"He's changed the middleware market for good. He's built a company where technical people have the freedom to pursue their ideas. And he's made a whole bundle of money for himself and his employees." With these words, Gavin King (pictured), founder and leader of the Hibernate project and a JBoss employee for the past two and a half years, summed up what the vast majority of the software world was thinking yesterday, after waking up to the breaking news that Red Hat has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Fleury's company JBoss.

King was fulsome in his praise:

"For a technical guy like me, JBoss is Camelot. Three years ago I was dragging myself out of bed each morning to go to my depressing job building boring web applications for organizations run by risk-averse middle managers and clueless "architects". I was thoroughly frustrated with the lack of productivity of the technology platform - always WebSphere - that was forced down my throat by these guys. ...

That was a world where an idea - however unoriginal - was valued on the basis of how many grey hairs were in evidence on the head of the person expressing the idea. But the hair was not the only thing that needed to be grey. In the world of "professional services", only the greyest personalities succeed. Passion, creativity, vision - all liabilities. Knowing no other world, I believed that that world was the whole world. At night I'd work on Hibernate, hoping that perhaps - if Hibernate became wildly successful - I might get just an ounce more respect in that world, despite my obvious lack of greyness."

But then came a visit to the USA, to a conference at which he found himself being actively recruited by JBoss.

Two and half years on, King is as energized as ever about the JBoss mission:

"The planned acquisition of JBoss by Red Hat will revitalize the middleware market - expect a more competitive marketplace, with all major products based on open source codebases. And expect us to be leaders in SOA. No other software company offers an open source enterprise software platform of comparable depth and maturity."

Of the choice of suitor - Red Hat over, for example, Oracle - King writes that the Red Hat announcement  "clearly signals our continued commitment to Free Software. The two companies have similar business models, similar licenses and a similar record of successful evangelization and commercialization of open source."

  

• Hibernate in a Large J2EE Project
• Why Can't Java EE Be More AJAX-Like?