Red Hat has made its distribution of Linux available since 1994. Originally, Red Hat offered its distribution for free download, and sold support contracts. In 2002, Red Hat began marketing Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Unlike the original Red Hat distribution, Red Hat Enterprise Linux was available only with a maintenance contract from Red Hat.
By early 2003, Red Hat stopped developing its non-enterprise distribution and focused its efforts on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Red Hat elected to turn the development of its free software over to the community. This free community-supported distribution became known as Fedora.