How a little tech startup in the Triangle took on Microsoft ... and won
“How is that possible, that one of the world’s biggest technology companies ... loses the product of the year to a company with 50 employees in the tobacco fields of North Carolina?”
Heading into 1998, the software provider Red Hat was little known outside a core of coders and computer geeks.
The 5-year-old company worked out of nondescript offices in Durham where it employed fewer than 40 people. Local press was rare, let alone national attention. Its unique approach to software, called open source, was niche, arcane and not obviously profitable. How do you build a business off a free code?
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