Wireless Utopia

The JBoss acquisition by Red Hat has Information Week investigating it in depth. They have three articles back to back; first one examining the impact for Red Hat, second one proclaiming a new era in OSS and the latest one on Marc Fleury, CEO of JBoss. Interestingly, Slashdot had featured an article on Marc Fleury from BW just two days before the deal was finalised which had painted him as the villain. In just a week, he is the new pin up guy for Open Source as per Information Week!

The best part of this deal is the vindication that there is an exit strategy for Open Source companies as well. Although the deal was not that huge in terms of numbers, it still will rake in a lot of money for the investors. The explosion in open source investments by VC's has indeed borne some fruit. Inspired by this deal a lot of new open source software startups will crop up which in time will lead to an open source bubble as well.

The company that I have formed, Tantra Telecom, is also into Open Source. And it has drawn a lot of criticism from the naysayers of Open Source. The halo of Open Source is always associated with altruism, a community of developers who take it up as a hobby rather than profession. And its difficult to shake off. This deal will do a lot of good for commercial open source software.

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Tags: JBoss RedHat OSS OpenSource Venture Capital M&A