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?"

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.

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?

Mono and Java integrate nicely

[Anonymous Coward]

IKVM http://www.ikvm.net/ [ikvm.net] is all you need

help this girl... http://oneluckyboy.com/ [oneluckyboy.com]

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: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: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.

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 [yahoo.com]). Let's see what happens at the end of the day.

JBoss Microsoft Agreement

[ajakk]

I wonder how this will play with the JBoss and Microsoft [com.com] 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: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.

What about impact on LAMP and RUBY?

[mrops]

Being a Java developer I am looking at this as good news. However I am wondering how this impacts the momentum LAMP and RoR are gaining in recent time, both of these use Linux as their prime deployment platform, infact L in LAMP is Linux. Will this pull some potential projects to JBoss/J2EE, projects that some decided they will do using LAMP because they do not want the hassle of configuring JBoss and or Tomcat? Further are we going to see more Hosting services providing support for JBoss as they do today for python,php etc.

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/ [novell.com]
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1843829,00.as p [eweek.com]

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.

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.