Open Source Worlds Collide
Open Source Worlds Collide
April 11th, 2006: In a surprising development, Open Source developer Red Hat has agreed to buy middleware software developer JBoss in a U.S.$350m stock and cash deal.
Red Hat bills itself as the world's leading open source and Linux provider, while JBoss develops products for creating and deploying e-business applications such as Apache Tomcat, JBoss Application Server. Red Hat believes that once completed the merger will help accelerate the shift to Standard Operating Architecture (SOA).
The deal will be a 40/60 cash and stock split, and see JBoss owner Marc Fleury go to work under Red Hat ceo Matthew Szulik. The agreement comes somewhat out of the blue as Fleury has been less than positive about Red Hat in the past.
Speaking of the acquisition, Fleury says that: “The union of these two companies will demonstrate the benefits of a pure open source play. Our customers are increasingly standardising their infrastructures on open source technologies and want a stable and trusted global open source vendor to support them.”
“By joining forces with Red Hat, we expect to be able to provide enterprises the largest offering of open source solutions, a global services network staffed by technology experts, and a large and vibrant eco-system of certified products and services. This is a winning combination that we believe will further expedite the proliferation of open source in the enterprise, which has been our mission since day one.”
Fleury seems to have had a Damascean moment however, considering that a blog post from September 2004 sees him rant about Red Hat: “RH is a packager, it doesn't create JACK, it doesn't create Linux, it wraps it up in proprietary s**t. And no the contributions that they make don't really count. Linus Torvalds creates Linux.
“But what really gets me is this: Our own talks with RH broke down, RH is not in the business of paying open source developers, we are, that is why we created JBoss inc. RH wanted to keep the services revenues all to themselves. That is the dirty little secret, so for them to come out and claim they are the open source when we know the reality is distasteful,” Fleury continued.
Red Hat and JBoss have tried to remove these comments from the internet, but thanks to the wonders of caching it’s still out there, floating around the ether.
Money talks.
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