JBoss Open Choice Strategy

RedHat has recently gotten a lot of good press by announcing a new enterprise Java strategy - JBoss Open Choice.

A choice is great and an open choice is better yet. The phrase as a whole feels somewhat like an oxymoron. My reading is "Open Choice on Top of our Great JBoss Product".

I do realize that JBoss comes in various flavors and can be further customized. The thing is I'm perfectly fine with vanilla Tomcat or Jetty and would like to build my open choice strategy from there.

My personal opinion aside, RedHat definitely moves in the right direction as evidenced by Rod Johnson's overreacted response on SpringSource team blog. If the Spring leader is worried about the new strategy, which he seems to be, RedHat is on the right track.

While I realize Rod's fiduciary duty, as SpringSource CEO, to promote lower-case-named servers, I do believe that RedHat's embrace of Spring as a part of the new initiative will do more good than harm to SpringSource as a company and Spring as a brand. With the exploding demand for Spring-based solutions in the enterprise, SpringSource will not likely to be able to scale fast to satisfy the demand in support without sacrificing the quality. RedHat's experience and proven track record, albeit in a different field, should fill in the void nicely.