p2pnet - rss feed: JBoss and Red Hat
p2p news / p2pnet: JBoss has, "toiled in an area other open source programmers considered a backwater - corporate middleware," says InformationWeek.
And there’s another anomaly: "founder Marc Fleury was brazenly out to make money".
It seems the first has paid off, leading directly to the second because this month start-up JBoss was bought by hard-core commercial Linux distributor Red Hat for a cool $350 million.
"Stubborn and outspoken, he built JBoss on what he calls ‘professional open source’," says the story of Fleury.
"He kept tight control over the code by hiring for JBoss any developer who showed signs of becoming a key contributor. Some developers left, some of whom eventually helped found the competing Geronimo open source app server project. But JBoss survived, and the result is an app server and open source middleware suite that JBoss can vouch for owning, avoiding the indemnification issue that can plague more open projects."
Jboss, "apparently did not have the patience to expand its business through partners like Red Hat, Novell, IBM, HP, and others and grow its channels worldwide so it could go public - just like virtualization software maker VMware didn’t at the end of 2003 when it sold itself to disk array maker EMC for $625 million rather than go public," says IT Jungle.
"In both cases, the acquisition deals were arguably better than a public float would have been, and both companies ended up a part of a larger, more secure company as well as making a ton of money for their owners without having to go through a messy initial public offering."
Fleury has a PhD in physics from the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris, but despite being a scientist, "or more likely because of it," posted Fleury on his blog on April 1, "I am actually extremely superstitious. In December 2002, I wrote ‘Blue,’ or ‘Why I love EJBs,’ followed up by ‘White’, or ‘Why I love Professional Open Source’ in April 2003. However, I never got around to writing the third and final installment in the trilogy: ‘Red.’ Partly because I got lazy and partly because I always felt it wasn’t time to write it, the future I wanted to write about was still being defined. Red was intended to be a vision of the IT future, along the lines of Morpheus’ quote in the Matrix:
" ‘You take the blue pill, and you wake up in your bed and you believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill; you stay in Wonderland and see how deep the rabbit hole goes’."
"Today is the beginning of ‘Red;’ we are going to wonderland and the rabbit hole keeps on going. Just like the Matrix protagonist wakes up to find ‘the real battle’, JBoss, Inc. today is stepping up to a bigger challenge by merging with RedHat.
"We chose a future in which I am proud to take part. Today we are announcing the signature of the definitive agreement. JBoss, Inc. will become a division of RedHat. I am staying on, reporting to RedHat’s CEO, Matthew Szulik, with direct responsibility for the JBoss organization."
In an earlier post, "Choose a career path, choose a cubicle, choose endless code review meetings, choose an IDE, choose to be good to authority and hope authority will be good to you, choose a thought leader, choose a license, choose an architecture, choose a paradigm, choose a retirement plan, choose a language, choose your SOA, choose sensitivity training, choose Linux vs. Windows, choose a debugger, choose an MBA, choose the system," Fleury says.
Or, "You can choose not to choose the system."
The reasons?
"Who needs reasons when you’ve got Open Source?"
Also See:
InformationWeek - JBoss Rewrites The Open Source Rule Book With Red Hat Deal, April 17, 2006
IT Jungle - Red Hat Buys JBoss–Your Move, Novell, April 17, 2006
blog - JBoss Signs Definitive Agreement to be Acquired by Red Hat, April 1, 2006
