Red Hat CEO Matt Szulik Explains the JBoss Deal

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."

Bring everything under one roof

Is it even possible to have a monopoly in the OSS market?

The Future of Software is Consulting, not Licenses

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.

Re:The Future of Software is Consulting, not Licen

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.

Competition matters more than independence

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

Ok.. this is me jumping off the JBOSS bandwagon... GERONIMOOOOOOOO!!!!!

Hibernate

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.

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http://www.h2database.com/ [h2database.com]

Red Hat's future bankruptcy

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?

Wow. 14 comments already.

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.)

not so sure about this

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 complicated system is to keep the high level parts simple (like the IP protocool on the Internet), but it doesn't seem like Jboss is going in that direction. I'm really not sure about this - I don't understand their vision.

Most high level glossy corporate visions that I hear about turn out to be pipe dreams. I've seen all sorts of high level unified information architecture corporate visions come out of Microsoft and they all turned out to be crap. I know the rules are different with open source, but from my experience - higher level implementations are driven by needs, not theories. This seems like it's driven by theories, not needs. The fact that there are all these buzzwords floating arround - COBRA, SOAP, J2EEE, Middleware, but not universal/intuitive use (like TCP/IP, HTML) smells like a big warning to me.

Re:I have to admit

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.

Re:What JBoss Really Feels About Red Hat

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.