The tools, which will be geared toward developing service-oriented architecture and Web 2.0 applications, will be made available as open source under the JBoss.org community, which works on open-source projects that then are rolled into JBoss Enterprise Middleware.

Red Hat will work with Exadel to drive development of the projects and their integration with JBoss IDE and other JBoss technologies, including JBoss Seam and Hibernate, Red Hat said. "We want to attract developers to build new applications on top of our platform and not just simply migrate existing applications ... to our platforms," said Bryan Che, Red Hat's product manager.

As part of the agreement, Exadel will make available via open source all its products, including Exadel Studio Pro and RichFaces, and consolidate its Ajax4jsf project under JBoss.org. Studio Pro is a Web development environment that allows developers to work with multiple frameworks in a single environment. RichFaces and Ajax4jsf are models for building rich Internet and Web 2.0 applications, Che said.

RichFaces and Ajax4jsf are now available on JBoss.org under the LGPL license. This license requires that when people make changes to the code, they send those changes back to JBoss and the community. Red Hat plans to rebrand Studio Pro as Red Hat Developer Studio and make it available this summer under a GPL-based license.

Unlike other vendors, such as IBM and Borland Software Corp., which have built programming tools on top of the open-source Eclipse IDE and are focused on the proprietary customization of the tools, Red Hat plans to provide open-source access to all its tools, Che said.