I caught up with Bryan Che, product manager at Red Hat, to get some background about Red Hat's Enterprise Messaging/Real-time/Grid (MRG) concept, the distributed computing framework pre-announced by Red Hat December 4, 2007 as a follow-on to November's Linux Automation announcement.
Linux Automation--based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.1 and its virtualization features--provides for seamless application provisioning/management/monitoring across both physical and virtual servers as well as appliances and "the cloud." MRG, when available in 2008, will sit on top of Linux Automation and provide similar provisioning/management/monitoring for a grid. The Messaging and Real-time functionality will be supported separately as well (and all of the above is available already in respective OSS communities).
With this announcement, Red Hat is competing as directly as ever against Oracle's Fusion middleware as well as Oracle's grid computing support, its RHEL clone, and the recently announced Oracle VM; IBM WebSphere MQSeries, WebSphere Real-time--built on the same Linux extension as Red Hat Real-time--and IBM grid capabilities; as well as (at least for the Messaging component), products from BEA, SoftwareAG, Sun and Tibco. The real-time component appears to be based on development work performed jointly with IBM; the IBM version was made generally available in August 2006.
Of course, I was primarily interested in the OSS aspects of the announcement. To steal a line from Murat Aksu of Zenoss in another context, "This is not your grandfather's open source software (OSS)." I wondered
(1) why the messaging component community was over at Apache rather than in Red Hat's own JBoss.org and
(2) where all the other pieces were coming from and how they were being licensed.
The answer to the first question is a matter of both timing and strategy. Some of the work started before Red Hat acquired JBoss but also it makes sense that the messaging component not be as dependent on one middleware stack as most JBoss.org work is, at least implicitly.
As for the answer to the second question, the answer is too long for a blog post. It involves Apache, JBoss, the University of Wisconsin, IBM as noted above, and many more communities and license terms and conditions (Ts&Cs). The complexity of putting the framework together simply from a Ts&Cs perspective demonstrates the advantages that a profit-motivated provider such as Red Hat brings to OSS.
It also demonstrates why OSS is more a development model than a business model as discussed here.
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