Martin LaMonica writes a blog entry for CNET News.com about why IBM decided not to buy JBoss, but rather purchased small company Gluecode.

Apparently, head of IBM Software Group, Steve Mills indicated IBM was interested in JBoss but chose not to purchase for a number of reasons. Rumours currently claim that Oracle is in negotiations to aquire JBoss for somewhere between US$200 million and $400 million. IBM supposedly paid less than $50 million for Gluecode, although details of the transaction were never published.

Steve Mills indicated he didn’t want to pay too much money for a product or technology that isn’t exactly a huge growth market - the J2EE application server market is relatively mature now, and IBM has their own WebSphere Application Server that does largely the same job.

Gluecode is closely tied to the Apache Geronimo project, and is very much standards based - while there are some concerns about JBoss and the proprietary components their software contains.

Gluecode is now sold as the WebSphere Community Edition and is targeted mainly at the SMB market.

Read the full article: Why IBM passed on JBoss acquisition

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