JBoss Head Marc Fleury Leaves Red Hat

Often opinionated, always entertaining, JBoss founder and former CEO Marc Fleury has officially left Red Hat, the Linux distribution vendor that purchased his open-source middleware company for US$350 million in June 2006.

Fleury, who has been on paternity leave, will not be rejoining Red Hat, a company spokeswoman confirmed Friday.

“I have done what I can to help Red Hat succeed,” Fleury said in a statement released by Red Hat. He added that the open-source movement has evolved well beyond the “force of individual personality.”

Matthew Szulik, Red Hat’s CEO, praised Fleury’s “positive contributions” to open-source software.

There was no word on whether Red Hat would look to appoint a replacement for Fleury’s position as senior vice president and general manager of its JBoss division. His duties included defining the application development strategy for the business unit.

In a statement, Szulik said the integration of JBoss with Red Hat was complete and “all functions are well managed.”

Fleury’s departure doesn’t come as a huge surprise. He is known as a lively, sometimes cantankerous individual with a dry wit, and from the get-go it was hard to see how he’d fit into Red Hat’s management team.

Red Hat’s purchase of JBoss last year was somewhat unexpected, as rumors had previously circulated that database and applications vendor Oracle was set to gobble up the middleware player.

JBoss felt comfortable becoming part of Red Hat because the more established company was like a “big brother,” Fleury said in April of last year, since the middleware startup modeled its subscription and services businesses on those of the Linux vendor. “It was very important to me to know that I was taking this company into an environment that was conflict-free where there could be trust,” he added. For JBoss, being acquired was the way to accelerate the adoption of its middleware around the world using Red Hat’s sales channels, Fleury said.

Before he founded JBoss, Fleury worked at Sun Microsystems on Java-enabling applications from SAP.

-China Martens, IDG News Service (Boston Bureau)

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