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Oracle to buy JBoss (and others)
tfritsch writes "According to a story at News.com it looks like Oracle's shopping spree is to continue. The JBoss acquisition could be big - what does it mean for the future of the JBoss Application Server?" From the article: "Oracle makes the majority of its revenue from its database and applications business. And it has its own line of Java middleware, which competes with JBoss' software, and a set of Java developer tools. However, Oracle has been warming up to open-source products, including Zend's PHP development tools, over the past year because its corporate customers are increasingly using open source software, according to company executives. "
They lay people off to buy JBoss.
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Since JBoss is private, Marc would have to be willing to sell JBoss to Larry. Larry can't just write a check, get regulatory approval and be done. There is no way Marc will sell his baby... I think he is much more interested in JBoss someday being bigger than IBM & Oracle. The world is moving toward software as a service. JBoss is positioned to be the king of that world. Marc knows this. 10 years down the road, no one will be paying for enterprise software licenses. Marc sees this and won't let even $400 million get in the way of JBoss being king of that world. I probably sound like a Marc loving lunatic. But we have to be honest. Marc created a virus that's exponentially eating away at Oracle, IBM, etc's business models. That virus can only be stopped if Marc sells. I've seen the smile on his face when he talks about the virus he created. By the time JBoss is public and purchasable by Larry, even Larry won't be able to afford it.
(Reposted from my comment on Javalobby)
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"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Don't believe for a minute that Oracle would purchase JBoss to "help it shift customers to a subscriber-based model". Oracle already has a superior J2EE server based on Orion technology. Far more likely is that Oracle wants to pull another PeopleSoft aquisition. They'll buy up JBoss, kill the company, then let the product die on the vine. All while pushing how "Open Source Friendly" they've become.
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I've been pleased with Oracle's JDeveloper; writing an extension for it has been interesting and the Oracle folks have been quite helpful.
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I've long operated under the assumption that any decent (or even semi-decent) piece of "freeware" (free as in beer, but not as in speech) for Windows will eventually sell out and become "shareware" and/or conventional commercial software. Likewise, I've assumed that any decent piece of "shareware" will slowly go the route of full commercialization. This assumption has served me fairly well. (Examples of this pattern: PowerArchiver used to be freeware; now it's shareware. Paint Shop Pro used to be shareware; now, it's being sold in stores.)
Am I now going to have to start assuming that any decent OSS/FS project will eventually sell out?
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
Hey Oracle the 90's called they want their bubble back.
"This isn't a study in computer science, its a study in human behavior"
And we all remember the last time a company went out and bought up a bunch of companies trying to hack together a bigger brand and comprehensive product lineup, rather than take the time to properly acquire and integrate their product lines...
Oracle is a quite good company producing quality database applications.
The problem with them? They don't give a rat's ass about security. 600+, 800+ days of unfixed exploits? Who cares! Their security track record is much worse than that of Microsoft's.
The people who fork out a lot of cash to Oracle could rightfully demand that they receive quick fixes for these things.
Oracle teaming with PHP? The worst security nightmare ever. PHP is absolutely craptastic from a security viewpoint (insecure default configuration, etc.), for example the mail() function makes it the favorite of spammers, because you can use it to spam a lot with it - because the mail() function's broken implementation allows spammers to send out mail in the thousands. Working around it is possible, but cumbersome - 99% of the people using the function doesn't even know about the issue, so its a spam-haven.
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Am I now going to have to start assuming that any decent OSS/FS project will eventually sell out?
Maybe this is just the way of business, who knows. People do want to make money, even from their labors of love. But the question I pose is simple: can't the "sell-out" software simply fork at the point of the acquisition? It's not like you can put open source software back in the can. All you can do is restrict it going forward.
Let's take JBoss as an example. What's to prevent JBoss developers (or anyone) from coming out with "JHoncho" based on the pre-Oracle version of JBoss and fork from that point? Oracle ends up buying the JBoss name and not much more, unless the developers want to work for them.
we'll all be yelling "Geronimo.....!!!!!"
(rimshot)
Wah wah "evil corporations" "poor workers" "outsourcing" blah blah blah.
One thing that seems to be overlooked is that with productivity rises, it takes fewer employees to do the same amount of work. The same is true after a merger, where it's redundant (no pun intended) to have two shipping departments or two sales forces.
I've been laid off several times in the last six years (once on Christmas Eve), and it's never been a big deal. I'm not saying it's been "fun" but if you have a rational savings plan to build a contingency fund, you should be able make it during the times you're laod off. I have sympathy for folks who are losing their jobs, having been there myself, but I also know this isn't the end of the world. I hope they do, too.
You can look at a layoff as a crisis or as an opportunity. Your choice.
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I am not sure why another company would want to buy JBoss.
In its time it was very innovative with two things. First, making EJB type properties available to POJOs (properties like security, transactions, remoting). Second, they pioneered the business model of selling services based on a free product, which encouraged very wide-spread adoption. Both of these were controversial at the time and JBoss should be applauded for showing us the way.
However, the problem is now many other companies do the same thing. Big application server companies give away free copies, at least for development teams. Java itself is moving toward making EJB type properties available to POJOs. On top of all this, over the last few years there has been a clear trend to move away from EJBs, favoring instead something like a Tomcat/Spring approach for J2EE applications, and, in other cases, the even lighter LAMP stack.
It seems to me a few years ago JBoss would have been a great purchase, but right now I am not so sure.
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You know this same thought crossed my mind too. However, on one hand Oracle has an app server and Oracle has a EJB3-compliant O/R technology. I'm not really sure how well their app server compares to JBoss, but Toplink certainly compares pretty well to Hibernate. Hibernate does have more mindshare than JBoss, but if you compared all the technologies in Oracle's middleware suite to JBoss equivalents, it seems like the one place where Oracle would stand up best is Toplink vs. Hibernate. Maybe what would be more valuable to them would be having the Hibernate guys, particularly Gavin King, as part of Oracle. That would give them a lot more influence on the future of EJB persistence and even JDBC.
Oracle will not practically own EJB3 persistence however. Don't forget about Kodo, a recent acquisition of BEA. They've had the best JDO implementation and now have an EJB3 implementation based on it.
Take a look at the latest numbers. Last year JBoss was ahead by a fraction of a point. This year websphere is ahead by