I’m angry again,

Came across Savio Rodrigues’s blog about whether Oracle would buy Red Hat and/or BEA. One particular comment is a very incorrect assumption, specifically Savio wrote:

By announcing Oracle Unbreakable Linux, Oracle has already proven that Red Hat doesn’t have a whole lot of technology that can’t be easily replicated. ….

Maybe Savio believes that Red Hat doesn’t produce any technology? JBoss aside, I used to think that Red Hat was just a packager and was surprised to find out this wasn’t the case. They are one of the biggest presences the Linux and FSF community. I was astounded by the kind of quality engineers Red Hat has in key positions in the OSS community.

Or maybe Savio believes what Larry believes, that since Red Hat is all open source based Oracle can steal whatever IP they want and that’s the end of that. I’m not sure either of them understands that professional open source runs on top of the same fundamentals of any other business. Brand, employees, management, happy customers, and ability to execute and innovate. Let’s face it, open source is a software industry segment. Only Red Hat has proven it can execute effectively in such a space. If you’re just going to “take Red Hat’s IP”, you still have to establish strong OSS community relations, you still have to have great engineers that know the software, productization teams that know how to take raw OSS projects and turn them into a product you can support for 5 years, you need sales people that know how to sell it, marketing that knows how to promote, management that knows how to deal with “freetards” and open source prima donas.

None of this means that Oracle can’t establish itself in Red Hat’s market, it just means that as long as Red Hat continues to execute and innovate they will still be the leaders. Over the years JBoss had to go through various crisis’s in order to grow up as a company, I remember myself panicking thinking we were done, it was over. Marc and Sacha, always the steady hands say, “just continue to execute and everything will be fine”. You know what? It was. When you see us stop being able to execute, then you can say we’re done.