Red Hat Inc. hopes to rally the members of its vast open-source cloud ecosystem in the same direction with a new initiative aimed at pulling the different communities closer together. The effort will center on propping up its platform-as-a-service (PaaS) stack.

OpenShift Online has attracted over two million applications since launching four years ago, a highly impressive feat in the ultra-competitive world of developer services. Yet the platform is still viewed as something of a second fiddle to Cloud Foundry, a rival project that emerged from the EMC federation and recently moved under the wing of an independent foundation.

Red Hat’s new initiative shares the same purpose of empowering the community of partners, contributors and users involved in the project. As the first and currently only vendor with a purely open-source business model to generate more than $1 billion in annual revenues, it has experience fostering collaboration around such undertakings.

That’s especially true when it comes to building a platform-as-a-service stack, which takes a tremendous amount of time and effort to even by the standards of the open-source ecosystem. OpenShift Commons aims to foster more of that activity and align the community’s work with Red Hat’s strategic goals.

The initiative removes some of the main barriers between the upstream project for the platform where new features are created and the complementary open-source tools that developers use in conjunction with the technology to build their applications. The lineup includes Red Hat’s container-based Linux distribution as well as Docker and the Google-developed Kubernetes scheduling engine.

OpenShift Commons is set to create unified mailing lists on several key priorities and open the door for contributors with common interests to carve out joint groups dedicating to pursuing their shared objectives. Most importantly, the initiative will see Red Hat and its allies engage the community more actively to foster the development of best practices, which the cloud could use.

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