Red Hat may be replacing its Red Hat Application Server with the Jboss software, the story in the corridors at the Red Hat Summit is that the original software was far superior to the Jboss product.

The Red Hat Application Server is based on JOnAS, an open source project headed up by the European Objectweb consortium. Red Hat turned to this group's product in 2004. It consciously turned down Jboss after much internal debate because the product was considered inferior to JOnAS, according to sources familiar with the matter.

01 Jun 2006

But superior technology doesn't always win in the market place. Red Hat simply failed to sell its JOnAS application server and when it did it required some major salesmanship.

The rest is history: Red Hat last April paid $420m to acquire Jboss.

Red Hat chief Matt Szulik yesterday used a stretch of imagination when he told vnunet.com that "they [Jboss] are superior" to the Red Hat JOnAS implementation, for its superiority is limited to market adoption.

Now it's up to the Red Hat and Jboss engineers to supplant the Jboss technology with Red Hat's, while preserving Jboss' market momentum.

Tags: Linux, Red Hat, Matthew Szulik, Red Hat Summit 2006, jonas, jboss