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Red Hat to Acquire JBoss
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Mon Apr 10, 2006 10:39 AM
from the i'm-sure-that's-important-to-someone dept.
from the i'm-sure-that's-important-to-someone dept.
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. "
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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."
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But what are the terms? (Score:5, Interesting)
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)
Parent
Re:But what are the terms? (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:But what are the terms? (Score:2, Interesting)
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
Re:But what are the terms? (Score:3, Interesting)
Redhat to aquire JBoss (Score:5, Funny)
What does this mean for Mono? (Score:3, Interesting)
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?
Re:Mono and Java integrate nicely (Score:2)
AWT and Swing aren't even there at all.
It's java implementation is not complete either.
Would it... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Would it... (Score:2, Interesting)
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
And? (Score:2)
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
Sounds like a good deal. (Score:2)
It's a good day for RHAT (Score:3, Interesting)
Makes sense for a service organization to do this (Score:5, Informative)
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).
JBoss Microsoft Agreement (Score:5, Interesting)
gcj (Score:5, Insightful)
Will JBoss go the way of CCVS (Score:3, Informative)
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)
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:
(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.
Parent
Re:jboss (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:jboss (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:jboss (Score:4, Insightful)
Regards,
Steve
Parent
Re:jboss (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re:jboss (Score:3, Informative)
The Qt Gui toolkit by Trolltech [trolltech.com] has the best documentation [trolltech.com] I've ever seen.
It's even good!
Re:$350m (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Re:Basic English (Score:3, Insightful)
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.