Red Hat to Acquire JBoss

tecker writes "Redhat.com has a banner and press release that states that it will be Red Hat that will buy JBoss and not Oracle as previously thought. The press release states "the world's leading provider of open source solutions to the enterprise, today announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire JBoss, the global leader in open source middleware. By acquiring JBoss, Red Hat expects to accelerate the shift to service-oriented architectures (SOA), by enabling the next generation of web-enabled applications running on a low-cost, open source platform." Could it be that a one company server package that will rival Microsoft's Windows Server 2003 and ASP will finally emerge?"

Comments

Makes sense for a service organization to do this

[Gunfighter]

Red Hat already had some enterprise Java stuff, but the middleware component just puts the icing on the cake. I think Red Hat is simply using this purchase to officially add this to their portfolio. By portfolio, I don't mean "software products", I mean their service offerings. The software has been, and will continue to be, free. It's the brains behind the operation that cost companies money. In fact, Red Hat probably already had engineers who were paid to support customers running Jboss, but now they are the "unofficial official" place to go when you want enterprise, corporate support for Jboss.

It's past time to stop looking at Red Hat as a software company and start looking at them as a service organization. This isn't surprising considering the success their RTP neighbor, Cisco, had as a service organization (and you probably thought they were a network hardware vendor all this time).

Basic English

[Cranky Weasel]

Okay, I know I'm going to have to rebuild some karma here, but it's got to be said.

""Redhat.com has a banner and press release that states that it will be Red Hat that will buy JBoss and not Oracle as previously thought.

I agree when people say that basic problems with grammar and spelling are not a big deal on a place like slashdot. But when faulty grammar leads to a complete misinterpretation of the situation, you have to fix it.

This line says that somebody thought Red Hat was going to buy Oracle.

When your grammar becomes an impediment to understanding, it's time to work on it.

Re:SOA, the 2.0 silver bullet

[Anonymous Coward]

> By SOA let's assume the writer really means SOAP services

Uh, no - what they mean is Service Orientated Architecture (as it says in the article)...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service-oriented_arch itecture

Try reading the article.

MOD ME DOWN PLEASE. REALLY.

[Cranky Weasel]

My grammar-nazi post above should be modded out of visibility. An anonymous coward above made an excellent point. I don't know why I thought there were grammar problems with the original - it's fine. It might seem a little unclear, but there's nothing wrong with it.

I don't usually stoop to picking on grammar and/or spelling. You have my apology.

I hope you're right!

[The Waxed Yak]

"I bet that Red Hat will start offering a consolidated support contract that will offer support for both JBoss and Red Hat when you are running JBoss on Red Hat."

"Official Support" has been one of my biggest obstacles trying to sell OSS as a consultant. I work on whatever platform my customer dictates, but I always try to make a strong pitch for OSS. 90% of the time, the customer refuses. Why? It is *always* support.

Yes, yes, I know that you can buy support for just about any major OSS application, but I think consolidation can be the key. At least a few of my past "inflexible" customers would have accepted an OS/AppServer/DB combination if it all came in a nice supported package. (Think "Redhat/JBoss/RedHatDB")

Will JBoss go the way of CCVS

[Locutus]

http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/ccvs/

JBoss might be a different product and different market but it makes me wonder if JBoss with end up like CCVS. Red Hat purchased another opensource project/product a while ago called CCVS( Credit Card Verification System ) and converted it to their proprietary license before later killing the product couple years later. They told their existing customers they'd be supported til the end of their contract by a 3rd party( mainstreetsoftworks.com ) and that MainStreet Works had a replacement product( also proprietary ).

If you've ever looked for GNU/Linux based CC processing software, you know how long and unsuccessful the search was/is.

There's definately a larger market for JBoss but the results could be the same in the long run if Red Hat can't market the product to profits. They are not a friend to Open Source when they do these kinds of things and it also shows/helps Microsoft when they do this... IMO.

LoB

Re:jboss

[atani]

Exactly what piece of open source sofware have you found that has really well writen documention?

FreeBSD and OpenBSD have excellent documentation, both for the core distribution as well as many of the ports.

Re:jboss

[d00ber]

The Qt Gui toolkit by Trolltech has the best documentation I've ever seen.

It's even good!