How are things different for JBoss customers since the 2006 Red Hat acquisition?
It’s hard for me to know what external people expected from JBoss back then because I wasn’t here at the time of the acquisition. But as a company, we went back and fundamentally retooled the business model. JBoss up to the acquisition was the .org bits that they then sold to customers with support contracts. Now, as with our separate community-based Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux editions of Linux, having JBoss offer both community-based open-source JBoss versions as well as JBoss Enterprise versions is a better model for our customers. If you’re going to run something in production, you want to be sure it’s going to run reliably. Open source is innovative, but the bad news is that the code keeps changing quickly. Customers want to make sure it is going to work for a few years without major changes. It’s a very different model than JBoss had before, but it’s very robust. My first thought was that having two versions was an artificial way to make money in open source. But it’s not
