Red Hat made two big announcements today at a press conference about their middleware strategy. First, they're separating JBoss into two branches, similar to what they did with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora. Secondly, they have acquired all the assets of MetaMatrix, provider of federated data services and metadata management to boost their SOA offerings.
Splitting the development branches of JBoss will result in JBoss.org housing the community branch and redhat.com/jboss holding the enterprise branch. Dennis Byron was at the press conference and believes it was motivated by JBoss not providing the expected revenue boost. Red Hat will only be supporting the enterprise branch, but they will support that for seven years. Sacha Labourey explains the split and how it will function, including the differences from the RHEL / Fedora split:
While this new development, distribution and support model looks and smells a lot like the good old RHEL/Fedora model applied to Red Hat's Linux distribution, it is not exactly the same. While the rules are the same with regard to the binaries, the JBoss source code will remain public and accessible during the complete Enterprise lifecycle activity, not just for specific release snapshots.
The second announcement was the acquisition of all of the assets of MetaMatrix. Some questions about the acquisition are answered by Red Hat, including that the motivation was to build out their SOA stack. The addition of MetaMatrix's assets will allow them to better support data-intensive workloads. The MetaMatrix products will be integrated into the JBoss line and while initially be available only via subscription, will be open-sourced eventually.