by Bernard Golden

Red Hat Makes a Fuss with JBoss Buy

Opinion
Apr 10, 20062 mins

Big news in the open source world this morning: Red Hat is buying Jboss for $420 million ($70 million of that coming if JBoss makes certain revenue targets). Beyond the obvious, which is that there is big money in open source companies, what does this acquisition mean?

1. Red Hat wants to increase the scope of their offering in order to deliver

greater value to their customers. This is great news for users, in that they

can rely on Red Hat to ensure the products integrate and work well together. Users can expect a bullet-proof OS and Middleware stack, which will simplify their development and operations tasks.

2. Open source is becoming increasingly important to end user organizations. Obviously, Red Hat heard from their customers that they are interested in moving open source deeper into their computing infrastructure. The march of commodization further up the software stack is happening rapidly.

3. While one interpretation could be that this acquisition indicates Red Hat

wants to “own” the open stack, it is actually good news for all open source

companies, in that increased presence of open source in computing

infrastructures provides more opportunities to deliver many more open source products to an open source-friendly IT user industry. Red Hat is increasing its slice of an even larger open source pie.