jboss

The effects of open source on stock prices

Has open source been positive or negative for its primary (commercial) proponents? That's the question I asked myself yesterday about Red Hat, Sun, and Novell, and found the answer interesting. I looked at these three as they, more than any others, have results that can be isolated and directly attributed to open source. A company like IBM does a lot with open source, but it's harder to discern the effects on the company's stock price because its embrace of open source is less pronounced/distinct among its other corporate policies.

A quick review of the data suggests that the market largely bought into the early hype on the transformative power of open source, but has taken a cautious "wait-and-see" approach since the initial euphoria.

Take a look at Novell's stock price since 2003:… Read more

JBoss + iWay PR disappearing act--whither Open Source SOA at Red Hat?

A month or so ago I saw a press release that discussed how JBoss was working with iWay to "bring a full range of information management capabilities to global organizations" and didn't think much of it. In fact, I thought so little that I just ignored it until today someone mentioned that they couldn't find that release on the RedHat website. After a bit of digging we figured out that it must have been an iWay release and that RH decided to lump it into a bigger press release about their SOA (service oriented architecture) platform.

In the Red Hat release there are a number of new JBoss partners, only one of whom has any open source products. The real IT world has both open source and proprietary products and they all need to work together. And lots of companies use the JBoss app server very successfully with all kinds of applications.

But the SOA products have been a bit slow out of the gate and so it's the iWay partnership that I find interesting as it begs a few important questions. … Read more

The open-source business (model) revolution

Craig Muzilla, Red Hat's newly minted vice president of Middleware, may be relatively new to the open-source game, but already he has picked up on its greatest strength. Yes, it is a winning development methodology. Yes, it can enable superior code.

But it's singular strength for a business guy like me is its unparalleled value for the customer and for the vendor in smacking around competitors. Craig notes in a Linux.com interview:

I think very certainly there's tech innovation, but I think there's also business innovation, which is trying to find a better way to create software, have more flexibility, and build a business that's both beneficial for the business that we're building as a vendor, and beneficial for the customers. People talk about tech disruption...… Read more

What's really going on at JBoss?

Oddly enough, the answer to that question ("What's really going on with JBoss?") is probably best answered by someone outside Red Hat: Marc Fleury. Marc isn't shackled by the need to keep corporate secrets, though perhaps he's a little biased.

Marc offers several data points that suggest that JBoss adoption and monetization is "going through the roof." But he also takes on two potential aspirants to the JBoss throne: Ruby on Rails and SpringSource (I've sanitized Marc's comments to suit my Puritan sensibilities):… Read more

Executive moves: Shaun Connolly leaves Red Hat

Shaun Connolly has been one of the few JBoss executives to stay with Red Hat post-acquisition. Today, however, is Shaun's last day with Red Hat.

It might be nice to ascribe Shaun's departure to some nefarious plot at Red Hat or to some other negative factor, but I talked with Shaun and it's none of the above. As Shaun told me, he's off to "get reacquainted with [his] family, as well as do some side jobs for a while."

If side jobs leads him to do something like Bob Bickel's Ringside Networks, then I'm all for it. Just don't stay out of the game as long as Bob did, Shaun. The open-source world needs more people like you reinvesting their experience in other open-source companies.

Shaun, conscientious guy that he is, leaves Red Hat in good shape, as he notes:… Read more

Mozilla may hold the clues to the future of commercial open source

Much is rightly made about the quality of open-source software like JBoss and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. These, however, are arguably not the source of the quality of the businesses behind them. Their networks were/are.

JBoss was doing well before it created the JBoss Operational Network using Hyperic's software as a foundation. But it was the Network that dramatically boosted JBoss' renewal rate and ASPs (as JBoss lead investor David Skok noted in his OSBC 2007 presentation). Red Hat was Red Hat before it had Red Hat Network (RHN), but RHN gave customers an easy justification for paying for what they could get for free elsewhere.

The Network, in other words, is the not-so-secret sauce that makes great open-source companies. The principle behind it is to give the "core" software away to lower the cost of sales and marketing, while providing "complementary" services like an RHN to facilitate a purchase.

Which brings me to Mozilla.… Read more

Rivet Logic earns the JBoss Innovator of the Year Award with Kaplan Test

Sometimes the good guys win.

I was really happy to see Red Hat announce that Rivet Logic won the JBoss Innovator of the Year Award for 2008. I'm biased in this one (see below), but it's an exceptional award for an exceptional piece of work by (you guessed it) an exceptional group of people.

What was the winning application?

...a next-generation platform for the www.kaptest.com site that can deliver personalized applications and dynamic, targeted content. The results include a 26x performance improvement over the legacy content authoring/delivery system, much faster page load times and a "fresher" web presence for Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions.

100% open source. I know the Kaplan team well, as well as the Rivet Logic team. This award couldn't have happened to a better group of people. Congratulations!… Read more

Underexposed blog: Links of the day

Rob Bearden of JBoss, Red Hat, and OpenSpan joins Benchmark Capital - Bearden was OpenSpan COO; before that, COO at open-source app server company JBoss, where "he helped architect and execute the company's business model, managed its worldwide operations, and played a key role in its acquisition by Red Hat Software." Take advantage of multiple CPU cores during file compression - Linux.com - "The mgzip tools that can take advantage of multiple CPU cores during file compression, while pbzip2 uses multiple cores for both compression and decompression." Interesting--I don't know how embarrassingly parallel … Read more

JBoss targets 50 percent market share by 2015, achieves 100 percent developer retention

Red Hat's JBoss division has big plans for the future. Fortunately, it's not squandering its development pool to get there.

JBoss was always an ambitious project and company. It would appear that not much has changed now that JBoss is a division within Red Hat, as Red Hat announced today its intention to push JBoss into 50 percent of enterprise middleware workloads by 2015. This isn't 50 percent of all installed middleware, but rather than half of every new enterprise middleware deployments in 2015 will be JBoss.

That's pretty impressive, even if only aspirational at this point.

Much more interesting to me than this marketing aspiration (as this really is all such a number can be at this point, given that we're eight years away from being able to measure the claim) is the fact that the JBoss development team is still intact. For Red Hat to reach its ambitions, it has to retain good employees that contribute to that vision, and specifically the developers who lead and develop the projects.

During Red Hat's press conference on JBoss today, therefore, I asked if the reported JBoss defections had hurt JBoss' momentum.… Read more