"It's still early in the game," Fricke said. Still, it's clear that open-source partners joining forces with Linux commercial vendors are ready for battle. For instance, JBoss CEO Marc Fleury, who has struck deals with Novell and Hewlett-Packard, took a swipe at Red Hat's Jonas-based application server. "Red Hat is ignorant about the middleware space. They're an operating system vendor. So when it comes to middleware, they don't know the leader," Fleury said. Fleury claimed Red Hat held talks with JBoss, but the two parties couldn't come to terms, which led to the agreement with ObjectWeb. "Red Hat picked Jonas because they wouldn't get into a revenue-sharing agreement with us," he said. Red Hat had no comment. Yet in a LinuxWorld keynote address, Red Hat CEO Matt Szulik took a lighter stance on competition.