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.

Redhat to aquire JBoss

[vv2]

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

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.

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

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: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.