Red Hat HornetQ debuts for open source messaging

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Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) today officially launched a new open source messaging system called HornetQ.  The new effort has its roots in the JBoss Messaging platform, that has been around since at least 2006.

In a blog post, Red Hat developer Tim Fox wrote that,” HornetQ is an open source project to
build a multi-protocol, embeddable, high performance, clustered,
asynchronous messaging system. HornetQ is an example of Message
Oriented Middleware (MoM).”

That’s right, messaging for middleware is now MoM. I expect we’ll see that acronym more over the course of what is left of 2009.

HornetQ is being licensed under the Apache Public License, which is somewhat of a departure for Red Hat and JBoss.

For years, Red Hat and JBoss have told me (and everyone else) that they are firm backers of the GPL, which is the license under which most JBoss products are licensed. Back in 2007, Red Hat and IBM argued over who was more open, based on the fact that IBM was using the Apache license while Red Hat was using GPL.

I wonder if HornetQ marks a new trend for Red Hat. Or perhaps, it’s just a very clever ploy to get HornetQ used by IBM Websphere users.

The other interesting part of this is the name. Red Hat could have easily called this technology JBoss Messaging 2.0.

“We decided to rename it and separate it as an independent project since it differs in a many ways from JBoss Messaging 1.x and we did not want to confuse the two, quite different, systems,” Red Hat stated in the HornetQ blog. ” The vast majority of the code base of HornetQ is different to the code base of JBoss Messaging 1.x

So, what happens with JBoss Messaging now? JBoss Messaging 1.x continues to be known under the name of JBoss Messaging and the project is now in maintenance mode only, with all new messaging development happening on the HornetQ project.”

So, we’ve got a new/old project using a license that JBoss traditionally has not used (much) before. In my view this is an interesting strategy my Red Hat to create buzz (sorry couldn’t avoid the pun) and time will tell if that translates into usages and $$ for Red Hat.