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Red Hat Press: Where’s Red Hat This May?

Events Team — 2008-05-01T12:12:45+00:00

North America

From May 6-9, Red Hat will be in San Francisco, CA at the JavaOne conference in booth #734. Here, you can meet JBoss core developers and attend over 15 different presentations and live demos that will show you how to use JBoss technology to solve real-world problems.

Make plans to join us at our Enterprise Acceleration events around North America too. These events provide the opportunity to hear from Red Hat executives about how IT can enable you to transform your business. You’ll also learn how to move beyond legacy, client server and first-generation Java technology and how to do more with less. JBoss customers will also tell you about the success they’ve had in developing JBoss Enterprise Middleware.

Red Hat executives will also be delivering keynotes at several stops on the CIO Forum and Executive IT Summit this spring. During keynotes, our executives will discuss driving innovation and value across the enterprise with open source, and will draw on the needs of today’s CIOs to map the adoption of open source in the enterprise. Hear how Red Hat is helping customers realize better performance from development to deployment.
We’ll be at the following cities:

May 1, 2008, Philadelphia
Keynote speaker: Iain Gray, Vice President, Global Support Services
May 8, 2008, Chicago
Keynote speaker: Tom Rabon, Executive Vice President, Corporate Affairs
May 15, 2008, Hartford
Keynote speaker: Katrinka McCallum, Vice President, Management Solutions Business Unit
May, 28, 2008, Charlotte
Keynote speaker: Lee Congdon, CIO

Other North American events:

May 1, 2008 JBoss Enterprise Acceleration Irvine, CA
May 6, 2008 Virtualization: Getting from Pilot to Production Houston, TX
May 6-9, 2008 JavaOne San Francisco, CA
May 11-16, 2008 VA Infosec Las Vegas, NV
May 12, 2008 JBoss Enterprise Acceleration Toronto, Ontario
May 13, 2008 JBoss Enterprise Acceleration Montreal, Ontario
May 14, 2008 JBoss Enterprise Acceleration Reston, VA
May 15, 2008 North Carolina Research Campus keynote by Tom Rabon, Executive Vice President, Corporate Affairs, Kannapolis, NC

See more Red Hat North American events here.

EMEA

May 6, 2008 JBoss Tech Day, Rome, Italy
May 13, 2008 JBoss Tech Day, Milan, Italy
May 14, 2008 Open Source Forum 2008, London, UK
May 21, 2008 JBoss Welcome, Wien, Austria
May 28-31, 2008 LinuxTag, Berlin, Germany

See more on Red Hat EMEA events here.

APAC

For information on Red Hat’s APAC events here.

Latin America

For information on Red Hat’s events in Latin America, visit here.

Red Hat Press: Australian Open Source Industry and Community Report Points to Bright Future for Open Source in Australia

RHEL5 Team — 2008-05-01T12:09:36+00:00

Open source now has an established presence in the Australian market and shows significant opportunity for further growth. As recognized in the recently published Australian Open Source Industry and Community Report, when it comes to open source, the continent is also a key center of innovation and world leadership.

The report was compiled by Waugh Partners based on research carried out in late 2007 and it recognizes the many ways that Australia has made its mark on the numerous facets of open source – industry, community, education and skills, careers and employment, innovation, the market and business development.

Some key points in the study:

Open source is ‘a key platform for Australian innovation and productivity’
A number of Australian open source companies are finding success in local and export markets
International organizations are acquiring open source experts from Australia
Local contributors are rated among the leaders of the global open source community
The report also estimates the value of the open source industry to be around AUD$500 million (revenue per annum), with over 50 percent of that directly related to open source.

With new opportunities for development and innovation, the future for open source in Australia looks bright. The Australian Open Source Industry and Community Report confirms a strong market today and forecasts encouraging growth tomorrow.

Working with over 800 customers and over 100 partners in Australia, Red Hat is committed to working with the industry to foster this growth in Australia.

The full Australian Open Source Industry and Community Report is available here.

Red Hat Press: iHealthBeat Discusses Open Health Tools

Healthcare Team — 2008-04-30T18:02:18+00:00

Last week, iHealthBeat posted an 8 minute audio interview discussing the recently announced Open Health Tools consortium. Open source and healthcare has the potential to change the current healthcare IT landscape, enabling healthcare IT vendors to focus on what truly differentiates systems instead of forcing them to invest in developing basic infrastructure. Collaboratively, OHT will focus on developing free, open source healthcare IT infrastructure for use by anyone.

Red Hat Press: Provisioning our New Middleware Architecture

Lee Congdon, Chief Information Officer — 2008-04-29T19:40:51+00:00

Red Hat Information Technology has created a new middleware architecture for our internally-developed applications. Although many of our internal applications take advantage of open source solutions, we have historically used tools such as Tomcat and Perl on a standalone basis and not taken full advantage of our JBoss application stack.

We’ve defined our new middleware architecture based on JBoss technology. This includes an Enterprise Service Bus implementing a Services Oriented Architecture (SOA); Seam, the JBoss integration framework; the JBoss Business Process Modeling suite (JBPM); and Drools, the JBoss rules processing environment.

The entire stack runs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, taking advantage of the operating system tools for virtualization, provisioning, configuration, and other functionality. The full technical architecture incorporates Cobbler/Koan, JBoss SOA, Xen, LVM, Git, and more.

Architecture Framework

The new middleware architecture is defined as an element within the Zachman framework, in which we consider data, function, network, people, time and motivation mapped against scope, business model, system model, technology model, and detailed presentation. We are excited about the potential of the architecture because it gives us great flexibility while at the same time allowing us to implement projects in alignment with our desired future state. Ultimately, the architecture enables us to reduce complexity while enabling our business users.

Architecture Definition

The internal name for the new architecture is Everest. Among the key underlying elements are the use of the Logical Volume Manager (LVM) to support virtualized guest operating systems and Xen virtualization to assist in the management and deployment of multiple environments.

We use the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform to provide loose coupling, a messaging infrastructure, process orchestration, protocol translation, adapters, change management, quality of service, quality of protection (encryption and security), and management services. JBoss Seam provides our application framework, unifying and integrating multiple web technologies while reducing complexity for our developers.

Git provide source code management under the new architecture. Git is a flexible, distributed, offline source management tool. It addresses some of the shortcomings of our previous solutions and provides support for parallel development, collaboration and the ability to maintain a consistent deployable branch of the source tree. Git use will result in a smaller, cleaner set of changes to our source code.

Although not strictly part of the run time architecture, Puppet is an important architectural component. Puppet is a configuration management tool that can be used to provide container and system configurations that can be deployed into production without modification. Puppet will also free our Release Engineering team from many manual steps and enable them to move to a review and release mode.

Of course, the entire environment runs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. We anticipate that some of our developers will use Fedora as an alternative operating system for their development workstations.

Architecture Provisioning

One of the first challenges addressed by the architecture team was the need to provision systems which comply with the new architecture. The deployment implementation supports 20 machine types, ranging from a web-proxy to an ldap service.

The most common types include a host machine, a repo machine, and a JBoss development machine. The host machine type is used to host virtual guests in the Everest environment. It provides a suitable graphical user desktop, automated NFS home directories, a Kerberos login, Xen virtualization, and access to all of the Everest tools.

A repo machine is at the core of Everest. Repo machines are self-contained provisioning, configuration and artifact stores. Repo machines are capable of creating all other machine types, including other repo machines. Features of repo machines include Cobbler for RPM and provisioning, a Puppetmaster for configuration, an Artifactory Maven proxy, Git repos for content under /pub/git, and gitweb running on a known address.

A JBoss development machine is an aggregation of several machine types. (One of the features of the architecture is the ability to consolidate machine types for development and later disaggregate them for the production environment.) Features of the JBoss development machine include the ability to use it on base metal or in a virtual environment; nomachine for remote desktop access; the SUN JDK; an Apache proxy; JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (EAP); JBoss Enterprise Service Bus (ESB); MySQL for JBoss data stores; build tools including Eclipse, Git and Maven; gitweb on a known address; and a Git daemon to serve repos.

Provisioning with Cobbler and Koan

Cobbler is a provisioning and update server that supports deployments via network booting, virtualization, and reinstalls of existing systems. A significant advantage of Cobbler is that it integrates multiple technologies and reduces the need for the user to understand the details of each. The update features of Cobbler integrate yum mirroring and kickstart.

Koan, which is an acronym for “Kickstart over a Network”, is an emerging technology that configures machines from remote Cobbler servers. Koan also enables the use of virtualization and re-installs from a Cobbler server. When launched, it requests install information from the server and creates a virtual guest or replaces the machine it is running on.

We’ve used both these tools as the foundation for deployment of systems complying with the new architecture. In our tests, we can quickly build and deploy a complete development server with no intervention. The provisioning solution significantly reduces both our time to deliver a development solution and to deploy systems in the production environment.

If you’d like to know more about Cobbler and Koan, see the Red Hat Magazine article on Cobbler by Michael DeHaan and the relevant man pages.

Application

We are working with Red Hat engineering, select partners, and the community to share our provisioning vision broadly. Although some elements of the provisioning solution remain as advanced technology and are not guaranteed to become supported elements of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the JBoss suite, we are confident that the benefits of the solution outweigh that slight risk. We also anticipate that our efforts in IT will facilitate moving the solutions into the mainstream.

More broadly, we are excited regarding the possibilities presented by the new architecture and the capability it gives us to execute our technical strategy. The ability to integrate best of breed applications solutions using a common stack, to project the resulting applications into web environments using common tools, and to take advantage of the scalability and recovery solutions inherent in JBoss will yield substantial benefits.

Dev Fu: Horizon appearing for freed open source Java

Karsten Wade — 2008-04-28T22:42:32+00:00

Weren’t we all skeptical when Sun announced their intent to open source Java? But we’ve watched along the way, as they chose a good free/libre/open source software license (the GPL), as they opened the code Sun has a copyright to, and as they have embraced (to varying degrees) the community efforts, such as GNU Classpath and IcedTea.

It should be apparent that Red Hat is looking to put its bread where the open source butter is spread, in the acquisition of middleware powerhouse JBoss. As can happen with an acquisition, that propelled Red Hat even further into the Java camp. Yet is has been several of the long-time Red Hat engineers who are also responsible for leading and coding on open source projects that enabled all this to happen (GNU Classpath, IcedTea, gcj, and all around Eclipse, to name a prominent few.) What may have started as hedging the bet that Sun would follow through, all of this work has resulted in a stronger relationship across Java camps.

In a fair article on the freeing of Java, “Java fully open-sourced ‘by end of year’“, ZDNet quotes Sun that this year is going to see the end of all the remaining unfreeable parts of the JRE. What you think about that has to be balanced with what you believe. And this time, I find I’m believing that Sun can and will do it in 2008.

See you next week at JavaOne and CommunityOne. I’ll be there, on Monday talking about Fedora (and OpenJDK), and the rest of the week in the pavilion at the JBoss booth.

Red Hat Press: Fedora Returns from the University Tour

Fedora Team — 2008-04-25T18:02:49+00:00

At the end of March, members of our Fedora Project team set out on the 2008 North American University Tour to spread the word about free software and Fedora. We want to make sure that the important principles of open source software are highlighted in universities around the world as they develop their computer science curriculums that will breed our future software contributors, so we decided to go directly to the source – students and faculty.

We made stops in Pennsylvania, New York, Massachusetts, Ohio, California and lots of places in between – see our full schedule. Basically, our aim was to raise the awareness of Fedora and open source software among the university communities with the hope that many of those that we touched will become active supporters and contributors to the Fedora Project.

We’ve gotten some great feedback from both students and faculty at the Universities where we stopped, and Jack Aboutboul, one of our Community Engineers that has been making the rounds, has some great anecdotes to share about some cool happenings, like Carnegie Mellon planning to install Fedora on computers in its Bill Gates building. Check out the blog about Jack’s travels for more.

Here’s what Jack has to say about the Tour:

The tour is over now and after what seems like a whirlwind of activity, much was accomplished. When you have the chance to fundamentally re-architect modern computer science education in the U.S. you take it! I spoke to many faculty members of some of the greatest computer science schools in the country and even more students and the consensus is, the time is right to begin incorporating open source into both the campus environment and the curriculum.

In places like Carnegie Mellon, Syracuse, Case Western, University of Illinois-Urbana, Purdue and Oregon State, there were large receptions with many eager to hear what I had to say about working, living and breathing community and open source and those even more eager to speak out about how they have been touched by open source, or about some cool open source project and about how building these principles and methodologies into modern computer science curriculums around the country would tremendously benefit students and reshape computer science education. The questions that I was getting weren’t so much, why or should, but how, and that makes me extremely optimistic.

At Syracuse, my Alma Mater, I spoke to a crowded room, including many familiar faces. People who only a few years ago were closed to open source were very open to it now and see value in using and teaching it.

Students at Case Western Reserve University and Purdue were so enthusiastic about my visit and talk, that a group of about 15 students followed me all the way out to my car so that they could keep talking and pose for pictures with me in Fedora T-Shirts.

Oregon State was a very special visit, and I got a firsthand tour of the famous Open Source Lab, and gave two talks — one of them a colloquium to a standing room only crowd! That was an amazing experience. We all knew that OSU was big into open source, but until you are there, on campus, walking with the faculty, admins and students you really don’t get the whole picture.

All in all it was an amazing experience. “I think we really did a lot of good, and effectively measured the feedback in the whole of the academic world with regard to open source and community. I am extremely optimistic that having Linux and open source in every university, whether in a lab or in the classroom will become a reality in the not too distant future.

Dev Fu: EJB3: an Introduction - JBoss World audiocast

Karsten Wade — 2008-04-25T01:10:06+00:00

Continuing with the audiocast series from JBoss World 2008, this is EJB3 lead developer Carlo de Wolf talking about EJB 3 for Java developers new to Enterprise JavaBeans. The audio is available in OGG Vorbis and MP3 formats. Slides from the presentation are available.

As an ongoing joint operation, this audiocast is the first that is fed into the JBoss.org podcast channel (ATOM feed.) This is fun, as it allows us to distribute not only a title and rich description, but a thumbnail image full of meaning:

Red Hat Press: Continuing Security Leadership

Government Team — 2008-04-24T15:00:02+00:00

Today, with atsec information security, we announced that JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, v4.3 is currently ‘In Evaluation’ for Common Criteria certification at Evaluation Assurance Level (EAL)2+ (augmented for flaw remediation).

This is an important announcement on many levels. It represents the first major milestone since we announced our intent to pursue additional Common Criteria certifications in Nov. 2007. Beyond this, many U.S. federal government agencies and private-sector companies use Common Criteria evaluations as a benchmark to make informed security decisions when evaluating solutions. Why? Products are evaluated by independent labs under Common Criteria’s stringent and lengthy testing requirements, giving customers an impartial assessment of the product’s ability to meet specific security requirements. Outside of the U.S., dozens of nations now recognize Common Criteria certifications, agreeing that the evaluations “contribute significantly to confidence in the security of those products.” Because Common Criteria is a recognized international standard, it gives private-sector customers with worldwide operations confidence that the products they purchase will meet local security standards.

The announcement also reinforces our commitment to IT security. We’ve long been known for our pursuit of additional security certifications. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is one of the most certified operating systems available. Outside of the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, we’re not aware of any other open source application server that’s been able to reach this status.

If you want to learn more about our extensive history with Common Criteria certifications, check out our Certifications and Accreditations page.

Red Hat Press: IDC Discusses the Health of the Linux Server Market

RHEL5 Team — 2008-04-24T11:52:52+00:00

An interesting new report — “The Role of Linux Servers and Commercial Workloads” — sponsored by The Linux Foundation and published by IDC, provides some impressive facts and opinions about the health of the Linux server market.

Quoting from the Summary: “Spending on software related to Linux SOE [Server Operating Environment] platforms is growing quickly - with a 2006-2011 CAGR of 35.7%. Overall spending on Linux SOEs, including software, hardware, and services, is increasing at a 2006-2011 CAGR of 24.1%.”

The report goes beyond the standard operating system view by including data on application deployments and breakdowns of Linux usage by vertical market. It also offers IDC’s views of Challenges and Opportunities facing the Linux SOE market today.

This report, by IDC analysts Al Gillen, Bret Waldman and Elaina Stergiades, is definitely recommended reading for anybody interested in how quickly the Linux server market is growing.

See the report. (#211647)

Dev Fu: Dangers of trying to block commercial use of free content

Karsten Wade — 2008-04-23T21:12:09+00:00

This article is an explanation for why non-commercial use restrictions on free content are contrary to the goal of making it free in the first place. It brings the discussion more clearly into a realm that is understandable for creative people not familiar with what we’ve learned in the free software movements. Think of it like great science writing, able to explain a complicated concept to a layperson … yet still with lessons for the most experienced.

http://freedomdefined.org/Licenses/NC

Red Hat Press: Florida Hospital Talks About Using Open Source to Cure Hospital IT

Healthcare Team — 2008-04-23T12:26:02+00:00

LinuxInsider recently published a case study on Florida Hospital and how they’ve used open source software to address challenges around reliability and cost. For more details, read the Red Hat case study of Florida Hospital or visit us online.

Dev Fu: Web Beans overview - video with Gavin King

Karsten Wade — 2008-04-18T06:56:19+00:00

Fresh from Australia, via JBoss.org, this is nearly an hour-long presentation on Web Beans. As the specification lead and originator of the JSR, Gavin has a lot to say on the subject:

Gavin provides an exceptionally nice walk-through behind not just how Web Beans works, but why it works the way it does. He provides comparison to AOP features, and even demonstrates the recursive nature of Web Beans functionality being used to define Web Beans functionality. Meta-annotations are cool. Meta-meta-annotations are even cooler.

We’ve broken the talk into 3 easy-to-digest chunks:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Dev Fu: Free book - Heiko W. Rupp’s EJB3 3.0 für Umsteiger

Karsten Wade — 2008-04-17T02:00:05+00:00

Can’t be much clearer than a free book. Heiko W. Rupp’s publisher has released the book as a free PDF in German, with a small courtesy survey in front of the download. The book is also available from Amazon.de.

Red Hat Press: What’s Going On With Red Hat Desktop Systems? An Update

Desktop Team — 2008-04-16T20:47:38+00:00

Red Hat is well known as a supplier of server systems, so the latest developments with our desktop products and technologies sometimes find themselves in the shade. It’s time for an update on the current state of the desktop at Red Hat.

Red Hat develops client solutions based on customer and partner demands. Our customers tell us what they need in a desktop — such as security, manageability and specific applications — while our partners help us ensure that the appropriate hardware support is available. Based on these demands, our desktop goals for 2008 and 2009 include:

Delivery and fostering of client technology advances through upstream community and partner collaboration. This means that much of the stuff we develop, and there’s a lot of it, is driven into the upstream open source community. It’s sad to see that not all vendors in the desktop space are doing this. By failing to be good community players they slow progress for everybody.
To build revenue-generating products. Something that any public company is in business to do!
To ensure that our desktop products complement our server and middleware products. Red Hat’s goal is to provide an integrated and comprehensive set of open source solutions, and the desktop has a vital part to play.

It’s worth pointing out what’s missing in the list above: we have no plans to create a traditional desktop product for the consumer market in the foreseeable future.

An explanation: as a public, for-profit company, Red Hat must create products and technologies with an eye on the bottom line, and with desktops this is much harder to do than with servers. The desktop market suffers from having one dominant vendor, and some people still perceive that today’s Linux desktops simply don’t provide a practical alternative. Of course, a growing number of technically savvy users and companies have discovered that today’s Linux desktop is indeed a practical alternative. Nevertheless, building a sustainable business around the Linux desktop is tough, and history is littered with example efforts that have either failed outright, are stalled or are run as charities. But there’s good news too. Technical developments that have become available over the past year or two are accelerating the spread of the Linux Desktop.

Considering our goals listed above, our desktop product plans for 2008 and 2009 include:

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop. This is our fully supported, commercial product. It is 100 percent compatible with the Red Hat Enterprise Linux server products. Its focus is to provide a desktop environment that is secure and easily managed. And it is upgradeable with the Multi-OS option (which provides virtualization support) or the Workstation option (which provides high-end workstation capabilities).
Fedora. This is a Red Hat sponsored, fast-growing, free product. While Red Hat doesn’t formally support Fedora, users can turn to a healthy online community to obtain help when they need it.
Red Hat Global Desktop (RHGD). Plans for this product were originally announced at the 2007 Summit Conference. It is designed exclusively for small, reseller supplied, deployments in emerging markets (e.g. primarily the BRIC countries), and will be supplied by a number of Intel channel partners.

We originally hoped to deliver RHGD within a few months, and indeed the technology side of the product is complete. There have, however, been a number of business issues that have conspired to delay the product for almost a year. These include hardware and market changes, startup delays with resellers, getting the design and delivery of appropriate services nailed down and, unsurprisingly, some multimedia codec licensing knotholes. Right now we are still working our way through these issues. As mentioned earlier, the desktop business model is tough, so we want to be prepared before delivering a product to the emerging markets.

In summary, Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop and Fedora (and, hopefully soon, Red Hat Global Desktop) products are successfully meeting the needs of our chosen markets and customer base.

While we have your attention, it’s worth noting some development accomplishments in the past year:

Perhaps most visible over the past year was our development of the software for the One Laptop Per Child project. With the design and first implementation completed successfully, Red Hat handed the finished project over to the OLPC organization last year.

Other desktop related projects where Red Hat has been the primary developer, or a major contributor, include:

X Revitalization effort (kernel modesetting, randr, dri2)
Screen size control panel
PolicyKit & ConsoleKit
Gnome (screensaver, gvfs/gio, GtkPrint, etc)
Liberation Fonts (with sponsorship of the Harfbuzz font shaper project)
Theora encoder improvements
Sponsorship of Ogg Ghost (successor to Ogg Vorbis)
NetworkManager and Network driver work - developed by Red Hat
OpenOffice.org 64-bit port
OpenOffice.org integration into the rest of GNOME: Port to cairo, dictionary unification, print/file dialogs
PulseAudio
Bluetooth file sharing
Ongoing hal maintenance and revitalization
DBus and DBus activation
Multiple power management activities:

— Tickless kernel
— Gnome power manager and the quirks list
— Suspend/resume enhancements
— Laptop backlight intensity autocontrol
— www.lesswatts.org project support (such as Powertop)
— CPUfreq
— AMD PowerNow!

and of course, lots and lots of bugfixes!

Looking to the future, Red Hat customers and partners appreciate that the world is moving to thin/virtualized/appliance-based clients so we are working with them to deliver open source technologies that make these systems possible. In fact Red Hat’s Appliance Operating System project, announced late last year, is expected to enter Beta in mid 2008. Of course these activities are triggering work on next-generation management capabilities and mobile computing projects. Hint: take a look at www.ovirt.org for pointers on where Red Hat’s Emerging Technologies Group is devoting some of its development resources today….

Red Hat Press: Red Hat High on the List of Rapidly Growing Software Companies

Lee Congdon, Chief Information Officer — 2008-04-15T16:32:51+00:00

I was pleased to see that Red Hat is ranked number 12 on the CIOZone list of rapidly growing software companies.

See the full list at The 60 Fastest Growing Software Companies.

Dev Fu: Intro to Seam - JBoss World audiocast

Karsten Wade — 2008-04-14T17:00:49+00:00

Starting with this “Introduction to Seam” by Pete Muir from the 2008 Jboss World in Orlando, JBoss.org and Dev Fu are presenting original audiocasts of technical presentations from various JBoss events and presentations.

The audiocast is available in MP3 and OGG Vorbis formats. You can follow along with Pete’s presentation slides. This introduction is intended for Java developers and anyone interested in learning more about what Seam is, how it got this way, and where it is going next

This audiocast is the first of many, to be released one or two a week as we get through the editing process. That should carry us right up to the Red Hat Summit, where we seek additional relevant and interesting developer audio content.

Red Hat Press: JBoss Seam Framework Named a Finalist in Developer Awards

JBoss Team — 2008-04-14T12:29:08+00:00

JBoss Seam is an application framework that is used by our customers to build next-generation Web 2.0 applications and is designed to eliminate complexity. JBoss Seam, along with JBoss Hibernate, is one of the many fully integrated and supported components in our JBoss Enterprise Application Platform.

Recently, JBoss Seam was recognized by The Great Indian Developer Awards as a finalist in the “Frameworks – Libraries, Components and Frameworks” category. The Awards, which include 15 varied categories, will announce the winners during the Great Indian Developer Summit 2008 in Bangalore, India, taking place May 19-23.

Not too long ago, JBoss Seam was also recognized by the InfoWorld Bossie Awards for the value delivered by the technology’s new functionality.

Make sure you vote for Seam before voting for The Great Indian Developer winners closes in May. And check out the latest innovations in the Seam community.

Red Hat Press: Red Hat Welcomes OpenSolaris and Ubuntu to the World of Type Enforcement

Security Team — 2008-04-09T13:43:03+00:00

In the last few weeks, there have been three significant events in the adoption of SELinux and Type Enforcement. They’re all exciting, and each is a testament to the long-term success and viability of the TE approach. Even more exciting, though, is the fact that none of these announcements came from Red Hat. After carrying the flag for so long, it’s gratifying to see other communities join the effort to make serious security a standard feature in general-purpose operating systems.

First, Sun has announced that they will be porting Flask to OpenSolaris in cooperation with the NSA, calling it Flexible Mandatory Access Control, or FMAC. If this sounds familiar, it should — it’s very similar to the deal NSA and Red Hat struck in 2004, when SELinux was just gaining interest from a broad audience.

While Sun obviously isn’t working on SELinux, they’ll be taking Type Enforcement, the theory behind SELinux, and bringing it to the OpenSolaris project. This is gratifying to Red Hat, of course, as this is significant endorsement of the TE approach. The work will be in OpenSolaris and not Solaris proper, and it’s not clear how the Flask work will be ported from OpenSolaris to Solaris, but nevertheless I’m sure I speak for everyone on the SELinux team at Red Hat in welcoming Sun to the fold.

Second, SELinux is now available on the new Ubuntu release, Hardy Heron. In the past, SELinux has been stigmatized by being a “Red Hat” thing, or a “Fedora” thing, even though Gentoo and Debian have incorporated it in the past. With the addition of another high-profile distribution, that seems to be changing.

Third, the good people at Tresys and the rest of the SELinux team have released a new Reference Policy for SELinux. This new policy adds a very exciting new feature: support for XACE/XSELinux. In other words, the framework is now in place to label an OpenOffice document window as “Company Confidential” or “Secret,” and enforce rules around how data in that window can be used. At the same time, Red Hat has contributed support for a number of new features, including confined users, so you can say “let this person log in, but don’t let them run X Windows or use the network,” or “let this staff member log in, but only let him manage the web server.” Imagine how useful it would be to have these features and that kind of protection in every Linux distribution. Even private sector customers can appreciate how useful it could be for HIPPA or SOX compliance.

Viewed from a distance, I think there are a few reasons for this sudden surge in interest:

First, SELinux is now much easier to use that it’s been in the past. Customers I talk to have moved from “It’s a pain, I always turn it off” to “I know I should use it, I’ll get to it eventually.” That’s a non-trivial improvement, due in no small part to the outstanding work done by Dan Walsh and the rest of the Red Hat team on tools like setroubleshoot.

Second, SELinux is slowly moving out of the narrow government market and into more general-use applications. As more security risks emerge, and the tools become more flexible and useful, folks see the utility of securing and compartmentalizing their systems. Vendors and distributions are responding with a tested and proven security solution like SELinux, and Type Enforcement generally.

Third, in the government space, it’s becoming clear that TE is the only way to accurately and securely model the complex interactions between agencies and coalition partners. Trusted Solaris 8, the 800 pound gorilla in this market, is near the end of its useful life. The upgrade path to Solaris 10 Trusted Extensions is less than simple. For many use cases, especially those involving a large number of security enclaves, Solaris 10 and its Zones-based approach simply can’t do the job. Customers are hungry for more straightforward alternative that can support even complex use cases, and they’re all taking a long hard look at SELinux.

So, I’m proud that Red Hat has taken a leadership role in this field. We have been a visible cheerleader for TE and SELinux for years, and it’s gratifying to see the community grow. With luck, the Fedora, OpenSolaris, and Debian communities can all work together, each learning from the other’s mistakes, and ultimately deliver the best and most flexible security available. That way, everyone wins.

Red Hat Press: Red Hat Joins Open Health Tools

Healthcare Team — 2008-04-09T13:38:25+00:00

Red Hat is pleased to announce that we’re joining the Open Health Tools (OHT) open source community. OHT is working closely with a broad spectrum of healthcare groups, including: major national healthcare providers in areas such as Canada, Australia and the UK; healthcare standards groups like IHTSDO and HL7; healthcare policy groups such as HSSP; and software providers such as Red Hat. OHT’s ultimate goal is to collaboratively build software tooling that will enable the seamless electronic exchange of healthcare data. This is an ambitious goal, but with incremental steps, we think it can be achieved.

The first OHT project is the HL7 tooling project, which will take some of today’s HL7 tooling to the next level.

We are tremendously excited about the potential enhancements that open source can provide to the healthcare industry. Semantic interoperability is a huge challenge, and we believe the only way that we can achieve this goal is through a collaborative, open source development model that brings together all stakeholders.

Red Hat Press: Red Hat Leads Open Source Contributions to Kernel

Emerging Technologies Team — 2008-04-08T19:24:02+00:00

It’s no secret that Red Hat is a leading contributor to the development of open source software. In fact, as noted by a couple of recent surveys, Red Hat is the leading corporate contributor to the most important open source project of all, the Linux Kernel.

Last week, the Linux Foundation published a report about Linux kernel development and we were recognized as the leading corporate contributor with over 9,000 changes contributed, or 11.2 percent of the total. And we were also recognized a few months ago by Linux Weekly News as the most active company contributor both by changesets (12 percent) and by lines changed (12.7 percent) in the development of the 2.6.23 kernel. The results for these two reports are summarized in the following table:

Top 6 Corporate Contributors
Linux Foundation			Linux Weekly News
Company Name	Changes	% of total	Company Name	Changes	% of total
None	11,594	13.0%	Unknown	1,180	19.0%
Unknown	10,803	12.9%	Red Hat	744	12.0%
Red Hat	9,351	11.2%	None	559	9.0%
Novell	7,385	8.9%	IBM	507	8.2%
IBM	6,952	8.3%	Novell	421	6.8%
Intel	3,388	4.1%	Intel	184	3.0%

The two surveys show slightly different rankings, which are a result of differences in counting methods. Nevertheless, Red Hat emerges as the top contributor in each.

The top 10 companies listed as contributors in the Linux Foundation report have made an impressive 75 percent of the improvements to the kernel. Of course, not everyone who benefits from the capabilities of the Linux kernel is a contributor, but the many corporate, government, academic and individual contributors do so because they see value in collaborating to ensure that the kernel provides the latest features combined with the highest levels of quality, security and performance.

We are also proud that many of the top kernel developers recognized in both write-ups are Red Hat employees. For example, Al Viro and David Miller, both Red Hatters, are the top two known individual contributors noted in the Linux Foundation report, with many others from Red Hat listed among the top 30. The top 10 individual contributors have contributed almost 15 percent of the changes, and the top 30 have contributed 30 percent. See the list of individual contributors in the article.

While Red Hat is the largest corporate contributor to the kernel, that’s not where the story ends. Red Hat Enterprise Linux has about 1,200 components beyond the kernel, and each will have its community of contributors, both commercial and non-commercial. Different components will be areas of strength for different contributors, such as Sun Microsystems’ leadership in the Open Office project. However, Red Hat is fortunate to have leading members in many of these communities, which provides us with a way to canvass for capabilities that will meet our partners and customers needs. Being able to supply bug fixes for a component is an important benefit of open source development, but being able to influence features and strategy are even more important, and this is an area where Red Hat is preeminent.

The Linux Foundation’s article notes that “the Linux kernel is one of the largest and most successful open source projects that has ever come about.” We’re proud to have made leading contributions to this project.