JBoss the Gestalt 
I have not spent a lot of time around the JBoss community until recently. The last experience I had with JBoss was running the application server for home projects in 2002. In the last year however I have spent an increasing amount of time intersecting with JBoss related technologies. Of course a large part of that is due to the fact that so many standalone technologies are now under the JBoss umbrella. Working with Hibernate for example brings so many of us into the JBoss community and exposes us to other offerings that we otherwise may ignore.
From the perspective of working with "federated" technologies, I think JBoss (Red Hat) is performing an understated service for the global software development community. Recently I had the privilege of presenting on Drools, the open source Java rules engine at the Oklahoma City Java Users Group (OKCJUG). This project was pulled into the JBoss family back in 2005 and the progress of the team and maturity of the technology speaks to the effectiveness of the JBoss project support model.
On the other hand I've recently undergone the marketing spiel that is Red Hat sales and it feels an awful lot like you're buying a used car. Unless you happen to know that the majority of the various components of JBoss are other open source projects, you are left to assume that you are buying support for a big stack of purpose-built JBoss source code. JBoss Web… why not just call it Apache Tomcat? JBoss Operations Network… wouldn't it be more succinct to just say Hyperic. JBoss Rules… of course now they are back to calling it Drools. Aside from the JBoss MicroKernel and JMX MBean work, it seems most of the stack is "reused" from other open source projects. While I have no problem with this fact, I do find the marketing/sales approach a bit underhanded.
Is JBoss now providing a value proposition greater than the sum of it's individual projects and pieces? A gestalt it might just be, or perhaps Red Hat is just that good at making a buck off the good intentions of open source.
http://www.hyperic.com
http://tomcat.apache.org
http://labs.jboss.org/drools
http://www.hibernate.org
