JBoss head Fleury quits Red Hat

IDG News Service - Often opinionated, always entertaining, JBoss founder and former CEO Marc Fleury has officially left Red Hat Inc., the Linux distribution vendor that purchased his open-source middleware company for $350 million in June 2006.

Fleury, who has been on paternity leave, will not be rejoining Red Hat, a company spokeswoman confirmed Friday.

"I have done what I can to help Red Hat succeed," Fleury said in a statement released by Red Hat. He added that the open-source movement has evolved well beyond the "force of individual personality."

For his part, Matthew Szulik, Red Hat's CEO, praised Fleury's "positive contributions" to open-source software.

There was no word on whether Red Hat would look to appoint a replacement for Fleury's position as senior vice president and general manager of its JBoss division. His duties included defining the application development strategy for the business unit.

In a statement, Szulik said that the integration of JBoss with Red Hat was complete and that "all functions are well managed."

Fleury's departure didn't come as a huge surprise. A lively, sometimes cantankerous individual with a dry wit, it was hard to see how he would fit into Red Hat's management team from the get-go.

Red Hat's purchase of JBoss last year was somewhat unexpected, since rumors had previously circulated that database and applications vendor Oracle Corp. was set to gobble up the middleware player.

JBoss felt comfortable becoming part of Red Hat because the more established company was like a "big brother," Fleury said in April of last year, since the middleware start-up modeled its subscription and services businesses on those of the Linux vendor. "It was very important to me to know that I was taking this company into an environment that was conflict-free, where there could be trust," he added.

For JBoss, being acquired was the way to accelerate the adoption of its middleware around the world using Red Hat's sales channels, Fleury said.

Before he founded JBoss, Fleury worked at Sun Microsystems Inc. on Java-enabling applications from SAP AG.