Red Hat Signs Agreement to Acquire JBoss: This is interesting, but we all knew it was coming.

Red Hat will acquire JBoss for approximately $350 million in initial consideration, plus approximately $70 million subject to the achievement of certain future performance metrics. The transaction consideration is composed of approximately 40 percent in cash and 60 percent in Red Hat common stock.

We talked about Oracle buying JBoss, but Larry debunked that whole theory in an interview which really paints open source software in a bad light:

If an open source product gets good enough, we’ll simply take it. Take Apache: once Apache got better than our own web server, we threw it away and took Apache.

JBoss wanted to sell the company to us. Clearly if we wanted to buy JBoss we’d have bought JBoss. Why didn’t we buy JBoss? Because we don’t have to — if it ever got good enough we’d just take the intellectual property — just like Apache — embed it in our Fusion middleware suite, and we’re done. We always have that option available to us — IBM always has that option available to them.

He’s right. What does JBoss have that’s worth paying for? Their product is free.

Open-source software is great, but it’s often tough to build a business around. There’s a certain open-source system we use a lot, and the company behind it sells a commercial license. Try as we might, we can’t find a reason to buy one.

I’d love to give this company some money because I want them to continue what they’re doing, but the product is free, I don’t need support, and there’s no other need whatsoever for me to buy a license. In this case, the fee for the license essentially becomes a free will donation. I’m not against donating to open source projects, but I can’t ask my clients to do it.

I believe in open source software, I really do. But I also believe in commercial software for a lot of things.

Oracle Acquisitions are not about MySQL: He refutes my theory.

Trying to put MySQL out of business would be a fairly short-term tactical move. I think Oracle is looking 5 years down the road and seeing what the world looks like as the commoditization of enterprise scale infrastructure software components continues. They’re seeing that they “own” a progressively smaller piece of that pie unless they act soon. The rumors of Oracle eyeing JBoss and others are completely in line with this thinking.

Oracle Buying Open Source Companies?: Some good commentary about Oracle’s aquisition spree. We’ve talked before about how Oracle is seriously trying to screw MySQL. How much damage would they do if they just went and bought Zend?

All of these moves prompt one question, will Oracle start to play hard ball with these companies other database clients? Zend for instance has been pushing for more DB2 (IBM’s database server), if Oracle were to own Zend would this trend stop? Would Oracle direct these three companies focus resources to make their products work best with the Oracle database and let community worry about supporting everyone else?

There are rumors today that Oracle is about to announce the aquisition of JBoss.

JBoss uses voluntarism to take aim at BEA, IBM: I’m probably not an expert, but I never thought there was much money to be made in application server software. I think that’s going to go down in flames as a commodity product, just like a regular everyday Web server.

“A small, upstart company that gives away its software for free is threatening to play spoiler to big rivals IBM and BEA Systems in the hotly contested market for business software that pipes data between applications. […] JBoss, which relies on a voluntary network of developers to build “application server” software, has won major corporate customers … JBoss, which sells services to users of its free software, has revenues of between $1 million and $10 million per year.

Apache group aims at J2EE applications: No more handing off stuff to JBoss or Tomcat — Apache’s doing Java natively.

“Greg Stein, chairman of the Apache Software Foundation, announced in an open letter this week the formation of the Geronimo project, which will work to create Apache-compatible software for delivering Web applications based on Sun Microsystems’ Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) technology.”