The document provides an overview of JBoss, including: - JBoss began as an open-source project in 1999 and was later commercialized as Red Hat acquired JBoss and continued developing it as enterprise-grade middleware. - JBoss offers application server software and other middleware products to help developers build, deploy and manage applications across distributed systems. - Key benefits of JBoss include its origins in open-source development, high performance, standards compliance and availability of commercial support services.