With the deals announced Monday, JBoss Group will now sell services for software from the Tomcat, JGroups, Hibernate, Javassist and Nukes projects. As part of the arrangement, the lead developers from Tomcat, JGroups and Hibernate will become JBoss employees, and the project heads of Javassist and Nukes will work with JBoss Group on a consulting basis.
These open-source projects will remain independent in that development on each product will continue under the auspices of their respective leaders.
The move will allow JBoss to ensure that each open-source product works well with the JBoss software and expand the potential revenue the company generates from services, said Marc Fleury, the company's president and founder.
"We go out and hire these guys and turn them into professionals, as opposed to an amateur or a hobbyist," said Fleury. "Other (companies) expand by acquisition or by deepening their (software) stack. We expand by recruiting those projects."
Aside from the "professional Open Source" terminology, this is a familiar business plan - think any large consulting company and their various software "practices" - they tend to focus on a business domain - and in doing so, they tend to focus on a few software products. This looks an awful lot like that model carried over to open source. It will be interesting to see how well the model translates.
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