Red Hat heads for developers

The Linux giant has announced a number of initiatives to attract developers

Red Hat is reaching out to developers in its efforts to extend its open-source platform.

The Linux giant plans to update toolkits this year, and is also creating a new developer portal and considering ways to offer its in-house testing tools for probing the performance of open-source technology stacks.

“We want to get involved earlier in the testing of deployments,” said Todd Barr, Red Hat product marketing director for applications. “Open-source development tools are largely commoditising and customers are not sure how to control their tools and have consistency.”

Barr said Red Hat will update its Eclipse-based tools suite this year with a “full open-source tools environment from Eclipse to debugging and profiling”.

Popular tools such as SystemTap for understanding Linux kernel performance and Frysk for debugging are likely to be included in the next release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Barr added that there will also be a full development portal targeted at commercial application developers and IT departments. Red Hat may also sponsor communities “where you get people together to see where a technology will go”, he said.

Another plan involves exposing Red Hat’s own testing suite - for example, to put tools and results online to publicise the results of integration and performance testing between various open-source components. Startup firms such as SpikeSource and SourceLabs already provide services in this area but Barr said Red Hat wants to offer a broader overview rather than operate a custom environment for each deployment.

“We’ll share how we do our internal testing and we can add tests over time,” he said. “You can see it becoming an open-source project.”

The moves dovetail with Red Hat’s previously stated ambitions to certify stacks. In December, the firm announced plans to certify and support three stacks. The first of those – for the hugely popular Lamp stack of Linux, the Apache web server, MySQL database and PHP scripting language – will enter beta testing in the next few days.

Separately, the firm is pondering how to price Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.0, due at the end of this year. The key new feature of the release will be integrated virtualisation from XenSource, and Red Hat plans to offer a licence with an unlimited number of virtual machines supported but details are yet to be hammered out.

“You won’t see us doing a per-VM [virtual machine] licence for Enterprise Linux,” said Brian Stevens, Red Hat chief technology officer. “It will be something much more disruptive.”