Month: April 2006

The Red Hat buyout of JBoss certainly was a surprise to most. And there has already been plenty discussed all over the web about whether it is a good move for Red Hat and/or JBoss. I just wish them all the best and hope it works out. I think JBoss have produced awesome software and have done great things for Open Source. Red Hat have also done great things in packaging Linux for the masses.

There have been some very interesting posts though this week, digging up some internet history. Firstly, Marc really did paint a great picture in this post on the JBoss Blog this week.

To hear what Marc really thinks about Red Hat, TheRegister managed to pull up this absolute gem of a blog post from Marc Fleury in September 2004, discussing the merits of Red Hat: “RH is a packager, it doesn’t create JACK, it doesn’t create Linux, it wraps it up in proprietary shit.” This happens to be the best comment I’ve every heard someone say about their future employer 🙂

In case this link disappears, then The Internet Archive also have a copy of Marc’s thoughts preserved in time (scroll down to the Sept 28 article).

So, since JBoss is now owned by ‘open source girly men’, I wonder what he really thinks about Red Hat?

Even before standard BluRay drives and media have hit the shelves, TDK have announced they are working on 200GB BluRay disks.

Standard BluRay disks and players that are getting ready to ship will be 25GB as single layer, and 50GB as double layer. The disk that TDK is working on is 8 layers.

Wow. I guess after months of speculation and crazy rumours it was inevitable that it was going to happen, but news this morning is that RedHat have bought JBoss for $350 million, 40% cash and 60% RedHat stock.</a

At least RedHat is more aligned to the open source model that JBoss was a major advocate for, and I expect not much will change with the JBoss product lineup for a while. I suspect this acquisition will be a relief compared to what might have happened to the company should someone like Oracle have bought the company, as was rumoured a couple of months ago.

Good luck to the new combined organization.