Open Source Weblog

"We do not intend to be a company that will provide hundreds of agents," Sacha Labourey, chief technology officer at Red Hat's JBoss division told ComputerWire. "We want to provide a management infrastructure and then have a network of partners that will provide the agents."

Labourey was explaining Red Hat's decision to open source the core systems management agent of JBoss Operations Network. The company is hoping that third party suppliers will plug into ON to create the necessary agents, but it is also planning to create "a unified, consistent management platform for customers utilizing Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss JEMS" by combining ON with the Red Hat Network.

Whether the company likes it or not, that will increasingly bring it into "coopetition" at the very least with the likes of CA , HP and IBM, and it's not the first time the company has indicated that management could be a future direction.

"We think it's time that the open source community looked at a ubiquitous management platform," Red Hat's recently appointed chief technology officer and vice president of engineering, Brian Stevens, told me in November.

"The explosion of Linux is continuing but there hasn't been a leap forward in terms of managing Linux farms, compared to the leap forward at the operating system level," he added. "We want to create a new effort around SLA management for Linux infrastructure that ends up getting enough involvement from the community of users."

If the company is going to go deeper into the management space, don't expect any deliverables too soon, however. "We're going to try to get an understanding of the vision, validate with clients, and then create something external as a community," said Stevens.

"We're looking at getting participation before we've even finished thinking about how we solve the problem," he added, noting that Red Hat is planning to create a definition of the new management platform during 2006 and 2007 before taking it to customers, and then the wider community.

Meanwhile, the JBoss technology is not entirely homegrown, as systems management start-up Hyperic inked an OEM agreement with JBoss in August 2005 that gave JBoss the right to redistribute its Hyperic HQ code, which manages a wide range of infrastructure components, including the major web servers, application servers, databases, operating system, and virtualization technologies.

Earlier this week Hyperic announced that it had chosen to release the software under an open source license, with binaries available today free of charge and a GNU General Public License version coming in July, alongside a community portal.

The timing is surely not a coincidence, and explains why Red Hat did not - or did not need to - acquire Hyperic.