Exadel's Open Source Cornucopia

Now here's a real confluence:

Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, and Exadel, the leader in providing rich application components for creating a new generation of enterprise solutions, today announced a strategic partnership that will add mature, Eclipse-based developer tools for building service-oriented architecture (SOA) and rich, Web 2.0 applications to Red Hat's integrated platform, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Middleware. This move marks the first time that a high caliber set of Eclipse-based developer tools will be available in open source.

Exadel will open source all of its products, including Exadel Studio Pro and RichFaces, as well as consolidate its Ajax4jsf project under JBoss.org, the community behind open source projects that roll up into JBoss Enterprise Middleware. In turn, Red Hat will work jointly with Exadel to drive development of the projects and their integration with JBoss platform technologies such as JBoss Seam.

So, here we have a company open sourcing its products, through a collaboration with Red Hat. As well as confirming the latter's central position in the open source ecosystem, it also boost Eclipse and Java while it's at it.

That's a pretty powerful payload from one announcement, and testimony to the multiplicative effects of open source, which tends to empower everything within its range, unlike proprietary moves, which are generally subtractive, damaging other offerings.