Overview
What is it?
The Open Source Architecture (OSA) provides a roadmap for the open source technologies and capabilities Red Hat and its partners will be building in the future--spanning the operating system, middleware, applications, and management tools.
What does it do?
With Linux firmly established as a mainstream operating system environment, the open source development model has proven its ability to create competitive and cost-effective solutions. Customers are now asking for the benefits of the model to be extended further up the software solution stack—to the middleware, application, and management layers—so open source benefits can be realized across the computing infrastructure. The OSA defines which technologies Red Hat and its partners are focusing on: distributed system management, integrated security, system virtualization, data management, and web application frameworks.
Why should I care?
Red Hat believes that by openly describing its technology strategy customers can make better decisions regarding their adoption of open source solutions. For many, a mixture of open source and proprietary software from Red Hat and its partners provides the most effective IT environment. Others look to use open source software as broadly as possible. OSA technologies are designed to help all of these customers and Red Hat's partners.
Red Hat designed the Open Source Architecture to meet four basic requirements:
- To create products and services that bring the benefits of standards-based and open source solutions to the complete software solution stack.
- To stimulate broad participation and collaboration across hardware and software vendors and the open source community.
- To extend the security and reliability of transparent computing as broadly as possible.
- To extend Linux, open source solutions, and ISV partner applications to cost-effectively provide massive horizontal and vertical scalability.