Open source software company Red Hat acquired API Management company 3scale in 2016 to extend its management capabilities
RedHat on Thursday announced the completion of open sourcing the entire family of 3scale application programming interface (API) Management products.
Red Hat acquired 3scale in 2016 to extend its management capabilities to address the increasing number of public APIs and the expanding use of internal APIs in containers and microservices. Red Hat had then announced that they will launch an on-premise version of 3scale’s software and open source the code in the Red Hat way.
However, the process of open sourcing 3scale code wasn’t that easy as the company writes in a blog post –
Taking an existing proprietary software package and opening the source involves more than just publishing the code to an open repository website. Inspection of the code is required to make sure that dependencies are under suitable open source licenses.
In some cases, we may need to rewrite parts of the codebase to make it suitable for release. Teams must also learn how to open source software and be prepared to start receiving input from developers outside the company. In short, it’s much more than throwing code over the wall. An open source project is a process, not an end result.
The Red Hat team “embarked on this process shortly after the acquisition, starting with the modules, such as our API gateway components that were of most interest to developers looking to extend functionality.”
Today, #RedHat has completed open sourcing the entire family of @3scale #API Management products. Learn about new features and how to participate: https://t.co/xgwQdARhDx #opensource @DavidKCodelli pic.twitter.com/r3gsZ7SR4H
— Red Hat, Inc. (@RedHat) May 23, 2019
3scale complements Red Hat JBoss Middleware portfolio
After the acquisition by Red Hat, 3scale API Management became part of the company’s larger integration suite that also includes Red Hat Fuse and Red Hat AMQ.
Three years back, Mike Piech, vice president and general manager of middleware at Red Hat, announced the acquisition in a blog post and said the software is a complement to Red Hat’s existing software.
“The 3scale technology complements the Red Hat JBoss Middleware portfolio, adding a robust and comprehensive set of API management capabilities to the existing rich integration features offered in today’s Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (EAP), JBoss Fuse, JBoss A-MQ and the Red Hat Mobile Application Platform,” he wrote.
Keeping its promise, Red Hat has now released the 3scale code under the MIT and Apache Software License (ASL) v2, both permissive open source licenses.
The company says it will continue its 3scale development efforts and come up with new features, new participation and new ideas.
