Red Hat CEO Matt Szulik Explains the JBoss Deal

Anonymous Coward writes "eWeek has an interview with Red Hat CEO Matt Szulik about the JBoss acquisition, where he says he approached Marc Fleury about the deal, never discussed the Oracle negotiations with him, and positions Red Hat as the next generation enterprise technology company." From the article: "It certainly broadens our product portfolio into an adjacent market, the middleware market. Over the last 18 months we heard growing requests from government and commercial accounts that had JBoss and were using Tomcat and Hibernate and wanted Red Hat to take a more direct position in that market. They also wanted the service competencies that we can deliver globally."

Comments

The Future of Software is Consulting, not Licenses

[LotTS]

This just further confirms the trend with software companies. Oracle has the 10g Application Server (which was once the Orion server slapped with the Oracle label). With JBoss, Oracle tried to get a completely new J2EE container under their umbrella. Why?

They were trying to "buy" JBoss customers, and the federal government is one of the biggest users of Open Source products such as JBoss. At least with the government, I see the amount of money spent on IT consultants compared to actual software licenses. Software was just an excuse to get Oracle consultants in the door.

Red Hat significantly upped their capabilities as a consulting company - might be a good idea to buy Red Hat stock.

Re:What JBoss Really Feels About Red Hat

[Anonymous Coward]

Too bad he's full of shit. RedHat does pay programmers to work on Open Source. They are a key force behind GNOME, glibc and other projects, as well as committing a great deal to the kernel. All this proprietary crap the guy was complaining about is false. All I've seen them do is buy proprietary software and open source it.