But Laurent Lachal, an analyst at London-based Ovum Ltd., said Red Hat has been disappointed by the adoption of Jonas and is unlikely to devote a lot of resources to that technology once it owns JBoss.

About half of the JBoss user base runs the application server on Windows. That could complicate Red Hat's marketing strategy, said Steve Walli, a vice president at Optaros Inc., an open-source consulting firm in Boston.

On the other hand, Jason Long, CEO and chief software engineer at Supernova Software Inc. in Houston, said the JBoss deal might motivate him to switch his company's internal applications from Windows to Red Hat Linux.

"This should lower that barrier and make it a more attractive option," said Long, who is also founder of the Houston JBoss Users Group.

James Niccolai and China Martens of the IDG News Service contributed to this story.