Red Hat on Monday is giving away 5,000 JBoss Developer Studio subscriptions to Java developers in six territories in the Asia-Pacific region.
The program will run in China, India, Singapore, Malaysia, Australia and Hong Kong, targeted at independent Java developers and those from small and midsize businesses (SMBs), said the open source vendor, in an e-mailed response to ZDNet Asia.
Red Hat valued the subscriptions at US$500,000 in total.
Interested developers will have to apply and go through a qualification process for the subscription, said Red Hat.
Similar to its Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) OS, Red Hat sells the JBoss software via a subscription model, where users pay for support and updates from the vendor. This differs from the traditional licensing model for proprietary software.
IDC last year predicted global revenue from open source software will reach US$5.8 billion in 2011, citing a growing comfort level with the subscription model among businesses, which will boost the adoption rate of open source software.
Red Hat said more details will be given at the company's site on Dec. 17.
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