In the last couple of weeks there has been a lot of speculation about Oracle buying JBoss. Some of the earlier articles suggested the purchase would allow Oracle to move towards a subscription-based model, but that didn't make a lot of sense to me. Yesterday the Oracle CEO rationed that the move was more about leveraging the ease of getting "low end" open source into a company, then offering commercial "high-end" mix-and-match upgrade options at production deployment time. IBM are experimenting with a similiar strategy by releasing WebSphere Community Edition, which is based on Apache Geronimo.
In the case of Oracle I would suggest this might be the first step in actually getting rid of their J2EE Application Server oc4j. In its short history there have been 3 code bases for oc4j - started from scratch twice, then lastly a fork of the Orion appserver. Despite being part of the massive Oracle 9i/10i stack, oc4j just hasn't gained much market share. Using JBoss as part of the stack would give them a much better chance at expanding market share in the mature J2EE market. LGPL license issues could make things very interesting :)
But, looks like JBoss is too expensive for Oracle or BEA to swallow.
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