Red Hat Assumes Leadership of OpenJDK 6 Community

Red Hat, Inc.

, the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced it has transitioned into a leadership role for the OpenJDK 6 project, effectively extending support for the technology and its users. The move reinforces Red Hat's commitment to the broader Java community and its future as a leading platform for mission-critical enterprise applications. In addition to taking on leadership of the OpenJDK 6 community, Red Hat maintains its role in setting the future direction for the OpenJDK project as an active board member, represented by Red Hat's long-time Java technical lead, Andrew Haley, enabling the company to continue to help drive the future of Java and of OpenJDK. Red Hat's vision includes better overall performance and manageability while enabling greater functionality around dynamic scalability and cloud computing. “To say that Java plays an important role in today's enterprise IT would be an understatement,” said Craig Muzilla, vice president and general manager, Middleware, Red Hat. “It has had a profound impact on the creation and integration of technologies that have ushered us into the 21^st century, shaping everything from banking and retail to transportation and research, and Red Hat is leading the charge. We want to see that continue, not only for the thousands of organizations running OpenJDK 6 and Java SE 6, but for users of future versions as well.” OpenJDK is an open source implementation of the Java specification. Red Hat has been a leading contributor to the OpenJDK community for more than five years, following an agreement with Sun Microsystems, and its customers have enjoyed the benefit of a highly optimized, accelerated runtime for Red Hat JBoss Middleware in a Linux environment.