Red Hat will compete with Spikesource and SourceLabs, who are in the business of validating, integrating, productizing, certifying and supporting LAMP stacks, by early 2006 with   three certified open source software stacks through the Red Hat Network that are production-supported.

Each stack will be certified and supported on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and delivered in a subscription model. Pricing will start at $599 per server.

The company said the stacks would simplify and standardize open source application stacks and developers could focus on their applications instead of configuring the underlying platform. It mumbled something about improving time-to-market for customers' development projects by helping reduce the certification and testing burden.

There will be a Red Hat Web Application Stack, a Red Hat Java Web Application Stack and a Red Hat Enterprise Java Stack.

Red Hat says the Web Application Stack is for simple web sites and applications, and includes the key LAMP components Apache HTTP Server, MySQL database and the PHP scripting language on top of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Customers will be able to choose the PostgreSQL database, which will be an option with the Web Application Stack.