Red Hat has always supported Sun’s efforts to build an open source community around Java. We helped start the IcedTea project earlier this year, and we’re excited to see its inclusion in Fedora 8, available soon.

Today, we made our support a little more official, by signing Sun’s broad contributor agreement that covers participation in all Sun-sponsored open source projects by all Red Hat engineers. We’re excited, and looks like Sun’s Mark Reinhold, Simon Phipps and Barton George are too.

We hope our participation, along with Sun and others in the open source community, will accelerate Java innovation and help foster greater adoption of Java. We still have work to do, but this is a big step in helping to ensure that through a fully open sourced Java implementation, JBoss Enterprise Middleware will be optimized to run in Linux and all other operating systems.

Check out this interview with Sacha Labourey, CTO and co-General Manager of JBoss Division at Red Hat, to hear more about what this announcement means to developers and the industry.