1990 to 1999: Expansion of the World Wide Web and the Rise of Dot-Coms - The Technical and Social History of Software Engineering - page 247

staff and uses professional quality assurance. Red Hat has more than 600 person-
nel in North Carolina, for example.
Open-source projects compare favorably to regular commercial software. In
fact, open-source developers pioneered the usage of static analysis tools. The
open-source business model is worthy of business school case studies because it is
popular and seems to be successful.
Red Hat shows that quite a bit of money can be made from the open-source
model. Red Hat had an IPO on August 11, 1999, that was the eighth largest first-
day gain in the entire history of Wall Street! (Their stock is sold on NASDAQ.)
In 2005, CIO Insight Magazine ranked Red Hat number one in vendor value.
On July 27, 2009, Red Hat replaced CIT Group in the Standard and Poor's 500
stock market. This is a first for an open-source company. Also, in 2012, Red Hat
became the first open-source company to top $1 billion in revenues, receiving
about $1.25 billion that year.
Since their IPO, Red Hat has acquired a number of other companies and ser-
vices and has also opened new offices and facilities in other countries, such as In-
dia. Red Hat is proof of the concept that the open-source phenomenon can be a
successful way to run a software business.
Red Storm Entertainment
Red Storm Entertainment is a computer-game company founded in 1996 by Tom
Clancy and Doug Littlejohns in Morrisville, North Carolina. Tom Clancy is the
famous adventure and military novelist, and Doug Littlejohns was a submarine
captain in the British Navy.
This company is a good example of the increasing sophistication of computer
games and the growth of the whole computer-game industry. Computer games ori-
ginated as fairly simple games such as Pong. Later, they evolved into more soph-
isticated role-playing games, simulations of board games such as chess, sports
games such as tennis and football and, finally, massively multiplayer online role-
playing games (MMORPGs) where thousands of participants wander as avatars
through artificial worlds. In some games, it is even possible to build buildings, ac-
quire real estate, and simulate actual urban growth.
The Red Storm games center on the topics and concepts that originated in
Tom Clancy's novels. Some of the Red Storm games include Rainbow Six, Eagle
Watch, Ghost Recon, and Rogue Spear.