Jboss (производитель открытого J2EE стека и сервера приложений) подписал соглашение с RedHat о приобретении компании Jboss. Сумма сделки составила 420 миллионов долларов.

Чуть больше месяца назад компания Oracle вела переговоры о приобретении Jboss, но сделка сорвалась из-за разногласий в стоимости компании. Кроме того на покупку Jboss претендовала фирма Novell.

Ниже полный текст письма, обращённого к сообщенству JBoss:

Hello JBoss Community,

I am writing to you today to announce some very exciting news. JBoss and Red Hat have signed a definitive agreement whereby Red Hat will acquire JBoss. I am personally very excited about this news and wanted to take this opportunity to let you know what it means for JBoss, our customers, our partners, and our community as a whole.

The goal of JBoss has always been to promote and accelerate the adoption of open source and the Professional Open Source Model. Although JBoss has been experiencing tremendous growth as an independent company, we believe strongly that there is an even greater opportunity to join forces with a larger and more established open source provider to further expedite the growth of our channel, expand our services offering and coverage, and expedite acceptance of JEMS technology as an enterprise standard. JBoss chose Red Hat because of our common vision around open source, our joint desire to protect the integrity of open source, and because of tremendous synergies in our business model. Red Hat was the natural choice for JBoss and we are very excited to be a part of the largest independent open source provider.

We are very confident that our customers will benefit from our approach of delivering an end-to-end open source platform that reduces cost and improves efficiencies across the entire application life-cycle and that is supported by an exceptional global support organization. Red Hat and JBoss share a common vision of providing exceptional customer value through an online services network (Red Hat Network, JBoss Operations Network) and we fully expect to leverage their joint capabilities in a very complementary fashion.

I am also very excited about what this announcement means for our certified partners. Red Hat and JBoss both expect this acquisition to increase the overall demand for open source certified solutions and services. This union creates the logical target platform for ISVs and OEMs to bundle and/or embed and increases the market size for compatible and certified products and services for Red Hat and JBoss enterprise customers. Together, Red Hat, JBoss, and our ecosystem of certified partners will continue to provide exceptional customer value and lower the cost of IT for our joint enterprise customers.

We are very dedicated to preserving our open source communities. The combined companies will continue to invest in development of new open source technologies while reaching out to the wider open source community as a whole to encourage continued and active participation in the success of our combined open source projects. Additionally, we absolutely understand that our communities, customers, and partners require support for heterogeneous platforms. As such, we will continue to deliver open source products that support multiple operating and Middleware platforms. The flexibility and modularity that you have come to expect from JBoss will continue.

If you would like more information on this announcement, I invite you to visit our website: www.jboss.com/redhat. Although I have spoken very positively about the acquisition, I must also point out that we still must obtain the necessary regulatory approvals before the deal can be completed. We hope and expect this process to be completed within the next sixty to ninety days. After the deal officially closes, we will begin to share more details with you on the specifics of our roadmaps and support offerings. I would recommend stopping by to see us at Java One this year and I strongly encourage you to attend JBoss World in Las Vegas on June 12-15.

Oh, and remember, we love you.

Marc Fleury Founder and CEO JBoss, Inc.

JBoss Inc. 3340 Peachtree Road Suite 1200, Atlanta, GA USA, 30326