02/07/2007

JBoss, a division of Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), today announced the appointment of Codehaus founder Bob McWhirter as technical leader for the JBoss.org open source community.

ebizQ received the following:

In this role, McWhirter will be responsible for evolving the technical infrastructure and content of the JBoss.org site for a growing community of contributors and users as well as an increasing number of open source projects. Today, JBoss.org generates over 30 million page views and half a million user sessions per month.

“The JBoss.org community, which includes some of the most talented developers in the industry, is doing great work in open source middleware. The opportunity to work with this community couldn't be more timely,” said McWhirter. “While I enjoy producing open source software, my passion lies with helping open source participants be as effective as they can. This includes providing them with the tooling they want and helping making connections between individuals. I look forward to the challenge of doing this for JBoss.org.”

McWhirter is most known for founding the Codehaus (www.codehaus.org), a repository for open source projects, including his own Drools project. Following JBoss' acquisition of Drools in 2005, McWhirter continued on as an outside consultant and developer for the project. He also founded the Jaxen project on Codehaus; started IT consultancies OpenXource and Werken Company which focused on open source development; and has been involved with various development communities such as BEA dev2dev. Most recently, McWhirter was a senior architect for Radar Networks.

“There's no better candidate to lead the technical development of the JBoss.org community than Bob, given his strong commitment and track record in open source,” said Sacha Labourey, CTO of JBoss. “He brings technical talent, open source passion, and vision that will drive the JBoss.org community to its next stage of growth. We welcome Bob to our team and anticipate many great contributions from him.”

McWhirter will be based out of North Carolina and report to Labourey.