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Oracle to buy JBoss (and others)
Posted by
Zonk
on Fri Feb 10, 2006 01:05 PM
from the offset-by-the-layoffs-i'm-sure dept.
from the offset-by-the-layoffs-i'm-sure dept.
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. "
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Oracle to Layoff 2000 Jobs 178 comments
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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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Wow (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Wow (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Wow (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:Wow (Score:3, Insightful)
Not gonna happen. (Score:5, Interesting)
(Reposted from my comment on Javalobby [javalobby.org])
Re:Not gonna happen. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Not gonna happen. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:Not gonna happen. (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Not gonna happen. (Score:5, Interesting)
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Note to JBoss administrative support employees (Score:3, Funny)
-Rick
Don't trust Oracle (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Don't trust Oracle (Score:3, Interesting)
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)
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.
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A discussion on the PostgreSQL advocacy list... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
OSS projects selling out? (Score:3, Insightful)
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)
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
Re:OSS projects selling out? (Score:3, Interesting)
Hey! (Score:3, Funny)
AOL anyone? (Score:3, Interesting)
Oracle and its security record (Score:3, Informative)
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)
(rimshot)
I can already hear the whining (Score:3, Insightful)
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)
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.
Re:is JBoss good to buy? (Score:3, Interesting)
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)
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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