02 April 2012, 17:00

Red Hat donates $100,000 to "the future of open source"

Red Hat logo Following its record annual revenue of more than one billion dollars, Red Hat has announced that it is making a donation of $100,000 (£62,400) to "the future of open source". In a post on Red Hat's opensource.com community site, President and CEO Jim Whitehurst says that the "billion dollar milestone is not only a win for Red Hat – it is a victory for open source advocates everywhere," adding that the company wanted to give back to honour the open source community.

The donation will be split between four projects which do not benefit, normally, from Red hat's work: Creative Commons (CC), the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) and UNICEF Innovation Labs. The $100,000 award is 0.7 per cent of the company's annual net profit of $146.6 million. Much of Red Hat's development work is available as open source anyway though, a contribution potentially worth millions of dollars to the community.

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