Red Hat appears to be moving away from Jboss software in favor of the work that is done by its old friend ObjectWeb.

The ObjectWeb open source consortium is most famous for developing the JOnAS application server. Red Hat in 2004 chose to use this application over the Jboss software as the foundation of its Red Hat application server. Even more famously, the software then failed miserably in the market place.

23 Nov 2006

JOnAS failed despite its technological qualities. The application is said to be technologically superior to the Jboss software. And ObjectWeb in general has a reputation of delivering quality code.

When Red Hat shelled out $420m to acquire Jboss earlier this summer, the open source community raised quite a few eyebrows. The price was high by all standards, but justified by the fact that a slew of jesters was courting the company. But the move made perfect sense considering Red Hat's aspirations in the middleware space.

So Red Hat will discontinue its application server and move over to the Jboss application server. But the dust has far from settled.

This week, Jboss signed a strategic partnership with French IT integrator Bull, one of the major forces behind ObjectWeb. The two will collaborate on R&D and Bull will become a reseller of Jboss technology, causing ObjectWeb to loose another user of its JOnAS technology.

But the move will also link ObjectWeb to Jboss.

In the end, that could very well be a good thing. Jboss is known as a good marketing operating churning out mediocre code. ObjectWeb is the exact opposite, doing a poorly in the market department while delivering good code.

technorati tags: JOnAS, application+server, red+hat, objectweb, bull