Meanwhile, a hot, young developer with a lot of chutzpah who some see as reminiscent of Fleury, David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of the popular Ruby on Rails framework, said he sees the deal as "a good business fit."

"If you're making your money from services, it's a good idea to bet on complex software stacks that are likely to require expensive consultants to get running and keep up," Heinemeier Hansson said, in Chicago. "Complexity is profitable, so buying an open-source J2EE stack is a great way to add to the bottom line."

Indeed, "Now the pitch to risk-adverse corporations becomes even simpler and more 'enterprisy,'" he said. "'See, we're just like incumbent A, B and C. Big organization, lots of escalation steps (someone to sue if you blow up), and the same tried tech your drones have been using for the past 10 years. Only we're open source!'

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"That may sound negative, but in their space, I think it makes good risk-adverse sense. Don't rock the boat, make the incremental steps as tiny as possible, and you have a good shot at sliding past the enterprise architects. Not every business in the world wants to make big tech bets; some are happy just grinding. That's great, the business spectrum needs all kinds," he said.

"I think that this is a very smart move for Red Hat," said Ari Zilka, CEO of Terracotta, in San Francisco. "Companies always have to be aware of the shape of the software stack on which businesses are deploying apps. Java is a part of the stack, no doubt at this point. If you do not have an app server in your product line, you do not have enough of the stack to remain relevant."

One developer, who did not want to be identified, said, "I'm surprised that Red Hat is willing to stake its good reputation on a company that has such a bad rep. If the Red Hat rep is damaged by JBoss, it could have an immediate direct impact on the main revenue stream and the stock."

Fleury said he will report directly to Matthew Szulik, the CEO of Red Hat, based in Raleigh, N.C., and JBoss will be an "independent division of Red Hat." The two companies' channel strategies are different, as are the pricing models, Fleury said, "but at the end of the day it's the same business model and the same mission."

Meanwhile, Szulik said he understands the concerns of competing middleware companies that currently support Red Hat, such as IBM and Oracle. But he said Red Hat will "continue to partner" with those companies. "There will be areas where we'll compete, but we'll let the customers ultimately make those decisions."

Szulik also said the branding of the JBoss technology was still under discussion, "but the reputation JBoss has in the market gives me a strong indication that that brand will continue."

In addition, Szulik said the future of the Red Hat application server project is now up to Marc Fleury. "The integration details will get the benefit of Marc and his team," Szulik said. He also said Red Hat's work with Jonas would continue.

This article was originally published on eWEEK.com.