Red Hat to Acquire JBoss
The rumors about someone buying JBoss have been bouncing around for weeks. As I was working on a presentation titled Commercializing Open Source for Eric von Hippel’s Democratizing Innovation conference this week, I went to Red Hat’s page to pick up their logo and saw that they announced the acquisition of JBoss this morning.
This is a huge success for everyone involved, especially Marc Fleury (JBoss CEO and founder) and the primary investors – Accel, Intel, and Matrix. JBoss only did one disclosed round of financing for $10 million about two years ago. Red Hat acquired them for $350 million with an additional $70 million earn out. This is about 10% of Red Hat’s market cap.
Good for JBoss, but bad for entreprenuers and economy.
Providing x35 ROI is potentially setting the VC industry eyes on a higher target making it difficult for other businesses and also attracting less professional VCs to hyped up investments that will fail…