Marc Ewing

Marc Ewing (born May 9, 1969) is the creator and originator of the Red Hat brand of software, most notably the Red Hat range of Linux operating system distributions. He was involved in the 86open project in the mid-1990s.

Ewing graduated from Carnegie Mellon University in 1992. While at CMU, he was known to wear a red hat as he walked between classes. Because of his computer expertise, people would ask for help from the "man in the red hat". Ewing and co-founder Bob Young named their initial software after the hat, and the name Red Hat stuck.

At the height of the dot com bubble in 1999, Ewing was briefly worth over 900 million dollars.

...
Wikipedia