Covalent veterans put Hyperic HQ under the GPL

The older 2.6 version is supported by Covalent and it supports PostgreSQL .

CEO Javier Soltero said his team built the product at Covalent, then bought it from them as it concentrated on Apache.

"They had sold it as a Web management solution. But we’d designed it as an adaptable, cross-functional management tool that could manage any platform," he said.

"So we are bringing this to market with a different focus. We’re changing the licensing model from old-school enterprise licensing to per-machine subscription, which includes every aspect of the product."

The open source model is being announced just as Hyperic is taking its first venture capital investment, a good indication that VCs are looking for open source opportunities.

"We were pretty fuzzy in the funding announcement talking about what we would do with the money," Soltero admitted. "The real announcement is we’re going to open source the platform, under the GPL."

Soltero says he sees JBOSS as a model, and has been offering Hyperic as the management platform with JBOSS since last summer. "Our JBOSS work has been a very good partnership and we hope to replicate it. We want to do major league level business with open source."

Open source cynics, please take note.