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

jboss

[msh104]

why would redhat buy this?
it already was open source right...
can't they just... contribute to it.

Re:jboss

[TrappedByMyself]

Why contribute when you can control.

Re:jboss

[ajakk]

Red Hat wants the support contracts that JBoss has. That is where these companies are trying to make money. 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. People who are paying money for JBoss support will be more than willing to push out a couple of bucks for Red Hat support as well.

Red Hat couldn't create their own support group for the JBoss application server because of the complexity of the technology and the lack (and cost of acquiring)of people with the Java skills to understand it in-depth. Also, Red Hat didn't have the reputation of providing world-class support for Java. Now it will.

Re:jboss

[LnxAddct]

Red Hat has a good history of doing nice things for open source projects, or proprietary projects that they bought and made open source. If a big supporter of open source didn't pick up JBoss, Oracle would have killed the project eventually (they have experience doing these things). One cool thing about this is that Red Hat develops GCJ (Gnu Compiler for Java) and they've got it compiling Eclipse and the Java portions of OpenOffice.Org, so I'd venture to guess that this increases the chance of JBoss running natively too which would be interesting.
Regards,
Steve

Re:jboss

[LWATCDR]

"i have to admit i never liked jbosses model, give the users a nice piece of [censored] without proper documentation and then charge for the books and support. the software itself was great when i had the look at it, but the fact that you had to hack around german forums to find out some nice tricks for free, wasn't so tempting."

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

For that matter what piece of closed source software have you found that comes with really good documentation?

Oreilly makes most of it's money by documenting other peoples software.
I don't see any real difference. Heck I spent a good part of friday looking for a fix for Asterisk@home. I found it on a forum on sourceforge after a few hours of searching.
Of course I added it to the wiki but WTH didn't anyone else?

You show me any program that comes with complete documentation, tutorials, and troubleshooting guides please? I would love to see it.

Re:jboss

[solstice680]

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

Personally, I have found open source to be extremely well documented. Just in the last few months I've relied upon the documentation of the GNU C library (and GNU software in general), fftw3, FLTK, and PlPlot. In addition to being generally well written, the documentation was extremely useful from a technical standpoint.

In contrast, I've found the documentation for the closed-source libraries I've used to be relatively scarce on technical detail. They may have been smaller companies with only a few people hired to do the documentation for a limited time, I don't know. At any rate, this is many times worse than scarce open source documentation, since you're basically left guessing (or calling up "support") to figure out anything the documentation leaves unanswered.

It may be true that "end user" applications have varying degrees of documentation in the world of open source, but as a _developer_, I wouldn't want to use anything else.

Re:jboss

[blu3 b0y]

The problem is not that JBoss doesn't come with great documentation, but that when people post very informative step-by-step instructions to the JBoss forums, JBoss deletes them, as it interferes with their support billing. Try to find docs on how to port your configuration from 3.x to 4.0 and you'll find very little help. It was on the forums. It's not now. That's dirty pool.

Would it...

[Natrone]

... give RedHat an instant "in" on the application server market so coveted by BEA and IBM? This seems like it could be an intersting fit, and would certainly save JBoss from extinction by Oracle (as seems to be the trend).

Hope they make it really Open Source...

[Anonymous Coward]

... and put a lid on Fluery

Re:But what are the terms?

[/ASCII]

PHP has an even bigger market share, by your logic they should have bought Zend. Well designed systems that are harder to master, like Rails, JBoss and ASP.Net won't drive the trivially easy web languages like ASP and PHP out of business, but there's room for everyone.

gcj

[Micah]

I assume this is good news for GCJ and/or Classpath, given Red Hat's committment to free software. Surely they will now devote many resources to making JBoss work reliably on Free Java, then we all win!

Re:$350m

[tppublic]

Actually, $350M isn't all that much. A financial analysis looks something like this:

Assume JBoss is growing at a rate equivalent to the S&P 500 (10.5%) - I'm trying to be conservative here and not get overblown about growth (since values are very sensitive to growth).

Assume RHAT wants to at least maintain its return on equity of it's stock, currently 19%. So the earnings rate on the purchase is 19% - 10.5% = 8.5%

At $350M, that means JBoss has at least $30M in profit ($350M * .085) for this to make sense.

If JBoss is growing at 20% per year and you want a 5% risk premium (accounting for uncertainty in the future of the market for middleware), then the earnings rate becomes 4% (19% + 5% - 20%), which means $14M in current income at JBoss to have it make sense for RHAT.

You can see how growth causes leverage in a price ... since:
value = earnings / (required return rate - growth rate)
... this division is part of the reason why stocks who have high growth expectations are very hard to value (at least using this method, especially when the denominator becomes negative) and why they fall so quickly from high stock prices when their earnings slow. This is why other (more complicated) models may use a higher growth rate in close years, but force the growth rate to slow in later years to the market rate - it helps to avoid the crazy value multiplication that can occur in the simple models.

Re:Basic English

[stuntpope]

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

While the sentence is confusing and could be better, it states "it will be Red Hat that will buy JBoss and not Oracle as previously thought."

Who will buy JBoss? RedHat, or Oracle? It will be RedHat. Not Oracle.