JBoss Reports Record Number of Downloads…Why?

I received my monthly JBoss Developer Newsletter the other day.  Not surprising, it referenced a record number of downloads of the JBoss Application Server 5.0 in December.   According to the JBoss AS 5 SourceForge project statistics page, from Oct-2008 to Dec-2008, there was an average of 122,000 downloads per month with a peak of 127,000 in December.  They cited December as being the highest ever download rate in JBoss's history!

Why so much popularity?  Here are my thoughts on the subject:

• Red Hat's subscription model for JBoss provides the enterprise caliber hardening and support that the other players such as IBM and Oracle provide minus the initial license fee.  Red Hat has a $2.62B market capitalization and did $650M+ in revenue last year.  I don't think Red Hat customers are worried if Red Hat will be in business tomorrow and this has made JBoss a no-brainer given its cost savings over the competition.
• Upon the acquisition of of the BEA WebLogic product family, Oracle has raised the support costs (up to 20%) for existing WebLogic customers with no additional product value.  Old BEA customers are asking themselves why they should pay more for support for no gain in functionality?
• The Java Enterprise Edition (JEE) application server could be seen as a commodity at this point.  The only way an application server vendor can differentiate themselves is by developing proprietary layers on top of the standard JEE application server.  This may have been popular during the hay days of BEA, but organizations are feeling the pain of being stuck on proprietary technologies promising themselves they won't do it again.  JBoss provides a solid platform which adheres to the JEE standard at an economical price.
• JBoss is a superior technical platform. The next time you walk into a large enterprise who may be using a non-JBoss application server ask the developers and architects which application server they would prefer.  In almost all cases they will say "JBoss".  The reason?  Simple, you can download the application server, unzip and install in less than 10 minutes.   Sounds like child's Play?  Well, maybe until you talk to Red Hat and learn that one of the most transaction intense financial trading applications runs on JBoss.