Today Red Hat announced that has joined the Vendor Interop Alliance, the group that Microsoft chartered with other top software companies, but which has not involved Red Hat to date.

Interestingly, as Matthew Aslett notes, Red Hat’s participation seems to be limited to its JBoss middleware, which already had partnered with Microsoft to improve interoperability. So what, if anything, does this agreement get Microsoft? Or Red Hat?

Red Hat’s membership in the alliance builds on the interoperability work started by the JBoss Division 18 months ago to optimize JBoss Enterprise Middleware on the Windows platform. To date, those efforts have been primarily in the Web Services arena, including the critically important World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) WS-Addressing specification and several plugfests around WS-Security, WS-Transactions, and WS-Addressing. In addition, Microsoft completed Hibernate certification for Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) driver. Now, Red Hat can extend and deepen interoperability beyond standards to the native level on Windows for its JBoss Enterprise Middleware.

All good, it would seem. This agreement does not touch on Microsoft’s controversial patent tax work that it has done with Novell, which is a huge positive for Red Hat and for the industry. But I do think it’s a sign of good intentions, if nothing else.And “nothing else” may well be accurate. These industry consortia tend to be worthless. Decent PR for a few weeks, and then no real work. Why? Because real work is done for real customers, and these vendor-led consortia never involve customers in any meaningful way. And why? Because customers have better things to do than to sit on endless committees which are designed to do little more than to benefit one company’s intellectual property position over another’s, but have it look like they’re collaborating.

Call me a cynic, but I don’t see much coming from the Vendor Interop Alliance that wouldn’t be better solved by individual companies working with each other. You know, just like JBoss and Microsoft already were doing.

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