Red Hat's JBoss unloaded a spate of announcements this week. It announced its
intention to buy Metamatrix to plug a key gap in its SOA strategy to provide data
integration. That was the headline.
But it was the back story that snagged our attention. Namely that JBoss would
now separate update schedules of its commercial product from the almost continual
updates on its open source JBoss.org site. That indicated to us that the company
was taking the last step to metamorphose from its early identity as rebel or
threat to the established order.
Of course it was all a figment of founder Marc Fleury's imagination. Playing
the role of enfant terrible-in-chief, he would often bait giants like IBM or
Oracle (which was rumored to acquire JBoss before Red Hat swooped in).
But JBoss, and Fleury, has always had method to their madness. Make no mistake,
Fleury's ramblings about being a band of a couple dozen developers taking on
the Java industry was theatre (maybe not great theatre, but entertaining enough).
Behind all that, JBoss was a business, not a social cause. And Fleury was intent
on carving a sphere of influence, if not an all-out empire.
In that sense, there was a cultural similarity to Red Hat, minus the cult of
personality.
Consequently, we have always viewed JBoss.org as having a different open source
model than, say, the informal community that spawned Linux, or the foundation
model of Apache. Although no vendor will admit it, vendor-sponsored communities
like JBoss.org are created not out of altruism, but for mercenary purposes such
as market development and adjunct R&D. To paraphrase Jerry Seinfeld, not
that there's anything wrong with that.
But this week's announcement of JBoss separating the .com and .org sides of
its business indicated to us that the company was formally shedding its renegade
identity in favor of something more ambitious: becoming claimant of the next
enterprise development stack. Yes, contributions to .org will be encouraged,
but the real business is providing enterprises stable releases on the .com side.
Time to ratchet things down and gain sanity there.
And, although their technology is (or in the case of the proposed acquisition
of Metamatrix, will be) open source, make no mistake, JBoss views Microsoft
as its model. Microsoft may not have the best known partners in the universe
(exhibit floors at the TechEd and Professional Developer conferences pale compared
to JavaOne), but it has a huge devoted developer base that's not going away
anytime soon.
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