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Red Hat CEO Matt Szulik Explains the JBoss Deal

Posted by Zonk on Fri Apr 14, 2006 07:46 AM
from the his-boss-wears-a-red-hat dept.
Linux Business
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."
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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 to Acquire JBoss 159 comments
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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Red Hat CEO Matt Szulik Explains the JBoss Deal 37 Comments More /

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  • Is it even possible to have a monopoly in the OSS market?
    • Well, monopoloy can be defined as
      a persistent market situation where there is only one provider of a kind of product
      so in theory if there was an OSS project which was just sooo much better than anyone else that no-one bothered to compete it would be a monopoly.
      • it is also possible to have an *effective* monopoly, where bussnisess require you to have "program xyz to do a certain job", or you what you want but "we only support xyz". leaving the client with no choice but to go for xyz
    • If you want to pay for it, yes.

      Right now I'm having a major trouble trying to migrate a mail server from RedHat7.x to Debian Sarge because the mailboxes are stored at Symetrics EMC Storage unit, and they offer support to RedHat and Suse. We tried to get an answer from the vendor, to see if they could support Debian also, but in the end it took soooooooo long that the old server went down, and in order to keep the mail service up we instaled Debian anyways, and used an open-source module for the fibre-channe
    • Is it even possible to have a monopoly in the OSS market?

      Yes. Corporations desire the cost efficiency, stability, features, and "coolness" of using OSS. However, they need to have the security blanket of support to the caliber that IBM would provide (snicker). If something breaks and the developers can't fix it, they want to be able to go to the source. The perceived source would be the company that is distributing and managing the software, i.e. RedHat.

      I think it's a good move by RedHat to act a
    • What camera exactly ? If you give the details, maybe I can help. I have extensive experience using linux with digital cameras. I am surprised to hear that your camera works only with Red Hat.

      There are many places to ask questions like this on the web and get answers from very knowledgeble people who are happy to help, such as yak.net.

  • The Future of Software is Consulting, not Licenses (Score:5, Informative)

    by LotTS (967274) on Friday April 14 2006, @08:17AM (#15128631) Homepage
    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.

    • The Future of Software is Consulting, not Licenses

      I mostly agree, the is a problem for established companies in that margins on licenses are near 100%, where as margins on consulting are closer to 30%. Moreover, there's far more fixed overhead associated with increasing consulting revenue than with increasing software revenue. The OSS model chips away at the foundation of software revenue while freeing dollars for consulting revenue. It's good because it means more employment for software techs. However, I think the future is going to be broader than just consulting. There are going to be openings in customization and implementation that weren't fully possible in the world of closed software.
      • If it is about value, and they always preach that it is, then spending money on supporting services, instead of raw software licenses, is in fact better value for the client, and a more beneficial boost to the economy.

        How often do the M$ licensing dollars go round and round, or are they locked up in a vault somewhere?
    • There is a strong argument that software has always been a service. It is seldomly resold, requires consistent maintenance, etc. The old model of charging a fixed fee up front for a license was just the result of cultural circumstance. Now companies are moving toward subscription-based licensing and services models, which might very well be more appropriate.

  • Competition matters more than independence (Score:5, Insightful)

    by cryfreedomlove (929828) on Friday April 14 2006, @08:20AM (#15128651)
    For me, it does not matter that JBoss is no longer 'independent'. What matters most is that there remain several viable competing options for J2EE containers. As consumers of J2EE we are best served in a world that still contains JBOSS, Geronimo, Weblogic, Websphere, OAS, etc. This is why I am glad Oracle did not buy JBoss. They already have their weakly supported OAS. I really think Oracle bought OAS so their sales reps could say 'Oracle does Java too' even though nobody really uses OAS. If they had bought JBoss the same thing would have happened to it over time. It would rot on the vine and we'd lose one more good option.

  • All I have to say is (Score:3, Funny)

    by fury88 (905473) on Friday April 14 2006, @08:23AM (#15128684)
    Ok.. this is me jumping off the JBOSS bandwagon... GERONIMOOOOOOOO!!!!!

  • Hibernate (Score:2, Interesting)

    by hypersql (954649)
    Oracle whould just have tried to convert JBoss customers to Oracle. Red Hat will probably let JBoss do what they want, and that's good (not that Linux would be bad).

    The most imporant asset of JBoss is probably Hibernate, and I think Red Hat knows that even better than Marc Fleury. Java/Tomcat/Stuts(JSF)/Hibernate is a good and proven plattform, and is here to stay. I think app servers will play a less important role in the next years.

    ---
    http://www.h2database.com/ [h2database.com]
    • I think app servers will play a less important role in the next years.
      I presume you meant that they will play a more important role no?
      • No, I think less important. For some reasons, many people believed app server are very important and therefore used them if they could. Including EJBs for persistence. But there was a wave of 'simplification' lately (POJO, Ruby on Rails) and now the trend seems to be: use app server only for the things they are designed for. In my view, most apps can be developed just with Tomcat (or Jetty) and Hibernate (or another persistence library) and a database.

        I think the same trend happens with XML: first, everybod

  • Red Hat's future bankruptcy (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Investing in Java software is like throwing money down the drain. No matter how much they spend on it one fact remains: they bought a slow, bloated Java app. What does that tell you about Red Hat's business sense?
    • Are you kidding?

      Did you ever saw an Java application running at the server-side? Tomcat/Struts/JSP is blazing fast, way faster than PHP for an example.

      The real bottleneck for most web applications is the database access. And thanks to Hibernate, Java kicks the collective ass of every other web enabled language out there.
      • And thanks to Hibernate, Java kicks the collective ass of every other web enabled language out there.

        And JBoss (the company) just happens to be deeply involved with Hibernate. Plus the hibernate model is pretty close to the new entity-bean model in EJB 3. Smart buy if you ask me ...

    • Note to metamods. The coward and the moderator (one in the same?) don't really think that Java is slow. He/They just don't like Java because (a) it ain't cool, (b) some weird ideology that Java is not open source enough, (c) it's not a shiny dynamic language like Ruby that all the cool kids are using.

      I'm not a big Java fan and would rather program in Ruby all day long over Java (well, personally with no external condidtions other than the fun of hacking), but fair is fair and Java is anything but slow and
    • Ignorance is bliss. Yes java hogs memory but with tuning that isn't a problem. I've personally used hibernate+struts to create large websites in a matter of 2 months, all java, revenue rolled in and life went on. Use whatever does the job, if you're close minded then it will only hurt yourself in the long run. You'll find this out.
  • It's been a while since I've see a front page Slashdot article get so few comments; looks like Red Hat and/or JBoss may already be irrelevant to the Slashdot crowd.

    (Do you run Run Hat on any of your Linux boxes? Didn't think so.)

    • Re:What JBoss Really Feels About Red Hat (Score:1, Informative)

      by 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.
  • A lot of times what I see in the industry, is that you take something that can be done with a simple programming language or a simple interface, add a lot of complicated layers on top of it that nobody can intuitively learn, call it middleware, and then charge out the nose for it.

    Now, I'm not sure if that's what Red Hat is planning to do, but it sure smells lkie it and the smell is a stinky smell not a rose smell.

    Also, I'm not sure if I like the approach either. The best way to have a successfull complicat

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