JBoss Chief Executive Marc Fleury isn't commenting on reports that Oracle plans to acquire his company, but the outspoken exec has published remarks in his blog that indicate there could be serious philosophical incompatibilities between the companies.
Specifically, JBoss' priority on open-source software (OSS) might not fit well with Oracle's proprietary products, judging by Fleury's view.
"JBoss has always been about pure open source. We started in OSS and we will die in OSS," Fleury said Tuesday on his blog.
In his blog, he singled out rivals IBM and BEA Systems with criticisms of appropriating open-source code or blending it within proprietary products. Fleury advocates a business model of selling services to support open-source software, in contrast to proprietary models that charge for the license to use it.
While he didn't mention Oracle, his remarks challenge the database giant. "Shifting from a software license revenue model to a subscription revenue model is painful for big vendors like BEA and IBM who need to protect their sacred cows so Wall Street doesn't devalue them," Fleury said.
Oracle and JBoss haven't commented on a BusinessWeek report that the database giant is acquiring the open-source Java application server specialist--but a rival of both companies has confirmed that JBoss has been on the market.
BEA Systems, which sells application server software of its own, decided against acquiring JBoss when presented with the opportunity, said Chief Marketing Officer Marge Breya in an interview Friday. One significant problem was the price was too high, and another was that BEA didn't like JBoss' open-source practices.
"JBoss has been shopping itself around for months," Breya said, during which BEA and JBoss representatives discussed purchase prices and other details several times.
"At first, everybody was tossing around numbers from $100 million to $200 million. Then we started hearing more," Breya said. The price tag was way too high compared to JBoss' revenue. "When you look at that multiple to revenue without a working business model, it was pretty amazing," she said.
Price wasn't the only problem BEA had. JBoss' controlling programming style was a bad match for BEA, Breya added. "It's like getting an open-source product with a closed community," she said. "We're into a more democratic approach to open source. This one seems very autocratic."
BusinessWeek reported on Thursday that Oracle plans to acquire JBoss for as much as $400 million, and the Wall Street Journal reported the same figure Friday.
However, Breya said she's heard the JBoss price is "a little bit above" $400 million. She also said she's heard rumors the deal will be announced Monday. Oracle declined to comment on rumor and speculation, and JBoss didn't immediately respond to a request for comment about BEA's views.
Oracle, BEA, JBoss and IBM all sell middleware, a software layer for Java programs on a server. These so-called application servers typically run business programs such as e-commerce sites in conjunction with other servers running databases and Web site software.
Oracle, IBM and BEA all have proprietary application server packages, but the companies are adjusting as open-source options are burgeoning. IBM acquired one specialist in the market, Gluecode, in 2005, and Sun Microsystems has made its application server an open-source project called GlassFish. BEA has adopted a "blended" strategy under which its programming tools will create software for multiple application serers, including open-source Apache Tomcat and proprietary WebSphere.
SAN FRANCISCO--Sun Microsystems Chief Technology Officer Greg Papadopoulos faced familiar skepticism Wednesday about the profit margins of Sun's business--but this time it was from Bill Coleman, a former Sun executive and business partner who now is chief executive and co-founder of Cassatt.
Coleman oversaw Sun's move from its SunOS operating system to its current Solaris product in the early 1990s, then founded BEA Systems, which sells software to let servers run Java programs. Now he's in charge of Cassatt, which sells software designed to automatically move programs among a group of servers so data centers work smoothly and efficiently.
But in a question at the Vortex conference here, Coleman challenged Sun's business. Customers like Solaris, but the company has become only a tactical supplier of servers instead of a strategic supplier, Coleman said. And profit margins are dropping in the server realm as they have in the PC realm.
"I'm concerned you're going to go the way of SGI," Coleman said of Sun, referring to Silicon Graphics, which specialized in high-end machines but whose business has steadily declined in recent years. How will Sun survive in a business with 20 percent profit margins--by increasing sales volumes dramatically or cutting distribution and development expenses?
Papadopoulos strongly objected to Coleman's assumption.
"I disagree with the leap that it's a 20 percent business. It's not that," Papadopoulos said. There are plenty of things customers spend money on besides just basic hardware and software.
"You started a company that is going after complexity. There are a lot of rewards to getting over solving that problem," Papadopoulos responded to Coleman. "At the basic level we should be collectivly embarrassed about how bad it is in computing--from the complexity of the operational side to how much power we waste. There is $2.5 trillion spent in information communication technology, and only a few hundred billion is in hardware and software space. There's a tremendous prize to be awarded."
SAN FRANCISCO--BEA Systems announced a technology this week called Bare Metal designed to give Java programs a speed boost by running them directly on computer hardware rather than atop an operating system. But in a meeting with reporters at Sun Microsystems' JavaOne conference here, Sun's software chief technology officer raised questions about the wisdom of the idea.
Hal Stern, appointed to the software CTO post in May, said that operating systems are very useful part of a stack of technologies from the processor at the base to applications at the highest level. In that that technology stack, operating systems are important for managing resources, governing input-output tasks, isolating independent tasks, maintaining security and easing software deployment
"As soon as you start ripping levels out because you think you're going to gain efficiency, I think you lose some of that flexibility," Stern said.
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