The San Francisco, California-based infrastructure management software player manages a wide range of infrastructure components with Hyperic HQ, including the major web servers, application servers, databases, operating system, and virtualization technologies.

The company has now chosen to release the software under an open source license, with binaries available today free of charge and a GNU General Public License version coming in July, alongside a community portal.

With the code going open source, Hyperic is also launching the Hyperic HQ Enterprise Subscription support offering, with additional features including indemnification, remote control, role-based security, security event tracking, problem identification, and policy-based management.

In May, Hyperic added open source advocate Larry Augustin to its board of directors as it closed its first Series A funding round with Accel partners, a Silicon Valley VC firm that has a history in open source, having also invested in XenSource Inc, Alfresco Software Inc, Zimbra Inc, and JBoss Inc.

The company also announced that it had hired Bob Bickel, JBoss’s former executive vice president of strategy and corporate development, as a strategic advisor.

This year has seen a number of open source systems management vendors emerging. Six of the leading players created a new consortium to further the adoption of open source systems management software in May.

The Open Management Consortium was founded by Qlusters Inc, Emu Software Inc, Zenoss Inc, Symbiot Inc, the Webmin project, and Ayamon LLC, the consultancy company of Nagios creator, Ethan Galstad.