Major players and Open source companies

Finally Red Hat buys JBoss Inc, an open source middleware company. This news came as a surprise when JBoss is at its peak in the market share of the application servers. I was quiet surprised to see that Oracle was also one of the bidders. Last year, IBM bought Gluecode, a major contributor of the apache Geronimo project.

When the open source companies establish a name of its own, why would they want to be eaten away by big players? IBM would encroach into the Geronimo's customer base and somehow market them to use its own suite of products. But RedHat-JBoss is not as worse as IBM-Geronimo in the sense that they dont belong to the same business domain. This is like ebay buying skype. Configuring anything in Linux is pain in the ass as far as I am concerned. With Red hat buying JBoss, i think Redhat version of linux boxes will have better support of JBoss or pre-installed version of JBoss could be expected.