Bob Young and the business of leaving the hood open

Bob Young ran his Linux catalog business out of his wife's sewing closet. His future partner, Marc Ewing, worked out of a spare bedroom. When the two small operations joined forces, the resulting company had a promising product, an unusually generous attitude toward sharing it, and very little reason to spend money on executive furniture. The business became Red Hat. The domestic arrangements deserve a little of the credit.

Asked years later how he first crossed paths with Ewing, Young answered, “Online dating.” Then he supplied the less romantic version: the Linux community was small, Ewing's distribution was attracting attention, and Young wanted to stock it. Ewing thought Young's catalog was a substantial retail operation. Young remembered it as tiny. Each had found something useful in the other.

That combination matters more than the closet. Ewing brought the software; Young understood the work of getting people to choose it. He had sold typewriter supplies and worked in computer leasing. He approached an argument about software ownership with the instincts of someone who had spent time listening to customers explain what irritated them.

The salesman and the unlocked engine

Young was born in Hamilton, Ontario, and graduated from the University of Toronto in 1976. Before Red Hat, he built computer rental and leasing businesses, including Vernon Computer Rentals. These were practical businesses involving equipment, financing and customers who expected things to work. They were also a useful education in the distance between what a supplier wants to sell and what a buyer needs.

In 1993 he incorporated ACC, the catalog business. Ewing's early Red Hat Linux followed in 1994. Young began selling the CDs, kept selling out, and in 1995 the businesses came together as Red Hat Software, with Young as CEO. The company's familiar 1993 founding date and the 1995 partnership describe different steps in the same beginning.

The name came from Ewing's red Cornell lacrosse cap, a gift from his grandfather. It was already associated with a willingness to help people solve computer problems. That was rather convenient for a company asking buyers to trust an unfamiliar way of making software. The hat supplied a face to remember; the business still had to earn the association.

“Would you buy a car with the hood welded shut?”

Bob Young, on the appeal of open source

Young's car question made the technical argument understandable without a computer science degree. Most drivers cannot repair an engine. They still want a mechanic of their choosing to be able to look inside. Access gives them options. A dealer who does a poor job can lose the repair business. The customer need not become a mechanic for that freedom to have value.

Applied to software, the argument was about a buyer's ability to inspect, adapt and obtain help with the technology supporting a business. In a 2009 interview, Young explained that established suppliers' reluctance to give customers that control had created Red Hat's opportunity. The commercial opening was sitting inside a complaint. Young's contribution was to take the complaint seriously enough to build around it.

A lesson from the ketchup aisle

There was an awkward question attached to all that freedom: why pay for something you could get free? Young liked to answer with ketchup. Anyone could obtain the ingredients. Heinz nevertheless had a business because people trusted the name to deliver something consistent. A familiar bottle spared the customer an experiment at every meal.

For Red Hat, the corresponding promise was that a recognizable supplier could make freely available software a dependable purchase. Sharing the ingredients did not remove the need for someone to put them together well and stand behind the result. Jon “maddog” Hall later recalled Young advocating better servers and more internet capacity so Red Hat could give away more copies. Wider availability and a commercial brand could help each other.

The company also had boundaries. At Linux Expo in 1999, Young defended the importance of Red Hat's trademarks. Software could circulate freely while the identity of its supplier remained protected. That distinction gave the business something it could build a reputation around. The ketchup analogy had room for both an open recipe and a label that meant something.

Red Hat went public in August 1999. On November 15, Matthew Szulik succeeded Young as CEO, with Young continuing as chairman. The announcement credited Szulik's role in assembling the management team, building partnerships and executing the IPO. Young's founding story includes a handover, and the people who developed the company afterward belong in the picture.

IBM completed its acquisition of Red Hat in July 2019 for approximately $34 billion. By then Young had been away from the board for nearly fourteen years. The number measures the company that several generations of leaders and contributors built. It gives the little catalog business a much larger later chapter, though it would make a misleading description of Young's own payday.

A publishing company for the books that get turned away

Young founded Lulu in 2002. His difficulties with publishing his own story helped prompt the venture. There was another strand, too: he and Ewing had established the Center for the Public Domain, and Young was concerned about the concentration of control over intellectual property. Lulu offered him a way to address access through an operating business.

Print on demand changed the calculation for books with small audiences. A publisher weighing a large print run has to worry about copies that never find buyers. Producing a book when someone orders it allows a narrower subject to make economic sense. A specialist's knowledge can matter deeply to a few readers without becoming a mass-market proposition. Small demand still contains actual people.

By its twentieth anniversary in 2022, Lulu had published and distributed work by 2.1 million authors. Young had retired as CEO the previous summer, with Kathy Hensgen taking over. As at Red Hat, a company that began with his frustration had become an organization other people would lead. He remained its founder, and was identified as chairman in 2023.

Open source was also underneath Lulu's operations. In 2005 Young said proprietary alternatives would have required more than twice the investment. Access to the code helped the startup adjust its offering as customers responded. The freedom he had sold at Red Hat had become useful machinery in his next business. The argument was now paying part of the operating bill.

Hamilton has a caretaker

The football story brings Young back to the place where he grew up. As a boy, he re-enacted Tiger-Cats touchdowns with his siblings. In October 2003 he became the club's owner and adopted the title “Caretaker.” His older brother Michael, a devoted supporter, had died the previous year; Young bought the team in his memory.

The title is a thoughtful choice for someone whose other businesses emphasize ownership and control. A football club has shareholders, but it also has people whose attachment predates any transaction. Calling yourself its caretaker acknowledges that history. The hometown fan was now responsible for keeping something available to the next set of hometown fans.

Young helped broker the deal for the stadium that opened in 2014 as Tim Hortons Field, and became a founding partner of the Canadian Premier League. His sports interests include Forge FC alongside the Tiger-Cats. In 2023 the Hamilton Sports Hall of Fame inducted him as a builder in football and soccer. Software customers, independent writers and football supporters make an unusual business portfolio. Each group comes with opinions.

Put the customer above the boss

Young has kept explaining his ideas in public. In a May 2026 conversation with Bill Harper, he described turning the conventional organization chart upside down. The customer goes at the top. The employee speaking directly with that customer follows. The founder's position makes more sense underneath them, supporting the work. It is a useful drawing for an executive to keep where executives can see it.

There are other continuities. In July 2023 Bluesky named him among the investors in its $8 million seed round for an open social network. He has also been involved with his wife Nancy in Needlepoint.com. His collection of antique typewriters and calculators gives the biography a pleasing physical counterweight to all that software. Some early interests survive a change of industry.

Young's jokes often place himself below the people he needs. “I need all the help I can get” is how he has described his success model. Taken with the inverted chart, the line suggests a workable discipline: make room for people with knowledge you lack, and listen to the person closest to the problem. A founder can be ambitious without claiming every answer.

The sewing closet remains a good place to leave him. It catches the smallness of the original operation and the practical spirit behind the later arguments. A customer should be able to open the hood. A writer should have a route to readers. A club should survive its present caretaker. Young has spent a career finding businesses in those expectations, then finding people to help him keep them.