Redhat, JBoss and Sun

I wanted to take a little time to digest the recent acquistion of JBoss by Redhat. I find it somewhat amusing that JBoss was acquired by a company that just last year Marc Fleury was calling just a packager of linux. It's amusing as it represent the view of Redhgat which is accurate in about the year 1994 when Fleury was graduate student in comp sci. That ceased to be the case in about 1998, when Redhat made the point of actively hiring kernel developers. They also acqured Cygnus in 1999 which was one of the first true open source professional services company which had numerous contracts with major chipmakers such as Intel and IBM. Marc Fluery has often declared Redhat - a complete piece of crap company. From the always snarky Register UK,

"Today RH *IS* a proprietary vendor," Fleury wrote. "Their whole business is around proprietary wrappers to Open Source Linux to drive the subscription business.

"RH is a packager, it doesn't create JACK, it doesn't create Linux, it wraps it up in proprietary shit. And no the contributions that they make don't really count. Linus Torvalds creates Linux."

Tell us how you really feel, Marc.

"But what really gets me, is this: Our own talks with RH broke down, RH is NOT IN THE BUSINESS OF PAYING OPEN SOURCE DEVELOPERS. We are, that is why we created JBoss inc. RH wanted to keep the services revenues all to themselves. That is the dirty little secret, so for them to come out and claim they are the open source when we know the reality is distasteful."

So why sell to Redhat? Well I think the answer is pretty clear. Marc Fleury is an ass. So much of an ass that the people who provided the one round of VC probably made it apparent that some form of liquidity event was expected from the investment. Since Marc with his propensity to randomly spout off nonsense (such as Redhat not paying open source developers) is unlikely to make it through the complete pain in the ass round show that is an IPO. Fluery is a great entrepreneur and taking his company from 2 people to roughly 100 is an amazing accomplishment. The problem is those skills sets don't often translate into the quarter to quarter discipline you see in a company like Redhat. Of course Marc will take his roughly 70 million (based on my rough guess) and in a year won't be working for Redhat. Despites Fleury's repeated and erroneous claims about Redhat he was more than willing to take their money when it became apparent that Larry Ellison didn't want to pay 8 times revenue for JBoss. (Silly Larry it's mostly stock anyway, what where you thinking).

Of course with this move, the real pressure is on Sun Microsystems to GPL their Java. It's apparent that customers like the JBoss solution and JBoss as a company can certainly execute. With the backing of a company like Redhat, entrance into the Fortune 500 becomes much easier. If Sun doesn't truly open source Java, well I am pretty sure Redhat is gonna eat their lunch and in 5 years the only Java application server will be JBoss.