Red Hat, once the little company that could, for years could do no wrong. It rode the rising popularity of Linux to become a $280 million-a-year company with a market cap as high as $6 billion, claiming 80% of the market for Linux-based enterprise servers. Other Linux-friendly vendors loved Red Hat, since it gave them and their customers a viable alternative to Windows. Even Microsoft, while openly anti-Linux, didn't treat Red Hat as too much of a threat.
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