This week, we announced a partnership with eXo – creator of the Open Source eXo platform. This strategic agreement allows us to integrate and distribute each others’ technology thus providing a mutual competitive advantage. This is no doubt good for both company’s products but I think the important point is that JBoss is 1. willing to do this and; 2. able to do this.

Taking the first point – “we’re willing to do this”. I think it shows a level of maturity in our organization that stands us apart from some of our Open Source competitors. The realization that not everything needs to be invented here; that there are smart people outside JBoss as well. There’s a tendency – call it NIH Syndrome, Professional Pride – to want to own and control everything; that’s true for every engineering and product company I’ve ever worked for. When taken too far – that can be at add odds with Open Source and diminishes some of its advantage.

Taking the second point further -  “we’re able to do this”. Our business model is still pretty unique – we put less value on the bits and more on the whole experience. Control of the technology is less of a competitive advantage than some of our competitors because we have more to offer than the bits.

While proprietary software has some advantages – they’re all based on the premise that your technology is better than your competitors and keeping it hidden maintains some kind of advantage. This can only really be true half the time.

Red Hat has the knowledge and experience that allows us to collaborate, allows us to integrate and support technology that we don’t outright control. We’re also confident in ourselves, our brand and our business strategy – and that allows us to see the act of ‘enriching’ other technology (like Apache, OpenJDK, GWT, eXo, etc.) as a way to grow our footprint, capabilities and potential rather than as a competitive faux-pas.

Update :

Some more info on the agreement from eXo : About The eXo Partnership

JBoss Web Services

JBoss DNA

WISE Project

Seam Framework

JBoss Tools Project

JBoss Tools Code Swarm (basic) from Max Andersen on Vimeo.

JBoss Portal Project

I’ll post more when / if they become available.

Bob McWhirter has been playing around with Ruby and JBoss – here’s his first progress report. The start of something cool I’m sure.

JAX-RS (aka JSR 311) is approved – now we just need a TCK. Bill has just released beta 8 of RestEasy and also posted some REST inspired articles on DZone (Intro. to REST, Putting Java to REST). Bill also provides some sage and hard-earned advice for Rod Johnson – I agree, and said this a while back – monetizing OSS is about more carrot and less stick.

Over on the JBoss Portal blog – there’s some nice horizontal scalability testing results. Portal is getting a real shot in the arm – we have a new Product Manager (thanks IBM) and a new project lead and the team seems pretty fired up. We even made Gartner’s MQ for horizontal portals – not bad given the young age of the project.

It’s always great to see your own products streamlining business and saving customers money – but optimization often has consequences.

JBoss Portal has a new friend.

Seam meets Flex, and again. Hmm, this could be important – I need to take a crash course in the RIA world according to Adobe – any pointers ?

btw. Tab Sweep is a term and behavior I learned from reading Tim Bray’s blog

I had a very quick look this morning and it’s pretty nice (and pretty free) – it really pulls together the other services (Documents, Calendar, etc.) and allows you to create nice-looking collaborative portals without much fuss – no coding, or munging around with markup or bizarre wiki-template cruft – nice WYSIWYG drag and drop UI. Of course it won’t suit hardcore wiki hackers but I think Google knows it’s target market.

I’ve said it before – the wiki is becoming the new Enterprise Portal.