Comment Re:Did I tell you about the onion on my belt? (Score 1) 39
jBPM is open source and free software, as pretty much all of the JBoss stuff is.
That being said, I would not use jBPM for a new project anymore. It uses it's own proprietary modeling language as opposed to the more standard BPMN2.0 notation, and a lot of the original developers left the project to start Activiti.
Activiti does use BPMN2.0 for it's notation, meaning you have much more choices in editing software.
As to the whole concept of BPM itself: it's very specialized software in that it allows you to do 1 thing: model business processes, and specifically those that require one or more human steps. Typical scenarios are where you call a company with some kind of request (say you want to upgrade your internet line speed), which will take them some time to complete. BPM software will handle the information transfer between the various people involved in the process, and also allow for easy tracking of the status of your request (e.g. our credit office is waiting for the results of your background check).