In case you were too busy enjoying the extended weekend, Red Hat announced what it says is the “first comprehensive open source SOA technology” platform. The JBoss Enterprise SOA platform combines software from its other open source projects, including JBoss enterprise service bus, JBoss jBPM, and JBoss Rules.

While I’m always skeptical of “first ever,” as my years of being a tech journalist taught me that technology comes in developments and/or iterations, the announcement speaks to the growing importance that open source will play at the infrastructure and middleware level as SOA concepts become mainstream.

As my colleague and blogger-in-crime, Mr. Schneider, has pointed out on several occasions, the concepts surrounding cloud computing, enterprise collaboration, and SOA depend entirely on open, standards-based, development languages. Without the continued penetration of open-source concepts and technology at both the infrastructure and application layer, SOA won’t be able to support interoperability across enterprise solutions and organizations.

 Want proof? IBM is using Apache Hadoop as a foundation for its own cloud computing initiative.