With the sale of his company JBoss to Red Hat, Marc Fleury will be going to work for an open source pretender that has never done much in the way of innovation. Or, at least that's what Fleury used to think.

An archived blog post from September of 2004 reveals Fleury's candid opinion of Red Hat. You will, however, struggle to find Fleury's writings as Red Hat and JBoss have tried to erase the comments from the internet's memory. Luckily, we're here to help with a cached image.

"Today RH *IS* a proprietary vendor," Fleury wrote. "Their whole business is around proprietary wrappers to Open Source Linux to drive the subscription business.

"RH is a packager, it doesn't create JACK, it doesn't create Linux, it wraps it up in proprietary shit. And no the contributions that they make don't really count. Linus Torvalds creates Linux."

Tell us how you really feel, Marc.

"But what really gets me, is this: Our own talks with RH broke down, RH is NOT IN THE BUSINESS OF PAYING OPEN SOURCE DEVELOPERS. We are, that is why we created JBoss inc. RH wanted to keep the services revenues all to themselves. That is the dirty little secret, so for them to come out and claim they are the open source when we know the reality is distasteful."

Fleury seems to have gotten past these issues and has accepted Red Hat's $350m bid for JBoss. When the deal closes, Fleury will report to Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik.

"The union of these two companies will demonstrate the benefits of a pure open source play," Fleury said in a statement today, countering past contentions that Red Hat is a shit-wrapping "open source wannabee" and "open source girly man".

Neither Red Hat nor JBoss has returned our calls seeking comment.

This author noticed the missing text. You can catch the original post here and the missing text here.

One blog post that is still hanging around is this rather nonsensical item from Fleury's wife. Surely the Red Hat lawyers could have saved us from that too? ®