From a total cost of ownership (TCO) perpsective, Red Hat comes out ahead every time, claimed Marco Bill-Peter, vice president of the Red Hat support group.

Also at the conference this week, company officials touted separate projects to provide an application server for Ruby applications and also to make it easier to use Red Hat technologies.

is a project to provide an application for running Ruby applications. A successor to the JBoss Rails project, TorqueBox is an open source effort that may or may not become a product, said Bob McWhirter, a JBoss engineer at Red Hat.

With TorqueBox, Ruby applications could gain benefits akin to what Java applications have had with Java application servers. It could run Ruby on Rails applications also.

"I think just as we saw that [as] Java matured through the years, we ended up getting an application server for Java," McWhirter said. "Application servers solve a lot of problems that we have developing enterprise software and Ruby has no application server. Ruby has not gotten that maturity yet. I think by providing an application server to Ruby, it makes life easier for those developers."