Open source to follow JBoss to the cloud?

Following on its successful launch of Red Hat Enterprise Linux as an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud service, Red Hat is now offering the JBoss Application Server on EC2.

It's yet another example of open source truly becoming a Web-enabled service, rather than a mass of packaged bits and bytes. And it comes at a reasonable price:

Red Hat is charging a fixed subscription rate of $119 per month for JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, or a variable fee, starting at $1.21 per instance, per hour, with fees depending on the size, bandwidth, and storage of the services purchased...Customers can either license JBoss on EC2 from Amazon and receive a virtual image of the software, or make their own subscription of JBoss available on Amazon's compute cloud.

The more Red Hat and others can deliver their software as Web services, the less trouble there will be with getting a fair return on R&D investment in commercial open source. It makes a development service into a Web service, which looks an awful lot like a product that people are used to buying. Maybe an answer to Savio's fair critique?

[sal-magnone]

Great idea.

[daverosenberg]

I hate to tell you this, but there is nothing new here. You can already run JBoss (or pretty much anything else) on EC2. Check out CohesiveFT (http://es.cohesiveft.com)

[someguy999]

once again, who's the guy that's willing to bet his business on Amazon staying up? Don't we all remember not just amazon going down a couple weeks ago for their retail, but in addition their hosted app platform went down like 2 months ago. And google's went down just yesterday...

Just because something feasible, doesn't mean its business changing and you should. At least I know if my servers go down, I can immediately understand the issues and execute and immediate course of action.