I had thought that we had been pretty explicit about the reasons behind the recent announcement of the JBossAS rename, but some feedback I've received makes me think that another entry is necessary. As I said before, there are a number of factors involved in the rename decision, some technical and some not so. But one of the major issues we want to fix is the confusion inherent in the term 'JBoss'. Sometimes people use it to mean the community. Sometimes it's the middleware group in Red Hat. Sometimes it's the EAP product.  And sometimes it's the community application server project. This confusion can cause major problems, especially if you download JBossAS (AS7) assuming you're going to get a fully supported binary, only to be told weeks, months or years later that that isn't the case!

So we find ourselves at a point where, because the project and product often diverge over the lifetimes of versions, it creates a lot of confusion when they have the same name. Instead, when people see software called "JBoss," we want them to know that it's a commercial product with a well defined SLA and support lifecycle, in contrast to the community projects with best effort forum-based support provided by the community. And other projects with "JBoss" in the name will continue to be renamed, as we've already been doing for the past several years with messaging, transactions, security, etc. We also hope that more clearly distinguishing the projects from the products in this way will encourage wider community participation.