JBoss going beyond application server

Bill Burke, JBoss Chief Architect hints on more open source developer acquisitions in their roadmap:

we are turning into a professional open source company, rather than just an application server vendor. So what you might be seeing over the next year or so is you might see more products joining the professional open source umbrella. So that is what we hope to be doing over the next year.

In a way JBoss is going in the direction of loosely-joined group of developers. It is as if suddenly they found the good use of that venture money - run a watch-list on sourceforge, if a project is active with high percentile, if its java, if its not part of Apache Foundation then give that starving hack some money to join JBoss family.

Though this raises a business model question. If all they are doing is support and certification revenue then hawking this loosely coupled team of programmers will limit their scaling. Their idea of buying open source projects is to gain wider-developer community support. In all likelihood when they will grow up  they will look like this. They might add Gentoo or Debian in the mix down the road.

On other point, we cannot rule out the possibility of middleware stacks championed along specific licenses:. ASF stack,  LPGL stack etc. This will provide clear entry point for lot of business models.