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.

Comments

Finally a real legal test for the GPL?

[smoon]

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.