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Red Hat to Acquire JBoss 159

Posted by CmdrTaco 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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Red Hat to Acquire JBoss More

Red Hat to Acquire JBoss

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  • jboss (Score:1, Insightful)

    by msh104 ( 620136 )
    why would redhat buy this?
    it already was open source right...
    can't they just... contribute to it.

    • Re:jboss (Score:2, Insightful)

      by TrappedByMyself ( 861094 )
      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.

      • "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."

        "Official Support" has been one of my biggest obstacles trying to sell OSS as a consultant. I work on whatever platform my customer dictates, but I always try to make a strong pitch for OSS. 90% of the time, the customer refuses. Why? It is *always* support.

        Yes, yes, I know that you can buy support for just about any major OSS application

    • Re:jboss (Score:4, Insightful)

      by LnxAddct ( 679316 ) <sgk25@drexel.edu> on Monday April 10, 2006 @10:10AM (#15098956)
      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.

    • Being a Java developer I am looking at this as good news. However I am wondering how this impacts the momentum LAMP and RoR are gaining in recent time, both of these use Linux as their prime deployment platform, infact L in LAMP is Linux. Will this pull some potential projects to JBoss/J2EE, projects that some decided they will do using LAMP because they do not want the hassle of configuring JBoss and or Tomcat? Further are we going to see more Hosting services providing support for JBoss as they do toda

      • J2EE was always supported on Linux by BEA, Sun, etc. This adds Red Hat into the mix, which is good. Now Red Hat can pursue contracts that IBM, Sun, and HP might have dominated.

        I don't think there will be a big impact on LAMP beyond what is already there. My experience is that LAMP and J2EE complement each other very well, as LAMP is perfect for small to medium sites and J2EE is better for large corporate sites. J2EE is just too big for small teams to master, but well managed IT departments can tackle it
      • However I am wondering how this impacts the momentum LAMP and RoR are gaining in recent time


        what impact? RoR looks like the new shiny thing to look at, but there are any real sites or apps based on it? People doing LAMP surely doesn't feel like they need distributed transactions or message queues, let's not worry them.

  • 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.
      • "PHP has an even bigger market share"

        PHP exists in an entirely different space, and suffers almost no direct competition from JBOSS. Red Hat already has a decent lock on the enterprise customers who want to do simple Web stuff ala PHP. JBOSS is much more a set of APIs than a tool for generating Web pages.

        Disclaimer: I'm an outsider JBOSS-wise, but this is as I understand it from some personal investiagation and comments from friends who work with it.
      • There's certainly a migration path from trivially basically designed-on-the-fly apps such as basic PHP and ASP pages to something much more formlly designed. Microsoft has at various points tried to offer this, but seems to frequently shoot themselves in the foot by going back to recruiting newer developers (notice that nearly all of their documentation builds logic right into event code).

        PHP is already pretty easy to set up and run on a RedHat box. JBoss with Web Services is not. If RedHat can give them
    • 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.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • I'm usually the first to bitch when I see a Slashdot screwup, but I have to sort of defend them here. I write technical prose for a living, and avoiding this kind of amiguity is a big part of my job. And when you're churning out a lot of documents, it's damned easy to get careless with the subordinate clauses. I usually manage to avoid it, but only because I've been doing this stuff for a long time, and I've developed an ear for this kind of mistake.

        The "editors" at Slashdot aren't really editors, they're

    • I almost fell for the dubiously-worded opening, too.

      "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."

      Then, I read it 2 or 3 more times. The clue is this:

      "... it will be **Red Hat** that will buy JBoss and not **Oracle (buying JBoss)** as previously thought."

      This sentence is almost as faultily or haplessly worded as this one:

      "We have bicycles for boys with adjustable seats."

      Well, HELL, where are the seats (normally expect

  • Wow (Score:1, Funny)

    by phil-trick ( 24853 )
    I didn't know RedHat was going to buy oracle....... ;)
    • it was probably just a cover so that nobody would know about their 'actual intention' of acquiring JBoss.... on the other hand, I heard about the JBoss thing last year sometime... but i dont remember from what news source it was...

  • 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?
  • that states that it will be Red Hat that will buy JBoss and not Oracle as previously thought.

    I read this, and thought there was speculation that Red Hat was considering purchasing Oracle. Now THAT would have been front page-worthy news.

  • 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).

    • Re:Would it... (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Coppertone ( 10332 )
      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)
    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).

  • ibm (Score:2)

    by raffe ( 28595 ) *
    would be the company that doesnt like this the most. Hp will not care that much, but going up against websphere......
  • 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.

    Ack, buzz word overload. By SOA let's assume the writer really means SOAP services. Microsoft's offering for these is ASP.Net and the WSE extensions, ASP simply isn't that good at generating or consuming SOAP. And once you open up your applications to everyone by using a SOAP service then all lock in is g

    • Re:SOA, the 2.0 silver bullet (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      > By SOA let's assume the writer really means SOAP services

      Uh, no - what they mean is Service Orientated Architecture (as it says in the article)...

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service-oriented_arch itecture [wikipedia.org]

      Try reading the article.
    • Agreed. Even so, SOA encompasses a lot more than just "Web Services". A lot of other required products are missing if this is a keystone in leveraging an "SOA" portfolio.
    • No longer do corporates have to stick to Java or ASP.Net, they can mix and match. You'd hope that this would enable people to concentrate on the best way to do things, but no, it'll just end up in a language pissing match again, thus ensuring the lovely ideals behind SOA go out the window.

      But the idea of SOA is to allow heterogeneity to proliferate -- to allow mix & match. It's the old saw of separating interface from implementation.

      Certainly, SOAP web services can be done wrong -- .NET remoting in par

  • 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.
    • The JBoss/Microsoft announcement was more about interoperability between Microsoft server products (.NET web services, Active Directory, SQL Server, Ops Manager) than it was about "running well on Windows".

      It also seemed to be mostly a PR move -- "we're announcing that we'll some day announce something of substance"....
  • With Redhat being pretty much the leader in the corporate Linux world, this will hurt Oracle and boost JBoss... it's time for me to start reading up on JBoss [tinyurl.com]. Could this be the start of the re-emergence of Java technologies at the forefront?
  • It may well emerge as a product to rival ASP and Microsoft's Windows Server 2003,
    but the big question is, who will place their trust in it?

    The product may be excellent, but it needs to be tried, tested and verified in the field before [INSERT MAJOR CORPORATION] will even consider integrating it into their [INSERT ERP/MIS/Whatever] system.
  • ... Could it be that a one company server package that will rival Microsoft's Windows Server 2003 and ASP will finally emerge ...

    Who knows, perhaps at some point in the future we might find microsoft complaining about anti-trust?

  • $350m (Score:2)

    by raffe ( 28595 ) *
    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!

    • Re:$350m (Score:3, Insightful)

      by tppublic ( 899574 )
      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.

  • Basic English (Score:1, Informative)

    by Cranky Weasel ( 946893 )
    Okay, I know I'm going to have to rebuild some karma here, but it's got to be said.

    ""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.

    I agree when people say that basic problems with grammar and spelling are not a big deal on a place like slashdot. But when faulty grammar leads to a complete misinterpretation of the situation, you have to fix it.

    This line says that somebody thought Red Hat was going to buy Oracl

    • Re:Basic English (Score:3, Insightful)

      by stuntpope ( 19736 )
      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.

  • Missing Link (Score:2, Interesting)

    by DeaderMeat ( 534833 )

    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?
    • Red Hat develops GCJ (in addition to the majority of GCC in general), which is the Gnu compiler for java. It allows you to compile java code natively and they've already had it compiling Eclipse and the java portions of Open Office for over a year now. Red Hat wants a free java implementation and they've been working on it for quite some time. Its pretty good, I use it often. (It comes with Fedora Core)
      Regards,
      Steve

  • 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
      • Agree completely. My company works as consultant programmers at investment banks. The most common scenario: traders or analysts (smart guys, but not programmers) need something and they start of in Access (if you are lucky) or, usually, Excel. They write some code in VBA, but then need a web service so switch to VB6 and compile a dll they can use in ASP classic page that runs on their workstation.

        Then when it all blows up we are brought in to "fix" it. Of course the only way to "fix" it is scrapping it and
      • Sometimes vendors overdo the "dummy" aspect, but there's no doubt that we're more productive at developing today because of higher level languages and more sophisticated tools. Some might argue this "dumbs down" programming, but I don't think that's the point, the point is to automate manual / rote chores that are often error-prone and better handled by a computer (most of the time). Memory management & garbage collection being an important example.
        • The examples you gave have their own sets of problems, depending on what you're trying to accomplish.

          In the real-time (soft or hard) context, the Memory Management may/may not cause a problem depending on how it's implemented and how it's used. The GC will cause you no end to issues in timing, etc. and is abjectly useless
          in that context. Again, use the right tools for the job- so many people keep trying to use a hammer to drive
          screws into things.

          To be sure, if you're making an end-user application that do
    • 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.
    • Beg to differ. It is open source (as in the source of JDK is available). It's just not free software.
  • Happy that RH and not Oracle is buying JBoss, but disappointed that if you want to listen to RH's webcast of the press conference (going on right now, BTW), you must have either....wait for it....WiMP or Real Player! To add insult to injury, here's the company that's hosting the web cast: HEAD http://phx.corporate-ir.net/ [corporate-ir.net] 200 OK Cache-Control: private Connection: close Date: Mon, 10 Apr 2006 15:36:06 GMT Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0 Content-Length: 14287 Content-Type: text/html Client-Date: Mon, 10 Apr 2006

  • 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]

  • Could it be that a one company server package that will rival Microsoft's Windows Server 2003 and ASP will finally emerge?

    Short Answer: No.

    Long Answer: Yes. It is going to take a lot more than the purchase of one relatively small company (when compared to the size of Microsoft). I believe it's a long road ahead before Microsoft will be debunked. I do believe that one day it'll happen, just not as fast as some might hope.
  • Can we ease up on "enabled" or at least restrict it to one use per sentence.

  • 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
    • Ah, it does my heart good that someone at least remembers CCVS. Extra points to anybody who remembers seeing the version we had that could run on a Palm Pilot (and good luck getting Red Hat senior management to understand the potential of that product...) That said, I have one minor correction to make: CCVS was designed to be partially open source, but the heart of the system, especially the protocol modules, were always closed source, due to contractual obligations with the payment networks whose protoco

    • 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.
      • hey, thanks for the correction and sorry about getting that wrong( to both you and redhat ). When I was looking for a GNU/Linux based CC processing system, I somehow heard wrong about what happened. And it sounds like CCVS was quite the product and it's understandable why you talk of it the way you do.

        It still blows me away how people will build CC processing systems on top of Microsoft Windows, given it's security and the target it has on its back. But, I guess too few had the money or desire to implement
    • Ah, it does my heart good that someone at least remembers CCVS. Extra points to anybody who remembers seeing the version we had that could run on a Palm Pilot (and good luck getting Red Hat senior management to understand the potential of that product...)

      That said, I have one minor correction to make: CCVS was designed to be partially open source, but the heart of the system, especially the protocol modules, were always closed source, due to contractual obligations with the payment networks whose protoc
  • Why would I want to use JBoss instead of Oracle's own Java app server? Or Apache's?
    • JBoss is Open Source, and has been since the get go. It is released under the GPL. I like even for straight web apps because it's deployment mechanism works some much better than just straight Tomcat.

      Apaches J2EE server, Geronimo, is a late comer to the scene. There was also a point where GPL code from JBoss ended up in Geronimo, which allowed code to be closed source; The JBoss folks took exception to this.

      Oracle's app server is fairly weak from all reports. Orion was a decent product once, but has gone
  • How long before we start seeing JBoss packages in Fedora Core installs, like we are seeing Eclipse and Xen being rolled out? Seems like they run everything through Fedora first, just to shake out the integration glitches and get as many people jumping on it as possible. (Open Source Beta Testers!)

    I wonder if they will build it on the SUN JVM, or on the GNU JVM that currently ships with Fedora.

    • If you install jpackage, you can get Jboss via yum today. Plus bunch of other Java software. Plus pluggable, switchable JVMs. Not particularly suitable for complex project/experienced developers but a nice to have.

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