Open source developer and recent Talkin’ Cloud Stock Index inductee Red Hat is trying to bring developers to the cloud with the launch of OpenShift, a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) that offers ISVs their choice of cloud providers, frameworks and languages. By extending Red Hat’s own JBoss expertise, the company is hoping open source developers will flock to create applications that can run on any cloud provider’s infrastructure.

Red Hat is touting the flexibility of OpenShift above all. In the company’s own words:

Red Hat OpenShift delivers greater flexibility than any other PaaS, by supporting more development frameworks for Java, Python, PHP and Ruby, including Spring, Seam, Weld, CDI, Rails, Rack, Symfony, Zend Framework, Twisted, Django and Java EE.  It includes both SQL and NoSQL data stores and a distributed file system.

OpenShift uses the Deltacloud cloud interoperability standard, which means developers can run their applications on any Red Hat Certified Public Cloud Provider, essentially ending lock-in. Though I have to ask, isn’t requiring developers to choose from Red Hat-certified cloud providers just another kind of lock-in?

Either way, Red Had is touting the JBoss ecosystem integration as a major value-add, since it gives developers access to a catalog of Red Hat Enterprise Linux-certified cloud middleware such as MongoDB.

Red Hat definitely has its fans in the channel, and OpenShift may well bring new ISVs to the cloud. But just as on the desktop, Red Hat is facing competition from Microsoft in the form of Windows Azure. And that’s not to mention VMware’s Cloud Foundry.

We’ll be tracking Red Hat OpenShift’s progress closely going forward, so stay tuned.

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