Red Hat Exchange: Apotheosis of the Stack

I've written several times on this blog and elsewhere about the rise of the open source enterprise stack. Its appearance signals both the increasing acceptance of a wide range of open source solutions in business, as well as the growing maturity of those different parts. Essentially, the rise of the stack represents part of a broader move to create an interdependent free software ecosystem.

Red Hat has been active in this area, notably through the acquisition of JBoss, but now it has gone even further with the announcement of its Red Hat Exchange:

Red Hat has worked with customers and partners to develop Red Hat Exchange (RHX), which provides pre-integrated business application software stacks including infrastructure software from Red Hat and business application software from Red Hat partners.

RHX is a single source for research, purchase, online fullfillment and support of open source and other commercial software business application stacks. Through RHX, customers will be able to acquire pre-integrated open source software solutions incorporating infrastructure software from Red Hat and business application software from Red Hat partners. Red Hat will provide a single point of delivery and support for all elements of the software stacks.

Through RHX, Red Hat seeks to reduce the complexity of deploying business applications and support the development of an active ecosystem of commercial open source business application partners. RHX will be available later this year.

It's obviously too early to tell how exactly this will work, and how much success it will have. But it's nonetheless an important signal that the open source enterprise stack and the associated ecosystem that feeds it are rapidly becoming two of the most vibrant ideas in the free software world.