Well, who can say he didn’t see this one coming. JBoss development will apparently switch to the Fedora model. That means a community edition will be developed out in the open, and releases will be made on a regular basis with less attention to backward-compatibility. Based on that subscribers will get a more stable “enterprise” version.
Hard to say if this will work out in the application server market. If you want stability and backward-compatibility, you’ll most likely have to opt for the subscription model which is probably fine with companies relying on both.
On the good side this might mean faster integration of new features into the community edition.
The switch is supposed to happen in June. We’ll see how it works out.