Dana Gardner writes about the impact of Red Hat’s purchase of JBoss for upto $420 million:
The open source code/commercial support business model is no longer just riding a commoditizing wave among certain IT stack runtime and tools components. The model is now carving out a disruptive place on a full, modern IT stack basis that extends down to the multi-core silicon threads and right on up to the vanguard of SOA.
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The escalating JBoss-Red Hat stack strikes at the heart of the data center software infrastructure business. This expanded Red Hat stack is both wide and deep. If end users determine that scale, reliability and manageability of this stack meets their needs, this puts significant downward price pressure on the other infrastructure vendors as they sell a solution, or one-throat-to-choke, value.Indeed, there are two major trends in open source, as evidenced by last week’s LinuxWorld show: open source is moving downstream from Linux into virtualization in a big way, and simultaneously open source is moving up the stack abstraction to SOA. In the meantime, open source is hollowing out the middleware components beyond runtime to groupware, portal, directory, and transactional messaging. Tools is a done deal.
