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

But what are the terms?

[liliafan]

Although I think this is an important development for java developers, I can't really see it really being a rival to Server 2003 and ASP, don't get me wrong I hate ASP and M$, but the simple fact is they have a huge market share, that just doesn't want to move, additionally they have legacy.

I would be interested to know more about the terms of the takeover, I remember reading recently that Marc let the Oracle deal drop because if/when he sold out he wanted his terms and conditions to be met.

Re:But what are the terms?

[ajakk]

Having been burnt on his first startup, I suspect that Marc got pretty good terms on the deal. JBoss has been running in the black, and their connections with some big clients could help Red Hat get more service contracts. I think that the acquisition makes sense, because it will help push Red Hat into the high end service area even more (i.e. where the real money is). I do wonder how well Red Hat will be able to manage the diverse group of people working for JBoss. I am sure that not all of them will be happy with the buyout. Considering the international nature of JBoss workforce, I suspect the Red Hat might have some difficulties managing them.

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.

Re:But what are the terms?

[gowen]

Hell, if they only wanted the code, they could just fork it, and work on their own fork. But a company is not source code. They don't just want middleware source code, they want middleware developers to take that middleware to the places they want it to go. Thus, it makes more sense to buy both the source (which they could get for free) and the developers (which they can't) in one go.

But don't worry, if you don't like the direction RedHat are taking JBoss, you can fork from their version at any point.

Or you can piss and moan about it, take the moral high ground, denounce RedHat, but do nothing and contribute nothing yourself.

Re:But what are the terms?

[jforest1]

"Could it be that a one company server package that will rival Microsoft's Windows Server 2003 and ASP will finally emerge?" Redhat has long since won the battle in our 5000-server datacenter.

Re:But what are the terms?

[Ohreally_factor]

I think this move is about competing with IBM just as much, if not more, as it is about competing with MS.

Redhat to aquire JBoss

[vv2]

So they are not buying Oracle then - settling for JBoss must be a bit of a dissapointment.

What does this mean for Mono?

[Epeeist]

Given that the biggest Linux vendor is going with a J2EE application server are there any implications for Mono and its associated application stack?

In another topic it was pointed out that Novell are not doing particularly well with Linux. Given that they employ a number of Mono hackers are there any implications for Novell and said hackers?

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).

Re:Would it...

[Coppertone]

I think there is a market for this. The company I am working for uses Redhat and Tomcat on x86-64 for internal application rather then full blown application server. Now that Redhat owns JBoss I can see a copy of JBoss AS included and pre-configurated on each copy of RHAS, which means that we can just install RHAS and start deploying our JSP and servlets to it.

The only piece of jigsaw missing for Redhat is of course a good quality JVM, and hopefully if they put enough people at it GCJ should be good enough in a few years time. Right now Redhat bundles a copy IBM's/BEA's JVM with RHAS, which I am more then happy with.

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.

It's a good day for RHAT

[t35t0r]

..well at least a good day if you own RHAT stock, it is up nearly 10% (http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=rhat). Let's see what happens at the end of the day.

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).

JBoss Microsoft Agreement

[ajakk]

I wonder how this will play with the JBoss and Microsoft agreement that was made in September. That deal was for Microsoft to work with JBoss so that JBoss can run better on MS servers. Clearly, having JBoss run better on Microsoft servers is against the interests of Red Hat.

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: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.

Re:And?

[LnxAddct]

Companies need support, and now Red Hat gets JBoss's support contracts. This software isn't just made for free ya know, there is money made from it because it takes money to develop it. That's just how business works. Also, if a bigger fish didn't buy JBoss, it is well known that Oracle had its sights on it to kill it off, which would have been bad.
Regards,
Steve

Missing Link

[DeaderMeat]

In order to run JBoss on RHEL you'll typically have to install someone's JDK - Sun's or IBM's (or even BEA's JRockit). Cue long discussion regarding open sourcing Java... I wonder how they intend to handle that gap when it comes to packaging and support.

I think this is a better result for JBoss and it's users than Oracle would have been. Still, I think Red Hat will have fun coping with some of the personalities in the JBoss line-up - I wish them luck!

Hmm, doesn't look like I'll be able to get to the JBoss forums today.

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.

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.

RedHat trying to squeeze out Novell

[attackenn]

Looks like RedHat is trying to do Novell one better. And maybe now that Novell-JBoss partnership arrangement won't get renewed?

http://www.novell.com/products/support/jboss/
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1843829,00.as p

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.

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:Will JBoss go the way of CCVS

[DdJ]

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.

Heh, that's not exactly how it went.

The original product implemented communications protocols that were owned by financial institutions.

These protocols were under heavy NDA. As a result, there was never a release of CCVS under any open soruce license. Red Hat wanted to open up the whole thing, but that would have been a violation of our contracts with those financial institutions.

In addition, there was a rigorous certificaiton process required for any software that did this stuff -- if anyone did modify the software we distributed, it would have been in violation of the finanical institutions rules to actually use it without going through a rigorous and time-consuming certification process for basically every single change to a line of code.

How do I know? Basically, I'm the guy who wrote it.

(There was more than one of us, but I designed the whole thing, and wrote the infrastructure parts, all of the telecom modules, and some of the protocol modules and language adapters. Other people wrote some protocol modules that plugged into my code, some of our language adapters, and one guy wrote our database layer.)

Some CCVS trivia:

• I ported it to PalmOS over a three day weekend once, so we'd be able to actually show it while walking around at trade shows.
• On the floor of a trade show (ALS '98?), at our booth, I ported it to the Corel Netwinder in about 15 minutes. (Yes, that was trickier than typing "make" -- if I can ever open up the source code, I can show you why.)
• Our first customer ever, and I think the only one to use the original "1.0" release of the software, was LinuxMall. Remember them? If you ordered stuff from them over the web in the mid-to-late 90s, odds are your credit card number went through my code.
• It wasn't strictly a Linux product. We had it running on SunOS, SCO, AIX, DigitalUnix, you name it. Internally, we even had it running on NeXTstep, and on Apple's "prelude to rhapsody", and on beta versions of MacOS X. If Red Hat had taken slightly longer to cancel it, we might have owned the (tiny) MacOS point-of-sale market. But it never ran on Windows.
• We made our APIs available for: C, TCL, Perl, PHP, Python, and Java. Yes, we were commercially supporting financial transaction processing APIs for all of those languages back in the 90s.

(You'll have to pardon me for going on like that. I'm kinda proud of what our little company managed to accomplish.)

Which reminds me: anyone from Red Hat (or with contacts at Red Hat) reading this? I'd love to get that source code back!

I believe I know how to make it open source today, and I'd like to take a stab at it -- and at porting it directly to today's 2.5G and 3G cell phones.

But, legally, Red Hat owns that source code, and I do not have the legal right to try to open it up without their say-so. I have been able to get responses from the folks at Main Street Softworks, but they don't have the CCVS source code or rights to it either.

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

[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

[d00ber]

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

It's even good!

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.