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Oracle to buy JBoss (and others)

Posted by Zonk on Fri Feb 10, 2006 12:05 PM
from the offset-by-the-layoffs-i'm-sure dept.
Java Programming Businesses
tfritsch writes "According to a story at News.com it looks like Oracle's shopping spree is to continue. The JBoss acquisition could be big - what does it mean for the future of the JBoss Application Server?" From the article: "Oracle makes the majority of its revenue from its database and applications business. And it has its own line of Java middleware, which competes with JBoss' software, and a set of Java developer tools. However, Oracle has been warming up to open-source products, including Zend's PHP development tools, over the past year because its corporate customers are increasingly using open source software, according to company executives. "
+ -
story

Related Stories

[+] Oracle to Layoff 2000 Jobs 178 comments
Joey Benington writes "Oracle plans to cut 2,000 jobs across the Siebel and Oracle work forces after completing its merger with Siebel last week. 'We will retain 90 percent of Siebel's support, development engineers, sales and sales consultants,' said Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. 'Most of the Siebel cuts will be in the back office, and nontechnical staff. The majority of the cuts will be Oracle people, not Siebel.'"
Offsite: Oracle's Open-Source Shopping Spree
[+] Linux: Red Hat to Acquire JBoss 159 comments
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?"
[+] Linux: Red Hat CEO Matt Szulik Explains the JBoss Deal 37 comments
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."
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Oracle to buy JBoss (and others) 50 Comments More /

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  • Wow (Score:4, Interesting)

    by cosmotron (900510) on Friday February 10 2006, @12:07PM (#14688389) Homepage Journal
    They lay people off to buy JBoss.

    • Re:Wow (Score:5, Funny)

      by tgd (2822) on Friday February 10 2006, @12:22PM (#14688529)
      A least that means lots of people who can contribute to JBoss now, in their free time.

    • Re:Wow (Score:4, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 10 2006, @12:56PM (#14688829)
      I hope I don't get laid off. I work for JBoss in their Astroturfing Dept.
    • You know, I was just about to say that. Damn, what a bunch of fucktards. I can understand if they lay people off and then merge with a company or get bought out - but to buy another product? How irresponsible. As I said to a friend of mine last week - in this day and age employees are treated like liabilities not assets. As the saying goes "If you are not in sales, then you're overhead"
      • Why do you think a company has any other responsibilities to the employee than what is legal and contracted?

        Welcome to the dark side of capitalism. In a free market everyone is out to make as much money as possible... legally. Unless theres a law that forces companies to keep employees until it goes bankrupt, employees will be treated as commodity, which they are in a capital market. I dont think Oracle is doing anything 'wrong'.

        • Re:Wow (Score:3, Insightful)

          by drinkypoo (153816)
          I think Oracle is doing something 'wrong'. I just don't think they're doing anything illegal - which has nothing to do with right and wrong, just what is or isn't convenient for society and the Powers That Be(tm).
        • Why do you think a company has any other responsibilities to the employee than what is legal and contracted?
          And yet, we do not have the same acceptance of employees whose goal is to take home the biggest salary for the least possible amount of work.

          What's good for the goose is good for the gander.

        • Because these 'tard companies always bitch about employees not being loyal to the company - except the employees are not loyal because they want to change jobs every 2-3 years, they are not loyal because companies treat them like dogshit. They give medeiocre raises (cost of living sound familiar), work their employees insane hours, not much in the way of appreciation (actually money is the only real form of appreciation imho) oh and the CEOs are still raking in MILLIONS/year! Defend the corporates all you

      • Re:Wow (Score:2, Informative)

        by Noressa (953475)
        That's more or less true. At Oracle, we were told that if it could be written out, automated and formulated it would be sent overseas. This is before the big merges started to actually come together. Now, not only do you have to worry about your job being redundant which is a contributing factor, you have to also hope that it requires your presense in the states. On the bright side, those getting let go of right now should have an easier time finding a job in the current climate then those a couple year
        • I never mentioned legalities, where did this come up (someone else mentioned it). I know they are not doing anything illegal.

  • Not gonna happen. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by md17 (68506) * <jamesNO@SPAMjamesward.org> on Friday February 10 2006, @12:09PM (#14688409) Homepage
    Since JBoss is private, Marc would have to be willing to sell JBoss to Larry. Larry can't just write a check, get regulatory approval and be done. There is no way Marc will sell his baby... I think he is much more interested in JBoss someday being bigger than IBM & Oracle. The world is moving toward software as a service. JBoss is positioned to be the king of that world. Marc knows this. 10 years down the road, no one will be paying for enterprise software licenses. Marc sees this and won't let even $400 million get in the way of JBoss being king of that world. I probably sound like a Marc loving lunatic. But we have to be honest. Marc created a virus that's exponentially eating away at Oracle, IBM, etc's business models. That virus can only be stopped if Marc sells. I've seen the smile on his face when he talks about the virus he created. By the time JBoss is public and purchasable by Larry, even Larry won't be able to afford it.

    (Reposted from my comment on Javalobby [javalobby.org])

    • Re:Not gonna happen. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by AKAImBatman (238306) <akaimbatman.gmail@com> on Friday February 10 2006, @12:11PM (#14688434) Homepage Journal
      Larry can't just write a check, get regulatory approval and be done. There is no way Marc will sell his baby...

      You might be amazed at how much power is contained within a single zero. Throw enough of them on the check, and even Marc would have a hard time resisting.

    • Re:Not gonna happen. (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I probably sound like a Marc loving lunatic.

      No probably about it. Yeesh, you sound like a first-name-dropping-steve-jobs-worshipping-sad-nol ife-mac-fanboy.

      Its not pretty - I suggest you seek help while you can.

    • Re:Not gonna happen. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by catch23 (97972) on Friday February 10 2006, @12:25PM (#14688558)
      I really really hope JBoss does not sell themselves to Oracle. I've hated most of Oracle's java products and really hate to see JBoss turn into another horrible product. I for one, really enjoy developing on JBoss products.

      Doesn't Oracle already have an application server they bought long time ago? I thought they had bought the Orion server and turned it into their own. I used OrionServer back when it was actually good. The main software developers hung out in the #Java channel on efnet so it was really easy to stop by there and fire off a question or two. Nowadays, I'd have to pay $50,000 to Oracle just for some support help.

    • Re:Not gonna happen. (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      > The world is moving toward software as a service. JBoss is positioned to be the king of that world.

      How so? Marc's stunning business acumen? They have a piddling little consulting service, and it's not like their app server doesn't have credible competition from the likes of IBM and Bea.

    • 10 years down the road, no one will be paying for enterprise software licenses.

      This is absurd on the face of it, and then upon reflection somewhat meaningless. So you don't buy a license; instead you pay a quarterly subscription fee. So basically instead of upgrading once a year you pay four times a year. What's the real difference?

      Marc created a virus that's exponentially eating away at Oracle, IBM, etc's business models. That virus can only be stopped if Marc sells. I've seen the smile on his face wh

    • Re:Not gonna happen. (Score:2, Insightful)

      by mbowen (943330)
      How do you get bigger than IBM and Oracle with JBoss? Simply because it's technically superior? You have to have superior sales and marketing to be a superior product, and only products make money - not technologies. JBoss needs to compete in the marketplace and it won't do so just because it was made by some cool guy named Marc. One day all of you open-source weenies are going to realize that the world doesn't run on GPL.

    • Re:Not gonna happen. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Doctor Memory (6336) on Friday February 10 2006, @03:55PM (#14690090) Homepage
      Not gonna happen. You know why? Because of Marc, Gavin King and their pet toad Bill Burke. When I think Weblogic, I think quality software. When I think of Websphere, I think Tomcat with a load of cruft bolted to every exposed surface. When I think of JBoss, I think arrogant poseurs with an app server. Face it, JBoss is more about the players than the product, and that's never going to cut it in the Real World. They've done remarkably well, but they're basically a fly buzzing around the real players. And, like a fly, if they ever become too annoying, they'll get swatted. Or maybe this is what Oracle is doing, setting out a pretty sundew [omnisterra.com] plant...

  • Note to JBoss administrative support employees (Score:3, Funny)

    by RingDev (879105) on Friday February 10 2006, @12:09PM (#14688410) Homepage Journal
    Brush up your resume.

    -Rick
    • That'd be one of the scariest two sentences to hear in concurrence: "That company that just axed 2000 employees? They just bought us."
      • Well it makes sence. If The purchasing company has it's own internal support (payroll, HR, accounting, building services, etc...) and they can easily enough merge those tasks from the new company into their company, why pay for the extra support?

        It's not like they're canning the technical workers with a very narrow employability range. They are laying off the administration and support staff that under the merger would have multiple people doing the same job. And most of the people have widely marketable sk

  • Don't trust Oracle (Score:4, Insightful)

    by AKAImBatman (238306) <akaimbatman.gmail@com> on Friday February 10 2006, @12:09PM (#14688412) Homepage Journal
    Don't believe for a minute that Oracle would purchase JBoss to "help it shift customers to a subscriber-based model". Oracle already has a superior J2EE server based on Orion [orionserver.com] technology. Far more likely is that Oracle wants to pull another PeopleSoft aquisition. They'll buy up JBoss, kill the company, then let the product die on the vine. All while pushing how "Open Source Friendly" they've become.

    • Re:Don't trust Oracle (Score:3, Interesting)

      by brennz (715237)
      Killing off the leading product in a high growth market is bad business. It doesn't appear logical.

      I think people are misunderstanding the software subscription market too, and how vastly profitable it can be.

      • Re:Don't trust Oracle (Score:4, Insightful)

        by AKAImBatman (238306) <akaimbatman.gmail@com> on Friday February 10 2006, @01:02PM (#14688891) Homepage Journal
        Killing off the leading product in a high growth market is bad business. It doesn't appear logical.

        1. JBoss is not the leading product in the J2EE market. It's a competitor, but nowhere near the top.

        2. J2EE servers are not a high growth market. In fact, the market is oversaturated at this point, with servers from BEA, Sun, IBM, Novell, JBoss, Apache, Macromedia, ObjectWeb, Pramati, Borland, Orion, Oracle, Caucho, Apple (!), ATG, Compaq/HP, Fujitsu, Gemstone, Hitachi, IONA, Secant, Sybase, and quite a few others who aren't worth mentioning. Of those, Apache and ObjectWeb directly compete with JBoss to provide an open source J2EE server. Nearly the entire market competes with JBoss for support contracts.
          • JBoss is the leading open source java app server

            That's a of qualifiers. The question is: Do they mean anything?

            I can unequivolcally state that I am the leading Slashdot poster with Batman in my name. That statement doesn't generate revenue or otherwise help me in any useful way.

            OSS Java app servers with low/null acquisition costs are a high growth market.

            According to who? I have observed no real push by the market to move from their expensive servers to OSS servers. There is a push for cheaper servers like
      • Yes, but Oracle has the same problem that Microsoft has - one that IBM does not have. When IBM embraced Linux, it had a software business, but that was dwarfed by their hardware and (even at the outset of it's Linux shift) consulting businesses.

        Oracle knows it need to make this shift, but its consulting businesses are not as well developed as IBM's, and it does not have the deep research arm that IBM does to create and sell things like "organizational optimization software" or UIMA. Oracle's core product
      • BEA? I think parent poster meant "JRockit", not "JBoss". Which, by the way, is a damn fine JVM for running servers. (BTW, the sun linux-amd64 jvm sucked big time - had to resort to running a 32-bit chroot with the 32-bit JVM to get a decent performance out of eclipse...)

  • A discussion on the PostgreSQL advocacy list... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by tcopeland (32225) * <tom&infoether,com> on Friday February 10 2006, @12:14PM (#14688460) Homepage
    ....right here [postgresql.org] had an interesting comment from Bruce Momjian:
    It is interesting that they are purchasing companies that almost fully control the software but give it away free as open source: Sleepycat, JBoss, and Zend. Oracle's purchase months ago of InnoDB used by MySQL was a similar move. What they are _not_ getting involved in is software that is community controlled, like PostgreSQL or Linux, because it much harder to see how a purchase would allow tight control of the software, resulting in revenue.
    Rather well said.

    I've been pleased with Oracle's JDeveloper; writing an extension [blogs.com] for it has been interesting and the Oracle folks have been quite helpful.
    • It would be quite hard to buy anything about linux. There is no company there. You could buy some distro, but its rather in Oracle's interest to let them free and compete. That does not mean that Oracle is not involved in Linux. There is a group of engineers at Oracle lead by Wim who do basically only that as their main goal. Just recently they got ocfs2 into the kernel and they are fixing bugs and providing patches back to both distros and kernel directly for quite a few years now. There is a plenty of oth

  • OSS projects selling out? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Caspian (99221) on Friday February 10 2006, @12:15PM (#14688466)
    I've long operated under the assumption that any decent (or even semi-decent) piece of "freeware" (free as in beer, but not as in speech) for Windows will eventually sell out and become "shareware" and/or conventional commercial software. Likewise, I've assumed that any decent piece of "shareware" will slowly go the route of full commercialization. This assumption has served me fairly well. (Examples of this pattern: PowerArchiver used to be freeware; now it's shareware. Paint Shop Pro used to be shareware; now, it's being sold in stores.)

    Am I now going to have to start assuming that any decent OSS/FS project will eventually sell out?

    • Fork off the companies? (Score:3, Informative)

      by kherr (602366)
      Am I now going to have to start assuming that any decent OSS/FS project will eventually sell out?

      Maybe this is just the way of business, who knows. People do want to make money, even from their labors of love. But the question I pose is simple: can't the "sell-out" software simply fork at the point of the acquisition? It's not like you can put open source software back in the can. All you can do is restrict it going forward.

      Let's take JBoss as an example. What's to prevent JBoss developers (or anyone) from
      • Nothing at all.

        But most companies will stick with the "official" JBoss, plus the Oracle name will attract Oracle fans. As long as it stays free, any new users will opt for the more popular "official" JBoss... turning the well-meaning JHonco into JUnemployeed.
        • Troll!

          If you fork, you must contribute your code back to the main base.

          Same as any LGPL. You must make the source available. Nothing to see here.

          If you fork, Marc will sue your ass.

          Only if you call it JBoss!
    • It seems to me the latest trend is traditional software companies buying up the smaller firms that control notable OSS solutions.

      JBoss, Zend, MySQL, BerkeleyDB all fit into this category.

      As pointed out by tcopeland quoting Bruce Momjian, "What they are _not_ getting involved in is software that is community controlled, like PostgreSQL or Linux, because it much harder to see how a purchase would allow tight control of the software, resulting in revenue."

      OSS that fits more into the category of community contr
    • Am I now going to have to start assuming that any decent OSS/FS project will eventually sell out?

      And this is why we have the GPL :)
    • It seems to me like most OSS projects reach a state where almost all of the code is written by people employed to do so. This is because it becomes advantageous for businesses to make sure that the projects don't get abandoned, and developers who are doing it as a full-time job just spend more time writing code for the project than other people do. What probably matters more is whether everybody is employed by the same business. The ideal situation is something like Linux, where lots of companies which use

  • Hey! (Score:3, Funny)

    by airrage (514164) on Friday February 10 2006, @12:24PM (#14688548) Homepage Journal
    Hey Oracle the 90's called they want their bubble back.

  • AOL anyone? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by MikeRT (947531) on Friday February 10 2006, @12:31PM (#14688602) Homepage
    And we all remember the last time a company went out and bought up a bunch of companies trying to hack together a bigger brand and comprehensive product lineup, rather than take the time to properly acquire and integrate their product lines...

    • And we all remember the last time a company went out and bought up a bunch of companies trying to hack together a bigger brand and comprehensive product lineup, rather than take the time to properly acquire and integrate their product lines...

      Yeah, they're called Microsoft, and it seems to be working pretty well for them.

  • Oracle and its security record (Score:3, Informative)

    by A beautiful mind (821714) on Friday February 10 2006, @12:32PM (#14688604)
    Oracle is a quite good company producing quality database applications.

    The problem with them? They don't give a rat's ass about security. 600+, 800+ days of unfixed exploits? Who cares! Their security track record is much worse than that of Microsoft's.

    The people who fork out a lot of cash to Oracle could rightfully demand that they receive quick fixes for these things.

    Oracle teaming with PHP? The worst security nightmare ever. PHP is absolutely craptastic from a security viewpoint (insecure default configuration, etc.), for example the mail() function makes it the favorite of spammers, because you can use it to spam a lot with it - because the mail() function's broken implementation allows spammers to send out mail in the thousands. Working around it is possible, but cumbersome - 99% of the people using the function doesn't even know about the issue, so its a spam-haven.

  • And as we jump ship from JBoss... (Score:5, Funny)

    by bunyip (17018) on Friday February 10 2006, @12:40PM (#14688678)
    we'll all be yelling "Geronimo.....!!!!!"

    (rimshot)

  • I can already hear the whining (Score:3, Insightful)

    by blueZ3 (744446) on Friday February 10 2006, @12:41PM (#14688690) Homepage
    Wah wah "evil corporations" "poor workers" "outsourcing" blah blah blah.

    One thing that seems to be overlooked is that with productivity rises, it takes fewer employees to do the same amount of work. The same is true after a merger, where it's redundant (no pun intended) to have two shipping departments or two sales forces.

    I've been laid off several times in the last six years (once on Christmas Eve), and it's never been a big deal. I'm not saying it's been "fun" but if you have a rational savings plan to build a contingency fund, you should be able make it during the times you're laod off. I have sympathy for folks who are losing their jobs, having been there myself, but I also know this isn't the end of the world. I hope they do, too.

      You can look at a layoff as a crisis or as an opportunity. Your choice.

  • is JBoss good to buy? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by DeveloperAdvantage (923539) on Friday February 10 2006, @01:31PM (#14689117) Homepage
    I am not sure why another company would want to buy JBoss.

    In its time it was very innovative with two things. First, making EJB type properties available to POJOs (properties like security, transactions, remoting). Second, they pioneered the business model of selling services based on a free product, which encouraged very wide-spread adoption. Both of these were controversial at the time and JBoss should be applauded for showing us the way.

    However, the problem is now many other companies do the same thing. Big application server companies give away free copies, at least for development teams. Java itself is moving toward making EJB type properties available to POJOs. On top of all this, over the last few years there has been a clear trend to move away from EJBs, favoring instead something like a Tomcat/Spring approach for J2EE applications, and, in other cases, the even lighter LAMP stack.

    It seems to me a few years ago JBoss would have been a great purchase, but right now I am not so sure.
    • JBoss lost a lot when Geronmino started up--taking a lot of the original developers.

      It's makes sense for Oracle to purchase another bloated app server--9iAS was a complete failure from an Orion standpoint--it got way out of hand in features and was too tied with EJB2.0. JBoss will help them break out of the 2.0 environment and with a more flexible, high performance appserver. Hopefully they learned their lesson from the Orion experience.

      As for Spring/LAMP, EJB3.0 has a lot of changes to the point of a

    • "...a clear trend to move away from EJBs, favoring instead something like a Tomcat/Spring approach..."

      ...using ORM persistence tools like Hibernate, which is owned by....... JBoss.

    • I've been under the impression that jboss was looking for a suitor for a while now, since they've had a little bad blood with IBM. Either Oracle or HP, they want to cash in and there is nothing wrong with that.

      Featurewise, they are the best opensource app platform going. Now does Larry integrate Jboss, harmoniously, with Oracle? That I very much doubt. I've been wrong before, look at all the stuff Sun is doing, I still don't trust them but they actually did it and they are slowly earning my respect

    • Re:The JBoss deal is about Hibernate... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by fupeg (653970) on Friday February 10 2006, @03:17PM (#14689756)
      You know this same thought crossed my mind too. However, on one hand Oracle has an app server and Oracle has a EJB3-compliant O/R technology. I'm not really sure how well their app server compares to JBoss, but Toplink certainly compares pretty well to Hibernate. Hibernate does have more mindshare than JBoss, but if you compared all the technologies in Oracle's middleware suite to JBoss equivalents, it seems like the one place where Oracle would stand up best is Toplink vs. Hibernate. Maybe what would be more valuable to them would be having the Hibernate guys, particularly Gavin King, as part of Oracle. That would give them a lot more influence on the future of EJB persistence and even JDBC.

      Oracle will not practically own EJB3 persistence however. Don't forget about Kodo [solarmetric.com], a recent acquisition of BEA. They've had the best JDO implementation and now have an EJB3 implementation based on it.

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