On behalf of the oVirt community, its contributors and Red Hat, we welcome Oracle to the oVirt community. oVirt is the open source component that enables management of the Linux Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM), the hypervisor for virtualized environments running on the Linux kernel.

At Red Hat, we believe that upstream collaboration drives innovation, even among competitors. To this end, Red Hat has a 10+ year tenure of thought leadership, contributions and collaboration in the oVirt and KVM communities. Our development and release processes are designed to ensure that Red Hat contributions to these communities are pushed upstream so the benefits gained from our efforts are available to the community at large and available for any and all to draw from.

We are also taking this “lead from ahead” approach by collaborating and contributing to the Kubernetes community and the kubevirt project to evolve virtualization use cases into cloud-native, platform-agnostic, container-based application and workload deployments. Again, the Kubernetes community and KubeVirt project are open and ready for contribution and usage.

This open source contribution and development model is in our DNA. It also serves as the development model we use to deliver the Red Hat portfolio of commercial, production-ready virtualization and cloud-native workload solutions such as Red Hat Virtualization, Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat OpenShift that solve problems for some of the most demanding, business-critical workloads. Related, we believe that Oracle’s active involvement in the oVirt community can also make oVirt better for both community project and commercial use cases. In fact, Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager is a commercial offering based on oVirt and KVM - a further validation of the oVirt community’s work that we are pleased to see.

From a market standpoint, and after talking extensively with customers, we believe that the problem oVirt and KVM aim to solve for traditional, on-premises hosted workloads is likely to continue to be with us. It is essential that these communities continue to thrive and innovate through the combined efforts and spirit of committed contributors.

We look forward to collaborating with Oracle and others who see the value in the benefits to be had with an open source, community-driven development model. At Red Hat, this is what we do and what we provide to the communities and customers we serve. We can do this because of our confidence in the community-driven innovation model. More open source - and more contributors is always a good thing.