IBM’s highly publicized launch of two Linux mainframe servers earlier this week barely made mention of Red Hat while playing up Red Hat rivals. That raised eyebrows at the HQ of WRAL TechWire, so we asked the Hatters: What’s going on? Then there’s the Open Mainframe Project. Is Red Hat involved?

Red Hat’s media team wasted NO time in responding to our inquiries.

“Red Hat is an active and strong partner of IBM across many different areas, and will continue to be,” wrote Mark Coggin, senior director of Product Marketing.

“Red Hat’s model is unique in that we develop and collaborate almost exclusively through open source communities, and, as a result, we are involved in virtually every critical open source project already.”

Linux may be open source but there are multiple varieties, and the competition is fierce.

The demand for Linux-running servers also is growing, as IBM pointed out in its announcement.

Red Hat and IBM have been close partners for years, so WTW was stunned to see so little notice given to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which is a darling of Wall Street and other financial firms. (In fact, WTW missed the one Red Hat mention the first time through the release and went back to Red Hat, noting “We found something …”)

Daniel Thompson of Red Hat Corporate Communications went on a hunt of IBM-Red Hat facts and pointed out to WTW the following as assurance that the Big Blue-Hatter relationship is strong.

“The Red Hat mention in the press release refers to a version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux that works on the mainframe, Red Hat Enterprise Linux for IBM z System,” Thompson noted.

“There is a good datasheet on this available here: http://www.redhat.com/en/files/resources/en-rhel-ibm-system-z-10093637.pdf”

And Thompson pointed out that IBM itself acknowledged Red Hat alongside SUSE and Ubuntu which were the focus on the Monday news.

“Prior to today’s news, Red Hat Enterprise Linux was one of several Linux operating systems available as a commercial distribution for the IBM z Systems mainframe,” Thompson explained.

“According to IBM’s website, ‘Today the Linux OS for the IBM z Systems mainframe is available as commercial distribution from IBM’s Linux Distribution Partners Red Hat and SUSE. Ubuntu will join the premier Linux distributions on z Systems.'”(Source: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/os/linux/).

The Open Mainframe Project

IBM also made a big deal out of its commitment, including a great deal of donated code, to the new Open Mainframe Project. Red Hat was not listed as a member.

But the Hatters could join later.

“While not currently a member of the Open Mainframe Project, we are involved in the broader mission that this project aspires to and support its mission as it will bring more active participants into the open source community,” Coggin explained.

“Red Hat is regarded as a leader in open source, and embraces this role. We are involved and invest in many projects through board leadership, project leadership, and as code contributors and commiters, and we will continue to do so.”

For example, a year ago Red Hat announced support for a new Linux security initiative but was not among the initial joiners.