The new office will house 50 employees, mostly in engineering. The facility will work on developing high-performance computing products, enhanced enterprise capabilities for the company's line of Advanced Server products, 64-bit technologies, and other projects as part of Red Hat's expanding efforts in open-source enterprise computing.

In a released statement, Paul Cormier, executive vice president of engineering at Red Hat, says that the company wanted to be near Boston because of its high tech talent pool, specifically for enterprise computing. "Many of the engineers joining our new Boston facility played an important part in developing such technologies as multiprocessing, fault-tolerance, 64-bit computing and supercomputers," he notes. The release says that the new office will "tap into the northeast's high-tech corridor."

Red Hat is headquartered in Raleigh, North Carolina on the Centennial Campus of NC State University and four other locations in the US. The company also has 18 locations throughout the world.