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Red Hat to Acquire JBoss

Posted by CmdrTaco on Mon Apr 10, 2006 09:39 AM
from the i'm-sure-that's-important-to-someone dept.
Businesses Red Hat Software Software Linux
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?"
+ -
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[+] Developers: Oracle to buy JBoss (and others) 162 comments
tfritsch writes "According to a story at News.com it looks like Oracle's shopping spree is to continue. The JBoss acquisition could be big - what does it mean for the future of the JBoss Application Server?" From the article: "Oracle makes the majority of its revenue from its database and applications business. And it has its own line of Java middleware, which competes with JBoss' software, and a set of Java developer tools. However, Oracle has been warming up to open-source products, including Zend's PHP development tools, over the past year because its corporate customers are increasingly using open source software, according to company executives. "
[+] Red Hat CEO Matt Szulik Explains the JBoss Deal 37 comments
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."
[+] Slashback: OpenSSH, Falwell, OpenDRM 302 comments
Slashback tonight brings some corrections, clarifications, and updates to previous Slashdot stories including the Supreme Court declines Falwell's appeal, GP2X now shipping in the US, a new version of Systrace released, Lessig and Stallman look back at Sun's OpenDRM, NASA jumps on the anti-matter propulsion bandwagon, GoDaddy donates $10,000 to OpenSSH, Ellison explains why he would NOT acquire Novell or Red Hat, and pictures of the Ball State wireless 'sculpture' -- Read on for details.
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Red Hat to Acquire JBoss 50 Comments More /

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  • But what are the terms? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by liliafan (454080) * on Monday April 10 2006, @09:42AM (#15098823) Homepage
    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.

    • Re:But what are the terms? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by ajakk (29927) on Monday April 10 2006, @09:48AM (#15098849) Homepage
      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:But what are the terms? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by /ASCII (86998) on Monday April 10 2006, @09:48AM (#15098850) Homepage
      PHP has an even bigger market share, by your logic they should have bought Zend. Well designed systems that are harder to master, like Rails, JBoss and ASP.Net won't drive the trivially easy web languages like ASP and PHP out of business, but there's room for everyone.
    • 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
    • "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.

  • Redhat to aquire JBoss (Score:5, Funny)

    by vv2 (671799) on Monday April 10 2006, @09:43AM (#15098828)
    So they are not buying Oracle then - settling for JBoss must be a bit of a dissapointment.

  • What does this mean for Mono? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Epeeist (2682) on Monday April 10 2006, @09:44AM (#15098832) Homepage
    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?

  • Would it... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Natrone (174754) on Monday April 10 2006, @09:44AM (#15098837) Homepage
    ... give RedHat an instant "in" on the application server market so coveted by BEA and IBM? This seems like it could be an intersting fit, and would certainly save JBoss from extinction by Oracle (as seems to be the trend).
    • 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
  • How does this change anything? Red Hat could have packaged JBoss in Red Hat without purchasing it. Why do two open source products need to be owned by a single company to "rival Microsoft's Windows Server 2003 and ASP"?

    Are they now going to benefit from being able to control the direction of JBoss? No. JBoss is an implementation of the J2EE standard.

    The only advantage I can see is that they will now have JBoss experts who can tightly integrate the server with the OS (like IIS). But I have to think they
    • it changes things a great deal, most corporations want SUPPORTED software, and they will pay for that support as it's a miniscule part of any service implementation.
    • They could have forked it, but then they could not have gotten the developers (which are kickass, some of the most well known guys in the j2ee world work there) and the customer base.
    • It's probably just a gimmick to boost Red Hat's stock price. The tweaking that Red Hat does to Linux is rather abstract for most investors to appreciate, but buying another company makes it sound like something new is going on.

    • Re:And? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by LnxAddct (679316)
      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
  • Sounds like money well spent. The site's not even linked from TFA yet jboss.org [jboss.org] won't respond to page loads. Very confidences inpiring from a web technology company.

  • It's a good day for RHAT (Score:3, Interesting)

    by t35t0r (751958) on Monday April 10 2006, @09:57AM (#15098893)
    ..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.

  • Makes sense for a service organization to do this (Score:5, Informative)

    by Gunfighter (1944) on Monday April 10 2006, @09:58AM (#15098904) Homepage
    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).
  • would be the company that doesnt like this the most. Hp will not care that much, but going up against websphere......

  • JBoss Microsoft Agreement (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ajakk (29927) on Monday April 10 2006, @10:02AM (#15098918) Homepage
    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.
  • According to this [silicon.com] "Linux distributor Red Hat said on Monday that it signed an agreement to buy open source company JBoss for at least $350m, a move that expands Red Hat's product line and adds to its growth potential."

    $350m sounds alot! Altough 40 per cent cash and 60 per cent Red Hat stock!
    • Actually, $350M isn't all that much. A financial analysis looks something like this:

      Assume JBoss is growing at a rate equivalent to the S&P 500 (10.5%) - I'm trying to be conservative here and not get overblown about growth (since values are very sensitive to growth).

      Assume RHAT wants to at least maintain its return on equity of it's stock, currently 19%. So the earnings rate on the purchase is 19% - 10.5% = 8.5%

      At $350M, that means JBoss has at least $30M in profit ($350M * .085) for this to ma

    • Even if it's stock funny-money, it's still valuation- and it still is largely spendable, just not in the ways most people think of it. Sure you can't sell it all off right away, but you can sell it off in installments as it's typically common shares and it can be used as collateral for loans on other things like houses or new business ventures. It's not like the RHAT shares are worthless, you know.

  • 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

    • Cue long discussion regarding open sourcing Java...
      AT&T didn't opensource C/C++ - the "community" wrote GCC. Why can't the "community" write and use a Java implementation instead of demanding the free-as-in-beer implementation should be opened up?

  • gcj (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Micah (278) on Monday April 10 2006, @10:17AM (#15098987) Homepage Journal
    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!
  • Could it be that a one company server package that will rival Microsoft's Windows Server 2003 and ASP will finally emerge?

    No it won't. They are two very different things. ASP classic was "for dummies" and ASP.NET is all about the framework (Web Forms) and the tools. (Visual Studio) On top of that, JBoss is .com terretory while .NET is the darling of the enterprise. There is some overlap, but I think that it's a pretty good generalisation of the markets.

    Don't get we wrong, ASP.NET is very capable in good

    • This old saw has been the bane of the IT industry since it's beginning.

      The reality is, that every time they make something for "dummies" (Namely BASIC, COBOL, etc...) they end
      up creating a tool that invariably ends up being used properly by few but actual programmers or causes no
      end to pain in security problems (VBA, anyone?). If you don't understand how to ask a computer what you
      want it to do, you honestly shouldn't be trying to program one- period. Learn how to, or ask someone who
      does to do the work for
    • ASP.NET ... "dummies" can work with it too.


      Very true, judging by the number of .Net guys banging on about "exposing" and "consuming" APIs.
  • enabling the next generation of web-enabled applications running on a low-cost, open source platform.

    Unless it's running on gcj, kaffe, sablevm or the likes, then it's not really an open source platform, is it? And potentially not low-cost in the future.
    • Red Hat is investing rather hugely into free java, employing several of the key developers of GNU Classpath and related technologies, as I understand it. So I wouldn't worry about that.

  • 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]

  • Will JBoss go the way of CCVS (Score:3, Informative)

    by Locutus (9039) on Monday April 10 2006, @12:03PM (#15099596)
    http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/ccvs/ [redhat.com]

    JBoss might be a different product and different market but it makes me wonder if JBoss with end up like CCVS. 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. They told their existing customers they'd be supported til the end of their contract by a 3rd party( mainstreetsoftworks.com ) and that MainStreet Works had a replacement product( also proprietary ).

    If you've ever looked for GNU/Linux based CC processing software, you know how long and unsuccessful the search was/is.

    There's definately a larger market for JBoss but the results could be the same in the long run if Red Hat can't market the product to profits. They are not a friend to Open Source when they do these kinds of things and it also shows/helps Microsoft when they do this... IMO.

    LoB

    • Re:Will JBoss go the way of CCVS (Score:4, Interesting)

      by DdJ (10790) on Monday April 10 2006, @01:29PM (#15100090) Homepage Journal
      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.
    • Why contribute when you can control.

    • Re:jboss (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ajakk (29927) on Monday April 10 2006, @09:53AM (#15098872) Homepage
      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.

    • Re:jboss (Score:4, Insightful)

      by LnxAddct (679316) <sgk25@drexel.edu> on Monday April 10 2006, @10:10AM (#15098956) Homepage
      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
    • You know, they have to make money. And buying JBoss is a very good move, IMO. Because if they offer bundled support contracts, there is a big opportunity for JBoss to gain market share.

      And their reference to SOA is right on, there's a big move forward in the Enterprise to put Application Servers as a SOA glue layer in front of legacy application. And that is one thing where open source is very strong.

        • Re:jboss (Score:5, Insightful)

          by LWATCDR (28044) on Monday April 10 2006, @10:56AM (#15099189) Homepage Journal
          "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.

    • This line says that somebody thought Red Hat was going to buy Oracle.

      While the sentence is confusing and could be better, it states "it will be Red Hat that will buy JBoss and not Oracle as previously thought."

      Who will buy JBoss? RedHat, or Oracle? It will be RedHat. Not Oracle.
    • My grammar-nazi post above should be modded out of visibility. An anonymous coward above made an excellent point. I don't know why I thought there were grammar problems with the original - it's fine. It might seem a little unclear, but there's nothing wrong with it.

      I don't usually stoop to picking on grammar and/or spelling. You have my apology.

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