Red Hat’s acquisition of JBoss made perfect sense to me. Red Hat has far more credibility if it is providing a whole software stack than if it is just offering various Linux packages. Also both Red Hat and JBoss have been targeting the corporate market and, as a single company, there should be significant economies of scale open to it. It also evens up Red Hat’s competitive battle with Novell.

I have been a fan of JBoss for quite a while because the technology road map looks well thought out to me—although I feel that JBoss needs to be asking for license fees on some of its products that are currently free. It had enough of a portfolio to do that. Maybe Red Hat will make that move. A viable strategy on how to make a commercial success—and I mean healthy revenue growth—from Open Source needs to be articulated.

The acquisition creates a conundrum for Novell, because JBoss is (or was) a significant partner. A phenomenon of Open Source has been that a single product normally emerges in any given category. Firefox (browser), Linux (OS), Apache (Web Server) and JBoss (middleware stack) are all examples. The only market where more than one product seems to have emerged is database—which is dominated by MySQL, but also served by FireBird, SleepyCat, Ingres and others. The acquisition is not good news for Novell.

Oracle to Market Linux?

Larry J Ellison of Oracle was quick to rain on Red Hat’s parade. A few days after the JBoss acquisition, he remarked, in a Financial Times interview, that Oracle might distribute its own version of Linux. Red Hat’s shares sank 7% immediately. Ostensibly the motivation is to help Oracle compete with Microsoft’s SQL Server stack (middleware plus SQL Server plus Windows). Larry mentioned that he had considered acquiring Novell. Rumour has it that Larry had also considered acquiring JBoss, but backed off.

Larry did, however, acquire the Open Source SleepyCat database about a month ago and picked up two small MySQL partners prior to that. As he indicates in the FT interview, Oracle intends to exploit Open Source rather than compete with it. In that respect that acquisition of Novell would make sense because Novell has a good deal more than a sack-full of Open Source products in its portfolio and some—such as its ID management software and NetWare.