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AOL in Negotiations to Buy Red Hat?
bstadil sent in this rumor. The Washington Post isn't exactly a rumor site, so there's probably truth behind it. Wow. It would make a great deal of sense for AOL/Time-Warner to acquire an operating system for leverage against Microsoft - same reason they bought Netscape.
To kill it?
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Well, let's see, AOL pulled Gnutella.
WinAMP sticks an AOL icon on your desktop, although it is left mostly alone, no noticeable AOL branding elsewhere. But I'd still rather be using Sonique.
Netscape. Um. Why should I use Netscape when I've got this or this instead?
ICQ, which has just recently overtaken Yahoo Messenger as the most invasive instant messenging client, with its own: Internet Explorer toolbar, Outlook integration, AOL icons in 3 or 4 different places (not optional), and a bootload of "ICQ Services" icons on the desktop.
Indeed, this is the coolest stuff on the Net.
Given that (for better or worse) RedHat is one of the cornerstone linux distros out there, forming the basis of Mandrake and many others, and Given the 'pay per view' mentality of cable combined with the 'enslave the idiots' mentality of AOL, do we have a potentially explosive mix coming together?
Just suppose that this transaction went through -- given the millions if not billions that AOLTW could piss away on legal fees, would this pose a serious challenge to the GPL? I don't doubt that the FSF, EFF, RMS, and a whole bunch of people would get ticked off about it, file suit, and generally raise a lot of hell. But when push comes to shove and RedHat becomes AOL 8.5, closed source, $xyz per copy (or per view) -- what are we going to do about it? Heck, they could just stall long enough to buy politicians, not unlike how MS has been behaving lately.
On the other hand, perhaps it would just cause RedHat to simply stagnate, too busy integrating corporate systems and dealing with lost employees to do much of anything else. Certainly the Netscape buyout hasn't exactly set the world on fire yet.
And lest I be branded an eternal pessimist, maybe they will instead piss away the budgeted fund earmarked for legal fees related to destroying linux on Free software development and contribution back to the community. To their credit the Mozilla project is still going.
"But actually trying to use m4 as a general-purpose langage would be deeply perverse" --ESR
....focus.
They write software. Thats what they know they do. They do not consider themselves anything other than a software company.
Time Warner is not a technology company. Ultimately they do not understand software.
If this merger rumoe is true, this is the kiss of death for RedHat, like it was for Netscape, like it was for @Home. Content and technology seem to not mix well when merged but thrive when left in their own respective worlds.
I'm still working on a clever footer.
Like AOL can switch Windows users to Linux - its not that easy to use.
You know, it seems to me that it would be very difficult for my post to have been "overrated" as it was modded when it hadn't been upmodded to begin with.
Sometimes I really wonder if moderation should be available to just any monkey with a keyboard like it is nowdays...