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Redhat Responds: " Oh no you di'ent! "

Much earlier today, I wrote about SpringSource CEO Rod Johnson's take on Redhat's recently announced Open Choice application strategy and I believe two words best sum up the tone in Mr. Johnson's article: "It's on!"

Well it didn't take long for Redhat to respond. Rich Sharples, who has the impressive sounding title "Director of Product Management for JBoss Application Platforms and Developer Tools" at Redhat posted in his blog today a rebuttal highlighted with competing Job Trends charts from indeed.com. Most of the article makes perfect sense: JBoss is recognizing that JEE, while very popular, isn't the only very popular framework stack out there. Rails is popular, Spring is popular, so why should they box themselves into supporting just one kind of stack. Developers certainly don't, which I experience everyday when I see developers creating sites that incorporate both Spring and JEE. From a business perspective, it makes perfect sense to this Music Major.

That being said the closing paragraph did get me thinking:

"This really isn’t about Spring Source - in fact we don’t even compete with Spring Source. Our sights are set much higher."

One could read this in a couple of ways, one of which involves me blowing it way out of context and saying that Redhat is essentially saying "Spring...who?" but it's also easy enough for me to sit back and wonder, "why Redhat?" Of all the companies that SpringSource could have put on notice, why did they decide on Redhat? The two companies, at least to me, seem almost like extended family. Redhat's supporting Spring and as of October 2008, springsource.com is running on Redhat Linux and could very well still be. I **think** that the Spring Framework has been integrating with Hibernate for years. It almost seems as if SpringSource's position has taken Redhat by surprise. Redhat doesn't view SpringSource as a competitor while SpringSource views Redhat as a suitable target.

So, my question to SpringSource, as already asked, is "why Redhat?" Is it because Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft are simply too big? My question to Redhat is, "what's next?" Is Redhat's position on SpringSource going to be changing over the course of this next year?

Oh Snap! SpringSource vs. Redhat

Looks like there's a war brewing in the enterprise open source java space between SpringSource and Redhat/JBoss.

A couple of days ago, Redhat announced their JBoss Open Choice strategy and the first thing that popped into my mind was "interesting....Redhat is starting to recognize that SpringSource is a threat too..." Yesterday, SpringSource CEO Rod Johnson blogged about it and, boy, it was harsh! This was Wrestlemania-worthy trash talking!

I'm a customer of redhat/jboss and I was a customer of covalent back before covalent spun off hyperic, merged with springsource, and then bought hyperic back and I agree that Open Choice for a large part is purely defensive but not necessarily just a defensive move against Springsource. Granted, for customers thinking of migrating to SpringSource platforms purely for enterprise support of Spring, Redhat can say, "Oh, don't bother. We support Spring, too, as well as Struts, apache, tomcat, blah, blah, blah" but also because Oracle's acquisition of Sun. It's all about the stacks and now Redhat can say that they have one and the one they have isn't bad at all.

I am very interested in seeing what Redhat winds up doing as far as their technologies go because Redhat does utilize stuff that SpringSource now serves somewhat in the role of steward for. For example, the JBoss Web Server is a repackaged version of tomcat with some neat additions like a mod_rewrite implementation and some PHP stuff. Jopr, JON, and RHQ are all based on Hyperic's HQ but geared towards managing your JBoss 'stack'.

Redhat might have some success with Torquebox if they can integrate that well with the JBoss Web server for those folks who want to develop Rails apps but don't want JBossAS and are frightened of Mongrel, Phusion Passenger, or Rack. Maybe Redhat could buy Scala, if that is even possible, in order to answer Springsource's acquisition of the Groovy and Grails stuff. What Redhat/JBoss seems to lack right now is that wild-eyed base of fans that SpringSource seems to enjoy. Spring framework developers really, really seem to love Spring. I have yet to witness many (any?) rabid Seam developers.

I have not used SpringSource's tc server so I can't say whether or not it really contains 'enterprise-class' features but if anyone from SpringSource reads this, I have two simple questions about tc server:

1. If I start up a default instance, will the server halt if I deploy a JSP that contains System.exit(1); and
2. Will a PCI scanner complain about the tomcat version that is being written in the Server header and/or within default error page footers because we inadvertently wanted the whole world to know what potential vulnerabilities are exploitable in our sites

If anyone out there uses tc server, can you let me know what you think?

As far as SpringSource's dm server goes, I have to confess that I don't yet "get" OSGI so the whole "we rock because we have an OSGI-based container and jboss doesn't" argument from a few months ago was lost on me.

If anything, there are interesting times ahead for those of us who like to steer clear of the larger, traditional commercial vendors. I can't wait to read Redhat's reply!