“We’re always tickled when virtually all of the press and
analyst community gets caught with their collective pants
down–including us. So Red Hat and JBoss’ mutual announcements that
Red Hat was to acquire JBoss and the technology world’s reaction of
‘wha–?!?’ delivered a veritable gleefest.“At first, the reactions were predictable: After the initial
‘holy mackerels!’ analysts settled into two camps. On one side was
the Red-Hat-is-going-to-totally-rock-the-middleware space crowd. On
the other side was the Boy-is-everyone-going-to-be-mad-at-Red-Hat
crowd. This latter set of punditry strikes us as a bit
disingenuous. If everyone based their business actions on not
upsetting other people, we highly doubt anything would get done.
Besides, much as we hate to say it, it’s not like IBM’s WebSphere
was making a big impact on the app server space, anyway…”