From the 'Portals R Us' files:

Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) today officially launched the GateIN portal project on its JBoss.org project site.

GateIN melds JBoss Portal technologies with the eXo portal to create a new portal framework. Red Hat originally announced the partnership with eXo in June and the today's availability of GateIN is the first deliverable.

Beyond the eXo partnership, other vendors are now joining in to help build out the JBoss portal community. Among the partners are enterprise content management vendor Alfresco and business intelligence vendor Jaspersoft.

According to Red Hat, the ultimate goal for the GateIN project is to be the foundation for Red Hat's future portal infrastructure products and enable organizations to build rich portal-based application experiences for users.

"The GateIn project represents the advantages of working through the open source development model; through collaboration we are creating cutting-edge innovation combined with a community of support to ensure that the best technology features make it into the project," said Stephen Hess, senior director of product management, middleware, Red Hat in a statement.

Overall, I think it's a great idea to build a portal project like GateIN in the open, though portals are a relatively mature technology. From a competitive point of view, even though this is open source and others can use this project, I doubt that other big portal vendors will join into this effort.

For better or for worse, portals are often closely aligned with the middleware on which they run and as such, the way I see it, GateIN is likely to be primarily a JBoss middleware play.