Brad Feld

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Red Hat to Acquire JBoss

Apr 10, 2006

The rumors about someone buying JBoss have been bouncing around for weeks.  As I was working on a presentation titled Commercializing Open Source for Eric von Hippel’s Democratizing Innovation conference this week, I went to Red Hat’s page to pick up their logo and saw that they announced the acquisition of JBoss this morning.

This is a huge success for everyone involved, especially Marc Fleury (JBoss CEO and founder) and the primary investors – Accel, Intel, and Matrix.  JBoss only did one disclosed round of financing for $10 million about two years ago.  Red Hat acquired them for $350 million with an additional $70 million earn out.  This is about 10% of Red Hat’s market cap.

Oracle should have stretched a little harder for this one.