JBoss (or actually Red Hat) makes money by offering support.
The free downloads you get from the website are the community versions which come with no support whatsoever. Well, you can ask questions here or on the JBoss forums and hope for an answer - easier questions are more likely to generate a response, but it you ask a very technical or in depth or length question, it is just as apt to get ignored. Or you might be given a hint to obtain a support contract. If you are comfortable in doing your own debugging or patching and not afraid to get your hands dirty in the code, this is often a good way to go.
When you pay for support, you get a support account and can use that log into the support portal where you can download the supported versions of various JBoss middleware offerings. The support portal also provide an area to submit support requests. Those are answered promptly. Everyone I know who has Red Hat support for JBoss products is very happy with it - often you get the guys that wrote the code working to help you with your problem. If money is involved (example: every minute your web site is down you lose a potential $1000 dollars in revenue), having a support contract is well worth the money.
