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

Why, It's free already?

[cide1]

Isnt this the beauty of the GPL, AOL already has the full source to RedHat.

Re:Why, It's free already?

[jonnyq]

yeah, but they don't have the ability to influence the direction that the company is heading.

Re:Why, It's free already?

[gorillasoft]

Isnt this the beauty of the GPL, AOL already has the full source to RedHat.

They acquire the talent, the distribution, and the brand recognition all in one move. It would save them money in the long run versus hiring knowledgeable people and creating a distro to capture the market share redhat already has.

It just makes more sense (for a large conglomerate) when moving into a new market to buy an established company than it does to start your own division that knows nothing about the new market and spend time playing catch-up. They can spend those resources instead on going where they want to go from the established base.

Re:Why, It's free already?

[Anonymous Coward]

I use AOL. I read Slashdot every day, I've used Linux (waiting for my new hard drive before I dual boot - I just don't want to play around with partitions) I know the differences between most of the distros, and to be frank, I know more about Linux than anyone I know in person (sad but true).

So why do I use AOL? I live in the UK, and AOL is BY FAR the best unlimited access dial-up service available. (Getting broadband is just too pricey right now.)

What is the major thing stopping me from switching to Linux altogether? It's not Word or Excel, it's not Internet Explorer (LOL) it's the lack of AOL. I have about 7 years worth of saved emails in my AOL Personal Filing Cabinet, which I NOW realise are pretty much lost forever as soon as I switch services (this is unless someone has reverse-engineered the file format, which I haven't seen done well in AOL's case)

At least I have a good computer. My father, who has a slower computer (ideal for Linux) will not swap, solely because of the lack of AOL. He's no dummy either. He's been using computers since well before the Commodore PET, and programming since then too. He doesn't want to leave mostly because all his friends know his email address.

I guess this has got a bit long, but the point is PLEASE don't assume that all AOL users are idiots, and/or know nothing about Linux. In the US, you may have free local calls to your ISP. In the UK, unless you're on AOL, don't expect to do that and be able to connect even 1 out of 5 times that you dial up.

I've posted anonymously, because my message is more important than my identity.

Re:Why, It's free already?

[lrichardson]

"You have to remember though that the people that run AOL don't have the foggiest idea who Red Hat is."

Despite how bad it has been, AOL has made massive improvements over the last few years. Still got a way to go, but ...

Switching to a Linux base would be another step on the road - faster, more stable, and no rebooting after the latest 'service pack' ;)

If it goes through, I foresee a situation like IE vs Netscape, except, in this scenario, millions of homes get a CD with a 'free' OS. There are a growing number of people out there who only use their machine for the net (surfing, e-mail, IM, etc). And there's a small number of companies that sell machines that run from a single CD. MS is no slacker in the 'marketing dirty tricks' division, but AOL could do serious, long term damage with their 'CD in every household' approach.

AOL managers may not know the technical side of Red Hat, but I'm pretty sure they understand what it means to the overall game plan. Two quotes come to mind, one about it's not necessary to make a large profit of every item you sell, as long as it means your competitor doesn't sell one; and from Netscape eons ago, to the effect that every time they sold a copy, it ran on Windows, so the two companies remained tied, but whenver a user opted for IE, then Microsoft won, so that Netscape could never win while it ran under Windows.

The implication is quite clear - if AOL wants to 'win', the best way would be to support an alternative OS.

Re:Why, It's free already?

[johnnyb]

Even more so, if they picked up TransGaming too, they could have a Windows-compatible OS that they simply shipped to your house. I can see the ads now -

"Why pay the money to upgrade to Win XP when AOL will send you the latest Windows-compatible operating system right to your doorstep! Be looking for AOL Windows in your mailbox."

Wouldn't that be fun?

Re:Why, It's free already?

[Reziac]

I just extracted emails and address book for a former AOL user. AOL uses some foully nonstandard database to store 'em in, but the essentials are still there in text. I had only a small job to do so just used LIST (yes, Vern Buerg's old LIST.COM, in a DOS window) to read the raw files and copy out the needful data. For a larger job, try XRAY, which you can get from Simtel, IIRC in the DOS/TextUtils section. It does a really good job of extracting whatever ASCII text is inside ANY file. Redirects to a file or an external viewer (frex, List :) in the usual manner for DOS utils.

I've also used XRAY to extract the meat from Word documents that were mangled beyond repair.

And still they try to tell us DOS is dead. :)

AOL buys *all* the cool stuff.

[Ptolemarch]

It's interesting: AOL has bought almost all of the coolest stuff on the Net: Netscape, ICQ, WinAMP. Don't forget that Gnutella came out of there, too.

And they've let all of them, so far, mostly be their own companies.

Re:AOL buys *all* the cool stuff.

[ekrout]

Except Slashdot. Are you trying to say Slashdot isn't cool? Are you? Huh?! Huh?!!!

Re:AOL buys *all* the cool stuff.

[CtrlPhreak]

From what I've read, AOL isn't letting them be their own companies, they are just so disorganized that they don't do anything with them. This is also the same story before AOL bought Time/Warner. There were internal conficts that ended up making the two companies figt each other from the inside out. They're so rich, they just buy out a company to have a leverage point, and never really care what the company was in the first place. So it ends up the other company just survives on it's own, just the head guy is employed also by AOL/Time/Warner.

Re:AOL buys *all* the cool stuff.

[luge]

Umm... the Moz Public License allowed them to take it closed whenever they wanted after they bought it. And as much as I love Moz it was completely unusable when AOL bought Netscape. If AOL had cut off funding then, sure, the community would have source, but the community would have nobody who understood the source and no one with time to work on it. AOL has paid for hundreds of people to work on Moz for three years now. So... you'd have no Moz without AOL. Period.

Re:AOL buys *all* the cool stuff.

[Jay L]

Very untrue. CompuServe was floundering when AOL bought them, and so instead of letting them go off on their own, their service was merged into the AOL infrastructure (via CS2000) and their developers have been pooled on many projects.

With Netscape, there's tight integration in some cases, where it makes sense (e-mail for NetCenter), and not others. And again, the development resources are often shared between groups when needed.

Sometimes the integration can be premature, at best. There were many articles in the press about trouble when AOL brought TW employees onto the AOL e-mail infrastructure, which just wasn't ready to support the type of groupware features TW was used to. I argued against forcing it down their throats, but the merger team had already decided what a Good Thing it was, and there was no fighting it. Long term, though, it'll be a big boon to the AOL back end, forcing some feature development. And I believe there are other such ways they've leveraged support staffs (staves?) and other infrastructure since I left.

In general, I think AOL's been fairly smart about when to integrate and when not to integrate.

Jay the ex-mail guy

Re:AOL buys *all* the cool stuff.

[MathJMendl]

Let's not forget the Open Directory Project. They haven't done too much to change with that either, except for messing with the license a bit to take away rights for editors.

Re:AOL buys *all* the cool stuff.

[Weezul]

AOl may not have any idea what they want to do with all those companies, but they know they do not want Microsoft to get em'. AOL & MS are both bad news.

Seriously, all those companies have significant leveraging potential (execpt maybe RedHat) but AOL is not in a position to use it. AOL can try to take MS if it aquires RedHat and merges with Apple, but my money would be on MS. The truth is that AOL has two types of executives, experenced TimeWarner folks and AOL nimrods. As much as I'd love to see Mac and Linux eat into MS's market share, TW's TV program directors are not going to be able to do it.

OTOH, AOL can keep RedHat on a leash (limit the desktop) to buy favors from MS. It violates anti-trust law, but they would get away with it.

Re:AOL buys *all* the cool stuff.

[KodaK]

They are a $$$ centric buisness.

What else should they focus on? Skeeball tickets?

...see them for what they are.... a money grubbing buisness...

Again, here you go with the anti-capitalisim. What, exactly, is wrong with making money?

No offence, and I know you mean well, but you really need to lighten up on the money making thing. Money makes the world go around, and no matter what you want to believe, it's not evil. It's what you do with it that counts.

AOL is not my favorite corporation, but they're doing well, that means they're doing things right for the majority of people who use their service. Yes, you and I know their service sucks, but THEY ARE MAKING MONEY! There's nothing more grand, more worthwile, and more deserving of our respect than profit. Nothing.

Look at it this way: money gives you the ability to affect change in the way you desire. Therefore, if you gain a lot of money you can do what you wish. If in the process you are corrupted by the money then you weren't a person of the convictions you started out with. This isn't a bad thing (unless you fund things to further the "bad things" you are convinced of.) It's merely a barometer of what you really are, and most of us are selfish "bastards".

I'm too drunk now to spout out some sort of disertation , but remember this: you're only as corrupt as you allow yourself to be.

Re:AOL buys *all* the cool stuff.

[Tony-A]

And a newbie friendly AOLinux.
To do that you need some very good and credible resources. Keep Red Hat Red Hat, for the name recognition and the credibility.

Re:AOL buys *all* the cool stuff.

[Afrosheen]

There's nothing more grand, more worthwile, and more deserving of our respect than profit. Nothing.

I beg to differ. Just because Nike exploits third-world countries and turn a huge profit, doesn't mean they're deserving of my respect. I spit on them and anyone who helps fund their 3rd world ghettos. There are plenty of greedy megacorporations that fit this description. I'm not saying Aol/TW is one of them, but your statement is crass and insulting.

Re:AOL buys *all* the cool stuff.

[DarenN]

I am sick of this.
Yes, Nike may have 3rd world "sweatshops". But, If you were starting a company and could get cheaper overall costs by using 3rd world labour, you would. You would not pay these people the average industrial wage of the western world. The Nike people get paid, get food. That's a lot more than many people in the 3rd world do. In the end, Nike is helping their economies, and thus the future of the country

And as for sweatshops, I worked on the line in Dell Europe, and I can tell you, it's not all a cakewalk on this side of the planet either.

Now I'm going to get Moded into oblivion, but just remember that just because a company uses 3rd world labour does not automatically make them the Root Of All Evil

Re:AOL buys *all* the cool stuff.

[staeci]

Don't panic just yet, GPL remember. What I'm seeing is linux/mozilla-powered AOL set-top boxes.

Re:AOL buys *all* the cool stuff.

[nizo]

When AOL bought Netscape (and weren't they making deals with Gateway for awhile there?) I thought FOR SURE they were going to offer an "AOL machine" through Gateway running Linux. Imagine the possibilities: user calls in, saying machine is broken. No problem says the tech, just slip in your recovery CD/floppy which causes your machine to dial in to some number somewhere (maybe setting the root password to a default) and I will LOG INTO your machine and fix it. Not to mention that if the user wasn't root, it would be hard for him to trash the whole machine, just his account. This situation seems IDEAL for joe user who reads email, does wordprocessing, and surfs the web (help out loki and you get games too :-) ). All without hefty fees to M$.

Re:AOL buys *all* the cool stuff.

[dhogaza]

And their excellent AOLserver is open source, too. They bought NaviServer and shortly thereafter offered binary downloads for free, then switched to a fully open source model two-three years ago.

AOLserverruns big parts of aol.com and digitalcity.com. Say what you may about the quality of AOL's services, but when was the last time you heard of either of those websites going down? Or getting hacked?

Re:AOL buys *all* the cool stuff.

[TheKingOfCowards]

This quote scares me: There's nothing more grand, more worthwile, and more deserving of our respect than profit. Nothing. I seriously hope you do not believe this. There are things which do not cost anything but have lots of value. take linux for example. Also am I to Respect the latest megabucks winner and hail him as a shinning example of what humanity can achieve? Am I to respect Organized crime and drug lords who enslave their own population for money? I encourage you to rethink your position. while looking at the economic viewpoint of things is somthing alot of the slashdot community lacks. It should not be the only viewpoint you have.

Re:AOL buys *all* the cool stuff.

[Afrosheen]

Your argument falls apart like a paper doll when held to the light of scrutiny.

Nike isn't a new company, and they didn't start with 3rd world labor. They helped create it. They found that they could cut costs (yes that's corporate speak for boost profits) if they could find a country with no labor laws and no fair wage laws. They decided to take their could've-been-american jobs to another country in the name of profit. Do you honestly believe a $120 Nike shoe costs anywhere near that much to manufacture? The shoes aren't expensive due to the 'new technology' in each and every shoe. It's to sponsor marketing campaigns to brainwash consumer puppets into buying their low quality, overpriced slave labor shoes. The only reason you show apathy towards this situation is because you have a nice life wherever you live and you have _no clue_ what the conditions are like in these factories.

In the end, Nike is hurting their economies. Primitive economies are built on hard goods trade and labor. IF Nike pulls out of one of these villages, the local economy instantly collapses, then will make a gradual recovery. The mosquito can make a meal of a human for life, but not if she's given half a drop every week.

Well that's all. It's clear to me that you don't understand 3rd world economics or how US foreign policy helps bloodsucking corporations exploit labor there.

Re:AOL buys *all* the cool stuff.

[MathJMendl]

From the you-know-what-page,

"To enable Netscape Communications Corporation to take appropriate action in the event of infringements by third parties, and in consideration for the opportunity to participate in the Open Directory Project, you hereby assign to Netscape the copyright in any material (whether link descriptions, email, communications, directory organization, or otherwise) that you have created and submitted to the ODP or will create and submit to the ODP in the future. However, you understand that Netscape is licensing back to you a nonexclusive, royalty-free right to use any material that you have created and submitted to the ODP. You further warrant that you have all rights necessary to authorize the distribution and re-distribution of any material you have submitted or will submit for inclusion or use in the ODP. You will provide information that Netscape reasonably requests related to any claim that material you submit infringes the rights of a third party."

Well, you give them the copyright to your data. Maybe I misremembered this from the time I was on the ODP (I used to be an editor (see here), but I got too busy to keep editing), since it gives you back a right to use your own data, but I remember that when AOL came in they changed the license and there was some concern amongst the editors about the new license, which somehow changed the copyright status of site descriptions. I don't think any problems came of this, I think it was just AOL protecting the ODP's assets, but it still did take away some rights from editors if I remember correctly, if there was ever a lawsuit.

Re:AOL buys *all* the cool stuff.

[Phroggy]

What else should they focus on? Skeeball tickets?

Well, they do own the Atlanta Braves and a few other sports teams....

Re:AOL buys *all* the cool stuff.

[KodaK]

+1 for the Atlas Shrugged, -1 for the Rush thingie (he really is a Big Fat Idiot) and no points for the dodgeball thing, I mean, who didn't resent dodgeball?

All in all, even count.

Content Control on Linux

[Graabein]

I guess this means we'll see a lot of "digital rights management" software and utilities etc. on Linux.

No more playing DivX movies on RedHat! ;-)

Re:Content Control on Linux

[Enahs]

"I got me Linux 7.2!"

I guess you're new to the world of Linux, so I'll be charitable. Red Hat merely produces a distribution centred around the Linux kernel, GNU tools, and a raftload of other software.

Linus Torvalds, father of the kernel and current head honcho of kernel development, works for Transmeta, not Red Hat.

How does that work, you ask? Simple. The only person who "owns" anything related to Linux is Linus, who holds the trademark for Linux. If Red Hat (or, in the future, AOL) were to get too asinine with the use of the Red Hat name, as they have done recently, it's conceivable that Linus could simply tell them they haven't the right to call their product "Red Hat Linux" anymore.

The world of Linux is far more complex than the world of Microsoft, for many reasons.

Re:Content Control on Linux

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

> No more playing DivX movies on RedHat! ;-)

Or, you see binary-only packages for user-land DVD support.

Once you have a Time-Warner-AOL sized consumer presence, the barrier for DVD licensees like CyberLink to port Linux/X versions.

Of course, these would be for RedHat/AOL versions - so Debian/Slack/etc users would have to compile equivalent kernel facilities and alien-ate the binary package.

I suppose AOL/TW might be able to add some kind of key-signed binary facility, to ensure that only their distro could support some packages. I do not doubt the ingenuity of next-years CS students in defeating any such measure!

Re:Content Control on Linux

[Enahs]

Actually, if you read what you wrote, it's easy to see how I could come to that conclusion.

Anyway, I'm divorcing myself from this thread, because this is turning into a classic troll: you post semi-ignorant-sounding comment, I post somewhat-condescending comment, and you come along, righteously indignant and quick to defend yourself, with links, even! It's tiresome and old, and I'm tired. :-P

I really don't care what Andy Oram has to say on the subject, either, because thinking that Red Hat falling in with AOL would change the *entire Linux world* is sheer idiocy. And you and I know you were just trolling for flames, and you got them. Congratulations.

A carton of feces

[perdida]

is about what this here is worth for AOL.

What happened with Netscape?

Microsoft edged it out. Netscape lost its competitiveness. In a straight comparison, IE kicks Netscape's ass now. The innovation departed from Netscape.

The purchase of Linux by AOL will come with a big PR campaign about AOLinux or whatever. There will be a standard, SINGLE image of Linux in the brains of most consumers, and then AOL will take that up against Microsoft, which will easily defeat it in many consumer-level preference comparisons.

Then, the consumers will forget Linux, not knowing that there are dozens of different flavors out there.

I recommend keeping all linices entirely without involvement by non Linux corporations, for these cultural reasons.

Re:A carton of feces

[hobuddy]

Then, the consumers will forget Linux, not knowing that there are dozens of different flavors out there.

Oh, come on! Most consumers today either haven't heard of Linux, or they think that "Linux is a company", and know virtually nothing about it except that it's considered a threat to Microsoft because some article they read said so.

I don't dispute that AOLinux would probably edge out other Linices in the consumer consciousness, but Linux's current presense in the consumer consciousness is next to nothing, so would AOLinux really do any harm? Even if Microsoft Windows trounced AOLinux, and Linux in general subsequently receded from Average Joe's mind, Linux would be in no worse a position on the desktop than it is today. Besides, while AOLinux's would be unlikely to defeat Windows, it would probably make more progress than today's laughably techy "consumer-oriented distributions".

Re:A carton of feces

[krow]

Netscape screwed itself out of the browser market. It did something really stupid, it decided that it should rewrite its browser. What happened? It blew years worth of new features and lost any sort of lead it might have had.

Re:A carton of feces

[tunah]

The purchase of Linux by AOL

What?

There will be a standard, SINGLE image of Linux in the brains of most consumers

That would be a start, it beats NO image of linux, which is the case with most consumers now.

I recommend keeping all linices entirely without involvement by non Linux corporations

1) Great, but it's as much AOL's software as it is yours.
2) If they are non linux corporations, they are not involved.

Re:A carton of feces

[_Sprocket_]

Of course... there are other factors that come in play.

• Netscape was already slipping. A couple years before, Netscape would liken themselves to a rabbit running down a road and seeing the headlights of a semi truck approuching from behind. By the time AOL, Mozilla, and the rewrite hit, Netscape could smell the deisel fumes.
  
• Netscape's code base was in shambles. At least, that is the reason cited for the rewrite and why Netscape5 never hit the public.
  
• AOL management walked in to the Netscape culture and smashed it with ham fists. They alienated their talent. The talent thanked AOL for ensuring their stock was worth something, cashed it in, and left. Netscape had to pick up the pieces with whoever they had left.
  

The truely amazing thing is that there is still a Netscape. Even better, there is a Mozilla which has spawned various smaller projects (such as Galeon). One could argue that the time taken away from the insanely paced feature race has enabled all this to happen.

Microsoft's targets usually sink below the surface and become footnotes to history. Netscape continues to haunt Microsoft today.

Re:A carton of feces

[Waffle Iron]

Netscape screwed itself out of the browser market. It did something really stupid, it decided that it should rewrite its browser.

I'm curious. A couple of years ago, the conventional wisdom was that Netscape screwed up by sticking to its crusty code base while MS rewrote their browser 3 times between IE1 and IE5. Now, most posts seem to reverse this, saying that Netscape screwed up by rewriting while MS didn't. What's the real story?

Re:A carton of feces

[Lemmy Caution]

Microsoft edged it out. Netscape lost its competitiveness. In a straight comparison, IE kicks Netscape's ass now. The innovation departed from Netscape.

This is a peeve of mine. I really don't care that much about innovation, at least in this context. I want *quality*. Netscape didn't fail to innovate - they had new features and functionality added to each version, just fine. They failed to create a stable, reliable, quality product that worked to my satisfaction. I want a client that nicely and quickly displays as close to all the content on the web as possible. I don't care whether it's using the latest whatevers, or whether it can give my cat shiatsu.

Re:A carton of feces

[krow]

That is very true. I worked for one company that got the Java bug. Last I had heard they had spent 15 million on the code conversion and had very little to show for it. They basically burned all the capital they had to stay as a public company.

It was a real waste and someone should have been shot for it.

Here's REAL:LY why AOL bought Netscape:

[Ars-Fartsica]

For the same reason AtHome bought Excite - because John Doerr told them to. Yes VCs have that much power. KPCB made huge investments in both Netscape and Excite, and once they saw their stock turning south, they simply employed other members of the KPCB "kieretsu" (sp?) to convert the shares into what was perceived to be more valuable assets.

KPCB has a long history of leveraging his full constellation of companies to maintain KPCB influence - and this is why he is often referred to as the most powerful man in Silicon Valley.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Please no....

[Saeculorum]

You've got Linux!

Good and Bad.

[thesolo]

This is great and awful news at the same time.

While AOL could provide a huge shot in the arm to Linux (it wont make a huge jump to the desktop without being able to run AOL, sad but true), what geek wants to run an AOL OS?? Would AOL/TW put their icons everywhere, or try to include DRM in it?? AOL/TW isn't much better than MS after all, they cater to the lowest common denominator.

Oh well, if they do, I'll just go to another distro, I suppose.

Re:Good and Bad.

[orkysoft]

Well, if there were many people using AOL Linux with DRM, other people could distribute programs that would re-enable fair use.

Maybe AOL will create a really easy to use installer tool that will auto-detect virtually all hardware. Maybe they'll even put pressure on the Winmodem manufacturers to release Linux drivers? A majority of AOL's customers has these things nowadays, after all.

It could definitely make Linux more mainstream, albeit probably a somewhat dumbed-down Linux. But that doesn't need to be too bad. Why would your aunt need to recompile a kernel anyway?

Re:Good and Bad.

[minusthink]

Initially I was horrified at the thought of AOL adds all over the place, but then look at what AOL did with winamp - basically nothing. Same development team, I haven't seen any AOL logos or anything of the type (though I haven't used it much), etc.

AOL did buy Nullsoft right?

Re:Good and Bad.

[thesolo]

AOL did buy Nullsoft, and then they made Winamp freeware. So, for once, AOL did good.

Re:Good and Bad.

[Some Dumbass...]

While AOL could provide a huge shot in the arm to Linux (it wont make a huge jump to the desktop without being able to run AOL, sad but true), what geek wants to run an AOL OS?? Would AOL/TW put their icons everywhere, or try to include DRM in it?? AOL/TW isn't much better than MS after all, they cater to the lowest common denominator.

There's nothing wrong with a "lowest common denominator" version of Linux. Why should Linux be just for geeks? This will just be another distro, and there can be as many Linux distros as are needed. The geeks will just use a different one (Slackware, Debian, etc.)

Even the people who are presently using RedHat wouldn't be hurt much by this. I bet that if AOL bought RedHat, some community-supported distro based on the last release of RedHat would emerge (minus any proprietary software, of course) and fans of the "old" RedHat would just shift over to using that.

Re:Good and Bad.

[reaper20]

or maybe if AOL decided to close up parts of Red Hat, I'm sure some of the more notable hackers would move on to other companies.

Re:Good and Bad.

[madenosine]

And that's the interesting thing; AOL owns so much that it simply cannnot keep them all under control. For example, Nullsoft's creating of the "AIMazing" plugin, in which one of AIM's ads is replaced with an equalizer for Winamp, would never come out of AOL directly. That's why I think that this is a great thing for Red Hat (if true, of course.)

Re:Good and Bad.

[Guppy06]

"While AOL could provide a huge shot in the arm to Linux (it wont make a huge jump to the desktop without being able to run AOL, sad but true), what geek wants to run an AOL OS??"

I for one wouldn't mind. Keep in mind that, while it is AOHell we're talking about, it's also Linux, which means the user is free to open up the innards of it and take out what they don't like. Unhappy about how the way the file manager is tied to your web browser? Microsoft says "screw you" while Linux says "modify it."

I was about to ask what this might mean for Mandrake, but then I just realized that Mandrake would be the prime people to de-commercialize any AOLinux releases.

Oh, and I'm probably in the minority for saying this, but I don't use Gaim, I use the actual AIM client for Linux (not as pretty but it's more stable for me). And speaking of AIM, it's the only instant messaging software I can think of that actually HAS a Linux release.

"AOL/TW isn't much better than MS after all, they cater to the lowest common denominator."

Then it will probably end up as a "gateway distro" for most users, the way that the kernel-hacking Aunt Tillie from several articles back got her start. Just because you use AOL doesn't mean you stick with it for years and years. I started on Prodigy, but then I disovered local BBSes.

I'm still having difficulty seeing this as being anything but an overall Good Thing...

Re:Good and Bad.

[Anonymous DWord]

Maybe they'll even put pressure on the Winmodem manufacturers to release Linux drivers

Excellent point. I can't count the number of times I've evangelized Linux to somebody, only to have them say "and can I surf the net and stuff?," only to have to reply with chagrin, "well, that depends..." People (especially someone for whom AOL is an answer to anything) don't understand the politics or the technology behind Windmodems. They just want it to dial up to check their mail. I think if AOL could make Linux simple enough for Joe User, it would be great. They're not forcing you to use it.

Re:Good and Bad.

[bonzoesc]

...Why would your aunt need to recompile a kernel anyway?

Perhaps her name is Tillie.

Re:Good and Bad.

[Anthony Boyd]

There's nothing wrong with a "lowest common denominator" version of Linux. Why should Linux be just for geeks? This will just be another distro, and there can be as many Linux distros as are needed. The geeks will just use a different one (Slackware, Debian, etc.)

Even the people who are presently using RedHat wouldn't be hurt much by this.

Well, everyone else appears to share your sentiment, but I want to step away from the crowd for a minute and ask: why Red Hat? Red Hat is trying to reach corporate America, not Joe Consumer. That's Mandrake. Mandrake could use help from a bigger company -- maybe some support and funding would stabilize their distro, and their end-user tools really compliment AOL's markets. But Red Hat -- they'll need to focus on a consumer desktop, which just isn't their market, and they'll probably be pushed in directions that won't serve their enterprise customers. And all the while, Mandrake will be standing to the side shouting, "we don't have to shift focus, we're already focused on Joe Consumer!"

I just think that there are more appropriate companies to buy. Oh well, as long as they leave my SuSE distribution alone, I guess I'm okay.

Re:Good and Bad.

[jchristopher]

And speaking of AIM, it's the only instant messaging software I can think of that actually HAS a Linux release.

Yahoo Messenger has an official Linux client, works great. It's bit light on features compared to the Windows version, but the functionality is there.

In fact, all it really needs is a feature to flash the icon in the taskbar when a message comes in. Anyone know how to make it do that?

I've tried some of the other Yahoo! clients people have made. Frankly none of them compares to the "official" client.

Re:Good and Bad.

[leonbev]

Even if AOL left Red Hat alone, it would still probably slow down the development of new products. For an example, look what happened when AOL bought Netscape. Many of their programmers and members of upper management fled, which probably added extra year to the development time of Netscape 6.

Like Netscape, Red Hat's and AOL/TW's corporate cultures are completely different. You can expect management conflicts, transition headaches, and dozens of developers fleeing from a corporate bethmoth that is more interested in making money than developing cool products.

Re:Good and Bad.

[Some Dumbass...]

but I want to step away from the crowd for a minute and ask: why Red Hat?

Well, "name recognition" comes right to mind.

Also, isn't Mandrake a French company? And SUSE is German... Perhaps merging with an American company would simply be easier?

Also, I wouldn't be surprised if an AOL version of RedHat would be used in a specialized device, like an AOL Internet Computer or an AOL PDA, not as a general-purpose OS that consumers can tinker with. Users are just supposed to use the GUI that AOL puts on top of it. So the present focus of the OS may not matter so much.

Then again, perhaps AOL might want a server OS of their own as well? If so, RedHat is probably better suited for the job than Mandrake, if only for reasons of stability.

Re:Good and Bad.

[dieman]

No, the longer time was because of the massive engine rewrites, duh.

Re:Good and Bad.

[cymen]

But you seem to be assuming AOL is going to take RedHat and sodomize it out back. That simply isn't likely. While Mandrake is great in the eyes of many people it isn't a real distrib. I'm sure these days they do all their packaging but lets not forget where they started - a hacked RedHat install. AOL could buy RedHat and continue to invade markets besides their own users desktops. RedHat is a viable business here in the US. Mandrake is not. RedHat has infrastructure in place. Mandrake does not.

Personally I would see a lot more value in RedHat than Mandrake... With RedHat AOL would have a company that they owned and could control the direction of but it could still be independent of AOL/TW. Mandrake simply isn't a viable option.

My .02 and I'm sure they are worth less :).

Re:Good and Bad.

[cigarky]

Agreed. But I'd rather they take Caldera, which is probably on its last financial legs, and leave RedHat alone. An AOL buyout of RedHat will mean many of the RH people leaving, thus leading to longterm harm.

Re:Good and Bad.

[joestar]

I just want to tell people that "Mandrake is great in the eyes of many people it isn't a real distrib. I'm sure these days they do all their packaging but lets not forget where they started - a hacked RedHat install." is rather untrue. Mandrake is now totally Red Hat-independant, has its own install (written from scratch in perl-gtk), and has not the same packages. Please don't provide false informations.

Re:Good and Bad.

[Dr. Spork]

Mandrake is in France; RedHat is not very far from Virginia. Maybe that helps.

Re:Good and Bad.

[cymen]

BTW, in my original post, I did not say that Mandrake over Red Hat was a slam dunk, I simply said that it was worthy of due consideration. 1.4 billion dollars can buy a lot of upgrades to MandrakeSoft. I'm sure that if AOL is seriously contemplating Red Hat, they would also be considering the alternatives.

Good point. I just don't think Mandrake is a realistic alternative. If you look at it from the point that AOL wants the best buy for a distribution that they can release for their own users you might be right. But I would think AOL/TW would be interested in a company like RedHat because it has other interests in the market besides being a consumer OS. RedHat would continue to be a viable business while working with AOL/TW on whatever they want too. In the same situation I would think Mandrake would be taken out back and sodomized :).

I guess what I'm trying to say is:
a) comparing RedHat to Mandrake is almost painful
b) RedHat has far greater business prospects than Mandrake and far greater infrastructure.

I just don't see the value in Mandrake at all (from a business standpoint, I think their distributation is great).

Re:Good and Bad.

[cymen]

I just want to tell people that "Mandrake is great in the eyes of many people it isn't a real distrib. I'm sure these days they do all their packaging but lets not forget where they started - a hacked RedHat install." is rather untrue. Mandrake is now totally Red Hat-independant, has its own install (written from scratch in perl-gtk), and has not the same packages. Please don't provide false informations.

Uh... Did you read what I wrote and what you quoted? I said they *started* with RedHat packages (should have said packages instead of install in the original post but it is pretty clear) and then got on to their own two feet. There isn't anything wrong with that as I believe Mandrake got going purely with an emphasis on making linux/redhat a better desktop OS.

I didn't say that Mandrake still relies on RedHat. Please don't provide false somethings yourself :).

Re:Good and Bad.

[Phroggy]

what geek wants to run an AOL OS??

The same geek that wants to run America Online. Not too many of them. An AOL-branded Linux distro will NOT be targeted at geeks, it will be targeted at people like your mother. The idea that your mom can't run Linux because she's not a geek is exactly what AOL would change.

AOL is the only company with the power to take on Microsoft and win. I'm surprised they've waited this long, to be honest, but I suppose it will be less bloody now than it would have been 2 or 3 years ago.

well, holy crimson fedoras...

[Raleel]

The ramifications of this are potentially mind boggling.

Despite how much you may hate aol, the fact of the matter is that they have the hearts and computers of an incredible buttload of users, including someone in your family. It's just mind boggling.

If they decided to have an AOL operating environment (UFS mount partition or something) We could see an incredible growth in linux.

What does it really mean? Goddamn, they would do it because it would advance their business interests. How....

Re:well, holy crimson fedoras...

[Robotech_Master]

Not only that--but get this...

AOL discs could be useful for something other than a coffee cup trivet or a pretty microwave oven light show.

"AOL disc? Heh heh. That's a Red Hat Linux install disc in disguise. And they sent it to you free, you lucky bastard! You didn't even have to pay the Cheapbytes cost!"

Re:well, holy crimson fedoras...

[Tony-A]

Now that's a way to get the latest Red Hat security/bug/whatever fixes without having to do long downloads.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Sell it to me!

[Anonymous Coward]

I already have the Electrical and Water Utilities and hotels on Boardwalk and Park Place. I have a monopoly to maintain, dammit!

True motivation

[Tablizer]

They hate MS so they buy what MS hates. The Larry Elisonization of corporate strategy.

What the heck would AOL do with RH anyhow?

At least I could get a new RH disk in the mail every 2 months.

Re:The End of the MS Monopoly

[Anonymous Coward]

.. a Linux distro with an AOL client strapped on

For some reason, that sounds . . . arousing.

~~~

It's just a tool...

[sultanoslack]

AOL won't really use Linux, just like they don't really use Mozilla, but it will give them something to hold over Microsoft. "If you don't intergrate us into Windows, we'll stop using it and take a few million users with us." Microsoft isn't stupid enough to let that happen. If there's one thing they're good at it's preserving their monopoly and they'll do what it takes to keep AOL from switching to Linux.

Re:It's just a tool...

[Anonymous Coward]

OTOH, AOL has antagonized The Beast(tm) with the bitter rivarly over browsers and media players. Let's not forget IM clients (who's the biggest? Whooooose your daddy??). Why NOT AOL using their own co-branded version of LInux? Their revenue stream would not be affected by adopting a ''rival'' to Windoze, unlike M$- which stands to lose MUCH more.

As long as they abide by the terms of the GPL, I'm all for it.

The spillover effect to the OEMs might even shock the most fervent of us ABMers in short order. The possibilites boggle the mind. Imagine a KDE/GNOME/AOL desktop with the 100's of free programs out there ...

AOL- are you listening?

Re:It's just a tool...

[Suidae]

AOL already has, or had, in development a version of the AOL software that runs/ran on linux. An early beta was leaked a year or two ago. I had the download, but never attempted to dial up with it.

Re:It's just a tool...

[sultanoslack]

No, I don't think many people would switch. Maybe only a few million. But, I think you would start to see AOL-OS coming from OEMs and I think people would buy it. I don't think the average AOL user is going to reinstall their operating system no matter how much AOL dumbs it down. And plus, it'll never happen, it's leverage man.

Obligatory Errata

[corby]

...Sony Corp.'s PlayStation 2 video-game console. Linux also runs the Sony product.

The Washington Post may not be a rumor site, but they are not exactly Scientific American, either. Playstation 2 is not run by Linux, of course, although some of their development tools are.

Re:Obligatory Errata

[tunah]

Linux also runs the Sony product

Factually *and* grammatically incorrect. Maybe they meant "the Sony product runs Linux"?

Re:Obligatory Errata

[ocbwilg]

Maybe AOL (plainning on)buying out redhat is somehow related?

Of course it's related. It's ALL related. Everything. Adam Weishaupt told me so.

Re:The End of the MS Monopoly

[KC Swan]

Think about it...to many people AOL IS the internet. How many of those people would by an AOL PC? Give them a machine that runs AOL, a basic word processor and spreadsheet, and what more do they need? To the great unwashed masses, it would be the ultimate information appliance.

Remember the days when people didn't want "PC Compatible", they wanted "Lotus 1-2-3 Compatible" and "Microsoft Flight Simulator Compatible". The problem with the various attempts at internet appliances has been that the target audience knows what they want, and what they want is AOL.

Netscape

[Fuzzy]

"same reason they bought Netscape"

...which is now the leading browser on how many desktops?

Personally, I'd hate to see RedHat turned into yet another media commodity, I would like to see them succeed, even if they never exceed the desktop penetration of Apple!

You don't have to be the biggest dog on the block to be profitable, and successful!

wow

[checkitout]

I don't know whether to laugh or cry. I'm still in disbelief that AOL was able to purchase TimeWarner and not the other way around.

Considering how poorly they've handled their acquisiton of Netscape, this would certainly be bad news for Red Hat. I'm sure any 'hardcore' Linux users would simply choose another distro (im sure many already have), I can also see many companies no longer wanting to use Redhat due to this. IBM, HP, etc the companies associated with Redhat right now, all have a hardline tough as nails tech image. AOL, on the otherhand is known by everyone to be the lowest common denominator of internet service providers.

Of course a close look at the article points out some things which just seem absolutely silly, and make me question its validity:

The AOL online software, which consumers can install for free from the Web or a compact disk, is now designed to run on Microsoft's Windows operating system. But the AOL software could be configured to override Windows and launch a version of Red Hat's Linux operating system, sources said.

Somehow, I just dont see that happening.

Re:wow

[weave]

I'm still in disbelief that AOL was able to purchase TimeWarner and not the other way around.

Smart move by AOL, buy into a traditional company at the peak of your worth in the dot-com boom.

I remember when I read that Priceline.com could have bought a major airline when their stock was at its peak. Imagine if they had done that? They'd not only still be in business, they'd be getting billions in aid from the feds right now... *

AOL is in the position to buy companies still soley because it's diversified and hence able to ride out the doc-com bust.

* - sonofabitch, i just checked priceline.com on a hunch. Seems they still are in business. Oh well, the point is still valid.

IE does not kick Netscape's behind anymore

[yerricde]

In a straight comparison, IE kicks Netscape's ass now.

Netscape 4's perhaps, but with regard to IE 6 vs. Mozilla 0.9.8 (effectively Netscape 6.3; 0.9.8 is due to be released in a week), I have to hand this round to Mozilla. Mozilla starts faster than IE, supports more CSS, supports XHTML (as opposed to IE just bailing and dumping the XML tree), allows for Opera-style tabbed browsing (which saves Windows user and gdi resources compared to the one window per page paradigm of IE, especially on Win9x/ME where user and gdi heaps are only 64 KB), works on platforms other than IE's Windows, Mac OS, Solaris, and HPUX, and even comes with a rudimentary IRC client (which IE+Outhouse does not).

What does IE 6 have that Mozilla lacks (other than market share, which can change once the next version of Concept Virus hits)?

Re:IE does not kick Netscape's behind anymore

[(H)elix1]

What does IE 6 have that Mozilla lacks (other than market share, which can change once the next version of Concept Virus hits)

A spell checker in the mail client? (Assuming you installed office) I hope the new build of both will let me add the NS spell checker to my Mozilla client.

Re:IE does not kick Netscape's behind anymore

[cobar]

>I can't get the RealAudio plugin to work with >Mozilla.

If you're using Mozilla on Linux, you need to use the gcc30 builds. The realplayer plugin was built with gcc 2.95, so it is incompatible with gcc 2.7 - which is what is used for the regular linux builds.

Re:IE does not kick Netscape's behind anymore

[BZ]

Um... which mozilla is this? Mozilla's support for Arabic is not complete (I know shaping is being worked on) but it's fairly decent...

Re:IE does not kick Netscape's behind anymore

[FyRE666]

What does IE 6 have that Mozilla lacks (other than market share, which can change once the next version of Concept Virus hits)?


I'm not sure how you have your system set up, but on all the machines I've worked with, Mozilla starts up noticably more slowly than IE5/6. In fact, it's sometimes so slow I've seen people click repeatedly on the desktop icon to start it up! IE starts up instantly, which is not surprising as it's practically running from the point the desktop appears.

This isn't the main problem though; what IE6 has over Moz is speed. Any sort of animated content is slower under Mozilla - in fact dHTML performance is absolutely abysmal (interestingly, NS4 is faster than either for most dHTML animations, but its numerous other problems more than offset this)!

If you monitor CPU usage when using IE and NS/Moz, you'll notice the latter can often hit 100% when handling animated content, whereas it's rare to see IE over 40-50%, even on low spec machines.

I'd like to see Moz improve - a LOT - but as a web developer, I have to be realistic in my assesment, and NS6/Moz is no-where near IE on the Windows platform. I don't even use it with Linux any more; Konqueror seems much faster for animation, renders pages quicker, and is more resource efficient.

Re:IE does not kick Netscape's behind anymore

[DrSkwid]

you know, the actual differences between the IE, Moz & Opera clients is easier to code round than all that if(NS) else if(IE) crap

for instance

IE lacks getElementById for a document

so the solution is far simpler than

if(IE)
el = document.all["someID"]
else
el = getElementById["someID"]

just add the functionality to the document

if (IE)
getElementById = function (id) { return document.all[id] }

than your code can become more cross platform

I use this technique in my JS and it works a treat

NS doesn't have pixelWidth
solution :
if (NS) {
getPixelWidth = function (el) { // el is a CSSStyleDeclaration
return el.width;
}
setPixelWidth = function (el, w) {
el.width = w;
return el.width;
}
} else {
getPixelWidth = function (el) {
return el.pixelWidth;
}
setPixelWidth = function (el, w) {
el.pixelWidth = w;
return el.pixelWidth;
}
}

these are examples without error checking etc. but using this technique is pretty time saving I can tell you because you gradually build a library of the stuff you use and all the browser dependent stuff only gets executed once at page load.

Re:Maybe, just maybe . . .

[Glytch]

Uh, you mean like GAIM?

Nice ...

[antis0c]

Then they can finally rewrite Linux so it can support skins and built in ecommerce links. Then they can remarket it under Linux XP to catch up with Microsofts versioning schemes, and bundled hundreds of little AOL trial links in it. I can hardly wait.

OK, after thinking a few minutes...

[chip_s_ahoy]

All I can think of for a reason for AOL to buy Redhat is that they need new group of employees to pit against "those damn Winamp guys."

Re:A Worry

[EvilOpie]

I can't see it as being one, really. After all, the reason that Netscape isn't doing so well is because that people became too lazy to install it and used IE as default. (the same can be said for mozilla, opera, and the other browsers too) I know I've converted technical people to mozilla when I simply showed them how well it works when it comes to blocking javascript popup ads after you set it up to do so.

So Red Hat will probably go the same way that it always has been... those that want to install it, will.

Re:uh. they're not buying linux

[Enahs]

In case you hadn't noticed, the comment you commented on was posted by Perdida, who is an Adequacy regular. Adequacy specializes in patently unfunny trolls that can be mistaken for true feelings, and funny to exactly 7 people.

Red Hat is *not* an OS

[Lawrence_Bird]

if they buy RedHat they are buying a distribution and a service company - not an OS.

Interglom vs. Megacorp

[nadaou]

This may be a prelude to the great battle of the set-top boxes.

The positioning of the .Net enabled XBoxes; TiVo patent lawsuits; embedded Linux.. yea, this could be big.

"CNN watchers who haven't registered with Passport were left in the dark today as XboxTV blocked coverage, claiming CNN used incompatible digital rights management protocols. MSNBC was displaying fine though, for anyone who needed to see the latest news."

I'd like to see it happen

[Publicus]

I really think that the market is going to be ready for something like this to materialize in a few years. If AOL did buy RH I think you would see a lot of GUI work (that wouldn't be GPL) go on top of the rest of the OS. I wouldn't be surprised if it ends up being an i386 version of Mac OSX (similar, at least). Technically and aesthetically I think OSX beats Windows, imagine if it or something like it ran on cheap PC hardware...

It would be cool. But I'd still be a Debian man...

Re:Same thing as Netscape, eh?

[mlsemon2]

Agreed. When I see Netscape bundled with AOL instead of IE, then I'll believe the speculations in the Post article (beyond the Red Hat buyout rumors).

Maybe AOL is waiting for all the pieces to fall into place, when Steve Case can hit The Big Red Button and switch everyone to the AOL/TW computing solution. I doubt it, though. I think it's just people with more money than brains.

I'm glad that my two Slackware systems won't be affected :-)

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Well put

[Ars-Fartsica]

AOL/TW has no idea what to do with an enterprise computing asset like RH. Look at what they did to iPlanet (now officially kaput).

On top of that, its not clear that RH needs to be bought. What are they missing? They seem to have decent capital available to them, and they are slowly cleaning up in the linux distro market. I would think IBM would be a better partner for them.

Re:Well put

[ocbwilg]

On top of that, its not clear that RH needs to be bought. What are they missing? They seem to have decent capital available to them, and they are slowly cleaning up in the linux distro market. I would think IBM would be a better partner for them.

Cuz IBM *really* knows how to compete with MS in the OS marketspace...

OK, I've thought some more...

[chip_s_ahoy]

Alan Cox works for AOL?...Dude! You've got patches!

Negative Feedback

[donglekey]

I can't believe all the negative feedback from this. What is so bad about AOL? They aren't for you and me, it is annoying having to delete them off a new computer for someone, and they sugar coat everything, but who cares? If there is one thing that could dramatically change the history of computing and put power back into YOUR hands, this is it. Quit compaining about the best thing that could realistically happen to computing right now.

Re:Negative Feedback

[DorianGre]

This is the best thing that could happen to linux right now. To break the MS Monopoly, linux has to mainstream. OSX won't do it, BeOS is dead, BSD is further behind on the desktop than linux is. Are you waiting for solaris to suddenly take off? Lindows is the first good idea I have heard in quite a while, except this. This might just do the impossible, not to mention setting a standard for a lot of the industry that will bring more jobs to those of you who do linux for a living. It may also provide a standard desktop config, so we can get on to building cross-compatible apps.

Re:Negative Feedback

[Tony-A]

Pretty confident, actually.
Influence, yes. Control doesn't really work, and they know it.
They are accustomed to being under constant regulatory scrutiny, probably more than Microsoft will be under after being convicted as a monopolist. They are expected to act in the public interest, hardly completely, but the FCC can get real nasty if it chooses.

Re:Negative Feedback

[maraist]

Control doesn't really work, and they know it.

They know it? AOL/Time Warner is looking towards that $2xx / month subscription service.. The all encompasing consumer entertainment tax. Why get your laughs, tears, and love from anywhere else.. Now you have the AOL-in-a-box. The rumors of their direction are anything but fearful of stepping over the line.

-Michael

Re:Negative Feedback

[ffatTony]

Quit compaining about the best thing that could realistically happen to computing right now.

This is hardly the best thing that could happen. As soon as cloning is perfected I plan to encourage my friends to grow their own Linus clones and force them to work full time on our OS of choice.

This is much better than AOL polluting another thing I love with ads.

Re:Negative Feedback

[maraist]

Others have said nicely that Netscape is a perfect example of their interest in Linux... A bargaining chip that only needs to be developed just enough to negotiate with MS.

There is no reason at all to "leave the MS platform". Too many users still need to write term papers in word-compatible-format; not to mention the video games. But now the AOL corporate heads don't have to take ultimatums from MS; on paper they have a backup plan.

If netscape isn't enough, then just look at winamp.. Sure they loved being bought.. But then what happened when they came up with gnutella.. Corporate headquarters issued a MEMO, and all work seized. Can you imagine grass root efforts being stifled because of the fear from distant branches of a megolopolous corporation who must save face... Can't have any association with virus writers or *gasp* other terrorists.

Further, and most importantly. To my knowledge Red Hat's employees contribute dramatically to the general open-source movement. In addition to packaging, they take active parts in important projects. What will their work-priorities be under such an anteriorly-motivated organization? Will Samba, postgres, etc. lose vital resources because the AOL port is priority one?

Pessimism? Not likely, given the probabilities.

Further, I can not see any probable positive outcomes. Macifying a Linux distro will simply make another Mac-clone; something increasingly incompatible with existing UNIX-flavors (not that Red Hat is really all that compatible). The simpler something is, the less dynamic it can be. If AOL wanted to compete against MS directly, why not merge with apple? An already established, easy-to-use base. Dual booting? Maybe, but is that really a selling point? Here, buy TWO oses for the price of 3. You can do all the stuff and more in windows that you can do in Linux, but.. err.. Linux is more stable? Which do I boot into today?

Best case, Mozilla + (potentially)Gnome + non-invasive thin-AOL-apps in a cross platform middle-layer (MS's biggest fear according the Findings of Fact). AOL has options.. They offer a whole lotta-product for some phenomina per-month subscription.. They don't alienate the grass-roots Linux people, nor their development team.. They can fun RH indefinately.. Linux and Windows merge seamlessly as apps slowly run cross platform (wine, DirectX-clones, robust cross-platofrm office, etc), and OS's compete on merit alone. Course I also have some land for sale (got real cheap via snail mail).

-Michael

Re:Negative Feedback

[Tony-A]

Control.
If the only service available is the $2xx/month dealee with no "basic cable" access, then they have stepped over the line. And will be stepped on. Gouging the suckers who opt for the sooper-dooper whatever is a different matter.

Re:Negative Feedback

[ffatTony]

No, I saw it, but reality is dull, we all can benefit from a little fantasy. Note to self: eat more fiber.

Re:Negative Feedback

[Chester K]

me too

Re:Negative Feedback

[Bandman]

I can't believe all the negative feedback from this. What is so bad about Microsoft? They aren't for you and me, it is annoying having to delete them off a new computer for someone, and they sugar coat everything, but who cares? If there is one thing that could dramatically change the history of computing and put power back into YOUR hands, this is it. Quit compaining about the best thing that could realistically happen to computing right now.

I think that everyone reading this should get my point. I actually think that this is a Good Thing(tm). The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

Re:Negative Feedback

[donglekey]

The difference is, that I don't consider AOL my enemy for any reason and I also think the 'the enemy of my enemy is my friend' is complete bullshit. I haven't seen AOL do anything on the same level as Microsoft. Now they are part ofa huge ass company and that isn't good, and I certainly hate any member of the RIAA and MPAA, but I really can't remember any bad things that AOL has done. Microsoft has pulled every horrible dirty trick in the book. I could switch from AOL to someone else in a second, but I still have trouble leaving windows behind me. There is a difference.

Interesting...

[BoneFlower]

Its become patently obvious that Steve Case wants AOL to become an operating system in its own right. So this isn't entirely a surprise to me.

On the other hand... While AOL may be able to get Linux accepted more widely, it could bring problems. I don't mind the newbies, they may be frustrating, but we need them all the same. The problem is they may start equating AOL and Linux. Its bad enough equating the web with the net, Red Hat with Linux... but AOL with Linux??? That could be a problem. AOL, if they release a Linux distro, may cripple many of the advantages of Linux. Killing the license advantages would be difficult to impossible, but their distro will probably make installing another ISP difficult to impossible, make AOL the default player and editor for everything... I don't like that. AOL 7.0 has a media player that sets itself as defauly. I put a CD in my moms pc, AOL loaded.

If AOL does buy red hat, and leaves red hat more or less alone to develop linux, and only uses linux itself to build devices like webpads and such it shouldn't be a problem. And if AOL takes the opportunity to create an AOL for Linux, that could get us more users, and an opportunity to enlighten literally MILLIONS of sheep who stick with windows just cause of AOL.

Overall, I'm neutral... I can see this helping and hurting the Linux world.

Look what they did to iPlanet

[Ars-Fartsica]

Its obvious that AOL/TW has no idea how to do enterprise computing, and for all of the tough talk about building an "AOL OS", they still rely on Microsoft for a great deal of their infrastructure.

If this happens, RH will simply get borged into a increasingly complicated conglomerate with no clear cohesive mission and declining financials.

Re:Look what they did to iPlanet

[Jay L]

What the heck are you talking about?!

iPlanet had VERY little to do with the AOL you hate - it was Netscape people and Sun people selling Netscape and Sun software bundles.

Very LITTLE of AOL's infrastructure runs on Microsoft. The vast majority runs on either UNIX or on Tandem fault-tolerant minis. When I left last year, some folks were beginning to play with LINUX now that it was becoming more reliable. Only one thing I can think of runs on NT.

The only "AOL infrastructure" that relies on Microsoft is the word-processing infrastructure.

Jay, the ex-Mail Guy

Be?

[jso888]

Kind of makes you wonder if AOL considered purchasing Be instead. It certainly would have been a cheaper buy.

It also would give them a more user friendly operating system with a familiar, functioning, and coherent/unified WIMP interface (yes, Linux with KDE or Gnome is IMHO still not ready for the average user's desktop).

And finally, it would give them an OS that is certainly cutting edge multimedia-wise.

Julian

Re:Be?

[discogravy]

But Be isn't nearly as complete as the various Linux distros. There was that article comparing Be to OSX a while ago, and one of the first things Scott Hacker said in it was Be was missing some pretty important pieces (e.g. a good SOLID browser like konq or mozilla,) which would have taken quite a while for AOL to fund.

the only really good thing about a Be/AOL tie-in is that Be can be started from the desktop, so you don't have to reformat/repartition your harddrive; can you imagine the nightmare of 100 million AOL users calling your tech support and asking "where's my windows pictures? I can't get back in windows!?! why did all my stuff on the harddrive go away? what's this linux thing?"

the only way AOL could reasonably hold linux over the head of microsoft would if they got some kind of linux/AOL client that didn't require a repartition/brand new install. I think they could take on MS if MS shut them out completely, but they'd lose lots of customers to MS if the choice came down to choosing between AOL and MS.

About time...

[xonker]

It's about time (sorry, pardon the pun...) that AOL figured out they need to back the competetion to Windows.

They half-assed it with a net device based on Linux with Gateway, but never pushed it.

Let's face it, AOL's customers are the kind of people who need a net appliance, not a Windows PC. They buy the Linux company with the most name recognition, and a solid embedded strategy and database play, and start whipping out AOLinux appliances that have Star Office, MP3 player, instant messenging, and a host of other goodies -- but they don't have to kiss Bill's ass anymore to get on the desktop.

Sure, they don't have to buy Red Hat to get Linux, but they can get a lot of expertise that way -- and I'm sure Red Hat is more than happy to talk to possible buyers.

I wish Earthlink and the other big ISPs would wake up and realize that M$ is NOT their friend.

AOL knows that the code isn't what they need to make money on -- it's a consistent monthly service -- and they can get the average person to pay $24.95 (or whatever) a month for an appliance that is self-updating (just like their client is now. Annoying, but it was one of the first examples of self-updating software...) and they have the infrastructure to make it work.

As much as the AOL-Time-Warner behemoth worries me as a media outlet (way too many media outlets under one roof) it could be the best hope for knocking Microsoft down a peg or two.

An AOLinux won't supplant Windows, but it'd sure as hell beef up the percentage to make it more even.

Redefining 'Dumb Terminal'

[long_john_stewart_mi]

"... a rival operating system that works exclusively with the media giant's own Internet service provider, its Web browser or proprietary content."

Now that's what I call a dumb terminal. =)

It's a little bit funny...

[Kaellenn]

I'm not entirely sure my opinion on this matter.

On the one hand, this could provide a huge step in mass-deployment of the Linux operating system among home computers. AOL is the largest ISP in the world, and their support and distribution of Linux would undoubtedly give credibility and power in the desktop market to Linux machines. I think many slashdot readers can agree that this is a good thing.

However, if this happens, are we not trading one monopoly for another? Microsoft is trying to corner the entire market with their .NET initiative. If they are successful, they will control nearly 100% of business online. It is definitely a scary concept. But are we to trust AOL/Time Warner on this issue any further simply because they deploy their system using Linux?

Either way, both companies are currently in very precarious positions. Growing their market share has become nearly impossible, so they have to set their sites on total control of the online market. It seems that both companies have grown to plateaus that leaves each of them with only two choices: down based on distrust of their software; or, they make the leap from their current plateau into the heavens, where they reign as the God of the "new world order" of online home PC's.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Be Afraid...

[davmoo]

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.

Yeah, and look what AOL did with Netscape. Too little, too late. To paraphrase a Robin Williams line, if its being done right anywhere in the online world, its NOT being done by AOL. Any Linux supporter with even a tenth of a brain does not see this article as good news.

Re:Be Afraid...

[WildBeast]

Besides, RedHat is more of a server distribution. I believe that AOL should've bought Corel Linux or maybe Mandrake.

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.

Re:Finally a real legal test for the GPL?

[reaper20]

I don't think they would risk violating the GPL, considering how vocal the fallout of that would be.

Though, a closed source desktop running on the GPL stuff would be a reasonably good guess, assuming the rumor is true to begin with.

Re:Finally a real legal test for the GPL?

[Courageous]

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?

No. If they made the GPL go away, they'd be convicting themselves of willful copyright violation. Nothing but the GPL gives them the right to use the source. Why would they want to do away with the one thing that gives them that right? That would be stupid.

C//

Re:Finally a real legal test for the GPL?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

What you're not considering here is that Netscape was already well down the toilet when AOL bought them. That Mozilla/Netscape survive at all is due to the fact AOL has plenty of money to squander on unprofitable hare-brained projects that might pay off some day. In contrast, RedHat is a small company on the rise, and with a push and an infusion of cash from AOL, this could be a real shot in the arm.

Consider, even if RedHat goes down the toilet as a geek distribution, what is left over still will receive the residual benefits. Obviously, Linux support would become a hell of a lot higher priority for hardware/software vendors. Even if they targeted a proprietary AOL Linux, the rest of us can still benefit. Hell, we get Windows applications to run on Linux, we get Winmodems to run under Linux. In comparison, getting something that runs on a wierd version of Linux to run on a standard distro should be a snap.

Re:Finally a real legal test for the GPL?

[Courageous]

I think the larger strategy here may be to use Linux in network devices like set-top boxes, etc.

Could be you're right. When I first heard that Microsoft was planning to use the Xbox not only as a game set but also as a Tivo-style playback unit, I began to see Microsoft's vision. A "total entertainment device" has huge sales potential. Consider: how expensive are a Tivo, a Digital Cable box, a DVD player, and a game set, when all purchased separately? Obviously, the answer is "a lot". A single digital fun device has a lot sales potential indeed.

It's vaguely alarming, really. If Microsoft put together something like that ahead of everyone else, they're all but assured market dominance.

C//

Buridan's Ass

[Dr. Spork]

I remember some ancient Greek philosophers thought that if you put a donkey exactly between a bucket of water and a bail of hay, it will be paralyzed there and die, because it wants both of those things but can't decide which one to go to.

I'm reminded of this because this will be the situation for many AOL asses if AOL decides to be a Linux-only ISP. The asses would have to make the heartbraking decision about whom they love more, AOL or MS. Some might choose AOL, if RedHat is reborn AOL'led down by a few notches.... maybe. You might think this is the only way to draw people from Microsoft, but I actually doubt it would work. M$ has enough $ to run a huge M$N advertizing blitz right about when AOL becomes Linux-mandatory (offer it free for 6 months to people switching from AOL, a "free" OS upgrade, etc.) I'm almost certain if AOL'lers are forced to choose, they will join MSN instead of ditching Windows.

Tech Support

[istartedi]

Customer: I can't connect.

Tech: What's your operating system?

Customer: AOL.

Tech: (trying not to laugh) No sir, that's your browser. I need to know what comes up when you turn on your computer.

Customer: I told you. AOL.

Tech: Maybe AOL is in your startup folder. What comes up before AOL?

Customer: It's the first thing that comes up.

Manager: Can you put the customer on hold?

Tech: Can you hold please?

Customer: OK.

Tech: Sorry this is taking so long. I've got a real idiot. Thinks his OS is AOL.

Manager: Didn't you get the memo?

Tech: What memo?

Tech 2: Hey did you see that guy go postal in cubicle 6?

Tech 3: No. By the way, there's some kind of memo. Have you read it?

Tech 2: Nah. I was gonna wait until break...

Re:Tech Support

[mini me]

Maybe that's why AOL wants to useLinux, for tech support reasons.

Customer: I'm having trouble doing X...

Tech: Just a minute:
ssh client.aol.com
~# `fix problem X`
~# exit

Tech: That should do it. Thank you for using AOL.

Oh my God

[twilight30]

This scares me. Yes, it would be good for the mainstream, if they bought into it.

However, I think this would be disastrous for the Linux community at large.

Part of the cachet of using a Red Hat distribution amongst the fringes of 'our little group' comes from its perceived independence -- I know it has plenty of investment from other computing companies, but it's a whole new ball of wax to consider the media giants of today.

Ultimately, it is this part I dislike the most about the rumour. I understand that Linux going mainstream means a move towards some form of meme shift. What I am worried about is the perception will be when America's biggest Linux firm becomes part of that media machine. Do we really need to have a Linux vendor in the grip of a media company?

On the other hand, this could represent AOL's desire to pull an OS X shift in the minds of x86 computer users. It's a flawed idea, not least because they have no 'sophisticated' computing experience to draw from, but an interesting one.

Unfortunately, the thought of it makes me quite ill.

Re:Oh my God

[Anonymous DWord]

I don't see the problem. Don't like it? Don't run it. It's a hell of a lot easier to port apps from RedHAOL to Slack than from Windows to anything.

Re:Oh my God

[CatherineCornelius]

What I am worried about is the perception will be when America's biggest Linux firm becomes part of that media machine.

There are plenty of distributions around that are every bit as good as Red Hat, and anything that Red Hat does to the system _still_ comes under the GPL.

AOL has a good record of treating with open source--look at the really excellent AOLServer, and Netscape, both thriving under GPL on multiple platforms with AOL Time-Warner's sponsorship.

Re:Oh my God

[dreamchaser]

Ah, I see. Things are fine as long as Linux remains a niche product run mostly by the computer savvy. Heaven forbid a major corporation buy a distro and make it easily available to millions of users. Then it wouldn't be as cool or elitist to run Linux. I think that's your real issue here.

What a knee jerk reaction to what ultimately might be the best thing that could happen to Linux.

This COULD be a good thing

[nate.sammons]

Think of this: AOL is tons of money. They have tens of millions of people sending them $19.95 a month, and that adds up really quickly.

They could easily afford to dump all kinds of money into making Linux a great desktop OS. What about some kind of "AOL station" for home users that's a cheap PC with AOL/RedHat installed? Could be good for spreading Linux to the masses.

-nate

What would we do...

[wirefarm]

What if they decided to buy OSDN?
Heh heh...

Re:What would we do...

[Anonymous DWord]

Maybe they'd pump 100 million bucks into writing a spellchecker for Taco.

Re:What would we do...

[Roblimo]

I know Gary, the guy who runs AOL news, and they leave him totally, completely alone. He says upper management has never, not once, tried to push coverage in any particular direction or stop him from running stories that were anti-AOL.

But I doubt that AOL would want to buy OSDN. Their mentality is "buy the market leader (in whatever field)." They'd be more likely to go after C|Net if they wanted to get into tech-specific news. OSDN is tiny compared to the now-combined C|Net/ZDNet empire.

This "buy the market leader" mentality is why you're reading about AOL (maybe thinking about) buying Red Hat rather than Mandrake or Redmond Linux or any other Linux distribution publisher, BTW.

Sure, AOL/TW is greedy, grasping, evil etc., but having a company as greedy/grasping as Microsoft *competing* directly with Microsoft's graspingness means at least a slight cut in the overall greediness either company would be able to display. Consumers would win from the competition.

The rest of us would just need to make sure we weren't anyplace these dueling dinosaurs could fall on us. We'd have to be mammals; small, lithe and adaptable by comparison...

- Robin

Re:What would we do...

[wirefarm]

I agree that it would be a longshot that they'd be interested, but not totally impossible; they bought Nullsoft/Winamp, who, though the market leader in Windows MP3 players, seems to have a business plan of "Make great software and give it away for free forever."
But by buying them, they gained a bit of credibility - they did that by *not* branding it as an AOL property. Same for Netscape, though I think their aspirations on that end were too grand and a bit too late, though we *did* at least get a pretty good Mozilla somehow from the deal.
Their long-term wins do seem to be from leaving things alone - I hope they continue. For all of their bad reputation, they do seem to stay away from influencing their content, apart from keeping it a bit 'family friendly' in that it is unbiased, inoffensive and unracist. (Apart from the extensive Usenet groups that they carry, that is...)
If they *did* buy RedHat, they'd probably want to buy some credibility with the community as well - offer something back, in a way. Picking up Slashdot/OSDN just to be their "Silent Rich Uncle" could help them in that aim. They fully understand their image, I think. I worked there on a contract a while back and I know that their staff are good people doing a good job.
For a huge percentage of the US, AOL and the Internet are synonymous - in much the same way that for a lot of people, RedHat and Linux are synonymous - They understand that dynamic and in a way, cultivate that feeling. The *want* to be The Internet for their users and the just might want to be their operating system as well. To do that, it wouldn't hurt to have a few respected people say "well, they *do* host Slashdot on their servers..."
Personally, I'd like to see RedHat get picked up and anything that will help them survive would be a good thing.
Cheers -
Jim in Tokyo,
(formerly down the road from you in Cheverly...)

Mandrake would be a better choice

[Woko]

RedHat is doing a great job concentrating on the corporate market, releasing stable, tested, supported distributions and getting third party vendors to support Linux.

It would be a great loss to have those resources "focus shift" to an unknown market with little to recommend it apart from being bankrolled by AOL/TW until they get bored of this whole linux thing.

Mandrake makes much better sense, as both companies are have the same aims, but with different technologies.

Re:Mandrake would be a better choice

[WildBeast]

I agree. Besides, RedHat is more of a server distribution. Mandrake would've been a better choice.

Or their TCP/IP stack

[twilight30]

...which is supposedly not compatible with anything else out there?

Ugh.

Next Steps for AOL?

[martyb]

So, Microsoft starts off with an OS, and then moves on to development tools/languages, application suites (office), a browser, and then internet-enabling apps.

AOL started off as a browser, moved into other internet-enabled apps (Netscape, ICQ, etc.), and now Linux (an OS).

As these behemoths try to grow ever larger, their markets will overlap more and more. What's next for AOL? My guess: a move into the application suites market.

Well, that, and now they'll be sending out lots of free Linux CDs in the mail! Seriously! That would put a real thorn in Microsoft's side, and they'll get their revenue by selling access to the on-line updates. They've already shown they can make money giving away trial AOL CDs; the additional cost of shipping RedHat CDs is relatively small.

Why would AOL buy Red Hat though?

[ahfoo]

If AOL wants a Linux distro why don't they just make their own?
Just a few boxes down we see the Sorcerer distro being discussed. It's not as though there aren't already scores of distros to choose from.
AOL could make a proprietary download system that only worked with an AOL account. That would seem more AOLish than teaming up with Red Hat which provides you with plenty of net access alternatives.
After all, AOL has been all about limiting the broader potential of the Internet and charging more money for less real net access and in exchange offering lots of useless cluttery crap. It's a ridiculous premise, but they pulled it off so far. Why would they suddenly get cozy with a distro that makes their core business irrelevant?
Of course they could make a version of Red Hat that only worked with an AOL account, but that would certainly be a big change for Red Hat. They'd probably have a hard time getting the existing user base on board with that kind of strategy.
I don't know though, like most /.ers, I never understood how in the world AOL ever became so widespread and probably never will.

Re:Why would AOL buy Red Hat though?

[ocelotbob]

If AOL wants a Linux distro why don't they just make their own?

Probably because Redhat has a huge talent base. If you're going to enter a new market, wouldn't you want some talent, like Alan Cox, working for you? Yes, there are scores of distros out there, but only a few with people high up in the Linux chain of power. Besides, Redhat is The Name in Linux; they'd be able to better negotiate with third parties if they had Redhat in their posession.

After all, AOL has been all about limiting the broader potential of the Internet and charging more money for less real net access and in exchange offering lots of useless cluttery crap. It's a ridiculous premise, but they pulled it off so far. Why would they suddenly get cozy with a distro that makes their core business irrelevant?

I'd say that it's more giving the average person what they want. Face it, having a different program for every internet function is great for techies, but it's too complicated for the average person. Besides, I'd say having an OS they can control in its entirety is a plus for AOL - they can control exactly where it's going, and how to program for it, instead of having to twostep with the other 800 pound gorilla.

Also, for the average person, the internet is moving away from being a computer thing, and more towards being part of the home entertainment system, integrated into the TV and/or cable box. AOL is no dummy, they know that Microsoft is going to go in that market with both guns blazing trying to push a Windows/MSN service on these boxes, and shove AOL right out of the market. Trust me, AOL's going to need an OS if they're going to stay alive in the changing market.

I don't know though, like most /.ers, I never understood how in the world AOL ever became so widespread and probably never will.

Just like Microsoft, they weren't the best solution, they just happened to be in the right place at the right time. Yeah. they're not the best, but they're good enough for most people. Remember the 85% rule here. As long as it's good enough for 85% of a market, you're pretty much set. The other 15% is marginalized enough that it would be a waste of resources to attempt to take it over. AOL's ust not concerned about the technically inclined segment of the market.

My prediction...

[erroneus]

AOL is not about to create AOL client software for Linux... well, they will, but their main project will likely not be an AOL client, but an AOL Appliance based on Linux.

Their primary user base is VERY happy with Windows. (They are too stupid to know any better) These same users wouldn't come near a PC running anything BUT Windows... maybe Mac but I kinda doubt that is the majority case. If, however, AOL linked up with, oh... say, Compaq and used their IA-1 machine to host a Linux-based dedicated Internet Appliance, their currect success model becomes even more successful.

A $100 device running a locked-up version of Linux? What could be better or cheaper? And of course, RedHat just happens to be among the most profitable Linux distros around anyway... not like it's a huge risk to AOL/TW.

I cast my vote for embedded Linux for an AOL internet appliance. It's a plan that makes more sense than anything else.

AOL Users Won't Switch to Linux

[guttentag]

AOL can put the Red Hat installer on the millions of AOL disks it dumps on the country (I got two today, by the way), but AOL users aren't going to install it:

• "Why can't I play my games?"
• "Why can't I use MSN Explorer?"
• "I'm not letting my kids use Wine!!!"
• "Are you sure my cup holder is supported?"

The masses aren't going to install AOL themselves. If they ever switch to Linux, it will have to come installed on their machines.

Not exactly a rumor mill

[ahde]

but, given the number of inaccuracies and misleading statements in the article, it doesn't sound very knowledgable.

It claims:

The longtime competitors have fought over an array of rival consumer technologies lately, including online subscription services, instant-messaging systems and Web-based video and audio players.

Implying that AOL has its own video and audio players (winamp may be owned by AOL, but it has never been a point of dispute; and Real Audio is not an AOL product)

AOL Time Warner could use the deal to couple its America Online software, the market leader with more than 33 million Internet subscribers, with Red Hat's operating-system technology, sources said.

Nevermind that not a single one of those users uses "Red Hat's" operating system, and few would be likely to switch.

the AOL software could be configured to override Windows and launch a version of Red Hat's Linux operating system

Though technically possible, this would be illegal, and marketing suicide. Wipe your hard drive clean with new AOL 2.4.11!

An even graver challenge to Microsoft would be for AOL Time Warner to develop a rival operating system that works exclusively with the media giant's own Internet service provider, its Web browser or proprietary content

Pure speculation. But, of course, if it were based on Linux, it would be easy to circumvent, unless vi becomes an anti-circumvention device under the DMCA.

AOL Time Warner has already tried to counteract Microsoft on other fronts, including rebuilding its Netscape Web browser business to better compete against Microsoft's dominant Internet Explorer.

Actually, AOL has all but killed Netscape.

Netscape technology has been incorporated into a Gateway Inc. tabletop Internet terminal and Sony Corp.'s PlayStation 2 video-game console.

Does Netscape run on PS2? I don't know.

Linux also runs the Sony product.

If they had said "Linux also may run on the Sony product" it would be true, but still misleading.

thanks to an initiative by a programmer named Linus Torvalds who organized volunteers to write the original source code

This doesn't give Linus enough credit, or the "volunteers" who still write the source code.

Linux has yet to be adopted widely by consumers, largely because it requires some technical proficiency to install.

Actually, this is a common misconception, but installation, these days, is the easiest part of using Linux. Administration can still be a bear, though, to newcomers.

Red Hat has claimed such big clients as Amazon.com Inc. and International Business Machines Corp.

I don't even know what this statement is trying to claim.

Re:Not exactly a rumor mill

[ahde]

I didn't mean they killed it on purpose. Even if it was only money (that's all it'd take for me) it was definitely a setback. Granted, bundling IE has done its share too but people wouldn't buy Microsoft if they weren't angry already.

Suggestion for AOL/Time Warner: FREE YOUR CONTENT

[argoff]

FREE YOUR CONTENT!!!!

Seriously, we would all be better off, and AOL would benefit greatly beging a bonified member of the "hardware faction" rather than the "content faction". It would almost certainly put them up there with ATT and IBM. It may even make it so that geeks would like AOL, and promote open standards thru AOL? (Something I never thought I would concieve of in my lifetime, but what can you say - I never thought I would see the fall of communisim either)

Stop Spreading FUD...

[Carnage4Life]

Netscape 4's perhaps, but with regard to IE 6 vs. Mozilla 0.9.8 (effectively Netscape 6.3; 0.9.8 is due to be released in a week), I have to hand this round to Mozilla. Mozilla starts faster than IE, supports more CSS, supports XHTML (as opposed to IE just bailing and dumping the XML tree),

My webpage is Fully Compliant XHTML 1.0 Transitional and renders better in IE 6.0 than in Mozilla (as text and images not this "dumping the XML tree that you speak of). Mozilla is a great browser but when I see people spreading lies in an effort to spread its usage I feel disgusted.

Let the browser stand on its own merits instead of spreading FUD to promote it. This sullies the name of Mozilla and all that work on it.

Re:Stop Spreading FUD...

[CondeZer0]

Who is spreading FUD here??

As someone else have already pointed, may be you should try to validate your CSS.

And "Fully Compliant XHTML 1.0 Transitional", means nothing,
you aren't supposed to make new pages using Transitional,
try to make it compliant with XHTML 1.0 Strict...

Anybody that knows a bit about CSS and HTML will tell you how much better
support for them Mozilla have.

Does IE already support CSS1?
I remember when some one from MS said that they would never support
100% CSS1, because "no body really want it", that one was funny..
And how much of CSS2 do they support?

:after, :before pseudo classes and "content" attribute?
No

All the table formating options?
No

etc..

I have a big respect for you, I have read some very interesting comments written by you,
but I think you should check your facts better before spreading this kind of FUD, you may
prefer IE, but it's an accepted fact that the standards support in Mozilla is very superior
to IE. (and I don't mean that Mozilla is perfect, I should know, I helped to run hundreds
of CSS test in Mozilla a while a go)

Best regards

\\Uriel

P.S.: Please, let me know when IE is ported to
FreeBSD so I can look at your page, or may be you will fix it first?

Re:Perhaps it's time to give Netscape/Mozilla anot

[Anonymous DWord]

Oho, so you're the guy that coded the Olympics site!

Crush Microsoft!

[rice_burners_suck]

This is what should happen. AOL should enter into some kind of agreement with Apple, SGI, Palm, Sun, a bunch of audio and video companies, and whatever remaining large ISPs there happen to still exist.

These companies would put together an army of programmers who would pick out the best bits of Mac OS X, Solaris, IRIX, BeOS (which Palm just acquired), Linux, the BSDs, and all the free embedded OSs out there. They would put together a bulletproof operating system that supports every standard out there and runs on just about any kind of hardware. This would be optimized for lightning fast performance and would have dazzling graphics and sound. Bundle with that a browser that supports all the standards, an office suite more complete than Microsoft's ever was, audio, video and graphics software capable of professional results, and a ton of games.

After doing this, AOL and the rest of the ISPs would remove their icons from Windows and heavily market the new software and crush Microsoft! Microsoft will go out of business within 6 months and everyone in the world will live happily ever after.

It'll never happen. Oh well.

Re:Crush Microsoft!

[WildBeast]

oh so instead of having a mini-Evil company like MS controlling 90% of the desktop, we'll have Hell on earth.

You've probably never been an AOL customer. Dare to cancel your account and you'll receive plenty of calls and a whole bunch of CD's by mail. Sun? Apple? Have you lost your mind?

unix shell gets banner-ads.

[SkewlD00d]

unix shell gets banner-ads, film at 11. =)

Geeks wouldn't be the target

[wirefarm]

Wouldn't it be great to get stuff like the latest RPMs on those free AOL CDs?
What about free security updates for AOL members - goodbye CodeRed-style nuisances... (Something like Apt-get on connect...)

If they can discourage members from running as root, they'll virtually put an end to a lot of the nonsense that we've had to put up with from email trojans, and VB Script crap.
Yes, they'd probably not let people run a lot of services on the network - telnet, smtp, etc, but isn't that a Good Thing for end users as a group?

Plus, wouldn't it be nice to be able to SSH to your mom's/uncle's/friend's machine to fix something, rather than have them drag it out at Thanksgiving?

Just some thoughts...
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo

Stallman?!

[rice_burners_suck]

Richard Stallman will go on a shooting rampage when he hears about this:

It's not GNU/Linux anymore! It's AOL /Linux!

Re:Stallman?!

[WildBeast]

haha I can only imagine his reaction when he reads that article. He'll probably have a hardcore match with his computer, he'll take the keyboard and slam it onto that monitor.

Re:Stallman?!

[ajs]

Or is that GNU/AOL?

Re:Stallman?!

[curunir]

maybe...(A)OL (O)wned (L)inux?

class action suite in 2005

[jon_c]

So whats the chances of the DoJ and MS filling a anti trust suite against AOL for using their monolopy in the internet market (Time Warner Cable, AOL Online) to force users to use their OS (a dumbed down Redhat)

-Jon

Wall Street -- Was The Fix In?

[istartedi]

Take a look at this. In particular, look at the chart on the right, and this post

So, assuming that this large trade really did happen, it looks like something that ought to be investigated.

Might be good

[RainbowSix]

If AOL makes Red Hat big, then hardware and software people won't be able to ignore linux, and while the general sentiment will be to avoid the "sell outs" linux as a whole might benefit

Two words: Copy protection

[Cerlyn]

Let's be realistic here. Linux zealots constantly state that no one can implement copy protection on Linux because anyone can work around it. Since programs can not easily distinguish sockets to other programs from sockets to sound cards or video cards (although I suspect to some extent one can) anything is theoretically copyable, right?

The biggest recognized Linux brand name known to the public-at-large is Red Hat. If AOL was able to convince Red Hat to incorporate a binary-only security system into their distribution, then Linux-loving people could not easily cry that their favorite operating system could not support digital rights management.

One of the easiest ways to "convince" someone to do something is to be their boss. Note that Winamp (another AOL acquisition) already supports multiple secure formats, and bypasses insecure output/effects plugins as appropriate.

No, I am not trolling. This message was written using a Linux box. Trademarks used in this message belong to their holders; yada yada yada, etc.

Re:Sure they are!

[ocbwilg]

Yeah! Then we'd all be able to hate AOL/TW *AND* Microsoft. Oh wait a minute, we already do.

As you were.

Seriously though, I think that AOL/TW would be just as bad pimping a Linux distro as MS is pimping Windows. The only difference is that mainstream consumers would be choosing the lesser of 2 evils.

We'll still have our little corner of the universe, and still nobody will care but us.

Re:I can see it now

[Anonymous DWord]

I'm not sure releasing the source in this case would do anything to their business interests. The type of person that gets AOL is looking for a certain type of experience, which AOL has pretty much dominated. Basically what their distribution would be is a bunch of programs that facilitate connecting to the AOL network, along with Abiword or something that you can get anyway. Nobody else has the infrastructure to really compete with that, which is why I don't think they'd worry about it.

missing the point here...

[Artifex]

Okay. So far I haven't seen this view addressed:

It's quite possible that AOL wants to make a thin client/small cheap desktop a la the nifty web-browser-based PC people are finding over at Fry's. AOL has a browser, already, remember? Just not the underlying code to run it on. They may have no plans to "fight Microsoft" (they need to go buy some office suite from Gobe or someone in order to do that), they may just want to embed something they can control into grandma's new set-top AOL box.

Even if they did do this in order to square off against Microsoft, why is everyone screaming that Linux will die as a result? Okay, admittedly Netscape is now even more grossy bloated and useless than before they got bought, but everyone is missing one important difference: Red Hat is not synonymous with Linux! Linux was around before Red Hat, and there are other commercial distros around (compare Suse market share in Europe to Red Hat). If anything, this will stop people being so Red-Hat centric. Besides, if Red Hat gets bought out, then I'll bet at least some of the open source programmers on staff will rake in some big bucks for staying, etc. Sounds like a great thing to point out to our kids... sometimes, the good geeks do win. =)

One more thing... I'm sorry, wasn't this what you wanted? If it wasn't AOL, you'd be happy. Unless, of course, it was Microsoft. =)

EXCEPT on microsoft.com - try this at home!

[simetra]

Try this for yourself:

Fire up Netscape. I've done this with 6.2.

Go to support.microsoft.com. Pick a product, type in something meaningful, search. No results.

Close Netscape, open IE, do exactly the same thing. Results. (I just tried again, using Access 97 as the product, "filter query" as the search string).

I have done nothing to the settings of Netscape that would cause this. This happens on my Win2K machine at work, and my Win98 machine at home. I haven't tried it in Linux, because when I'm using Linux I have little need for any MS info...

MS. What a bunch of wankers!

Re:EXCEPT on microsoft.com - try this at home!

[Reziac]

Okay, I'll bite.. by *preference* I use Netscape 3.04 with images and javascript off. (And I wish NS6.x or Mozilla would offer a NS3 interface option, it is SO much more efficient in everyday use, especially on my shit 26k connexion..)

[goes to support.microsoft.com, types in "windows millennium 64k gdi heap"]

I get a ton of results -- absolutely none of them even remotely relevant!

Re:AOL CD's

[farrellj]

Better (or maybe worse), they will market Linux the same way...mail millions of copies of Linux free to homes around North America!

ttyl
Farrell

You've got Linux!

[Erris]

I don't see the problems. You will still be able to modify things to suit you. AOL users will get what they want. Red Hat will be assured survival under the world's largest ISP. Microsoft will improve or die.

There is no way for AOL to destroy the modular design of Linux/GNU software. To do so, they would have to custom modify and maintain far too many packages. Why would they go to such effort and cost? The average AOL user never ever bothers to venture furthers that far, so "digital rights management" and advert cramming will be maintained by default, just like they are on M$ platforms today. AOL useres actually use AOL's client and browser there and they will under Linux. You will still be able to replace bogus packages and use the ones you want.

What this is going to be, is AOL being able to send out a shiny new CD when M$ breaks their customer's machines. The customer can sit happy knowing that they won't have to buy a new computer and that they can get the things they expect from AOL. My mom is a good example. She has used her computers for three application and only three applications. She has used AOL, Word Perfect, and Quicken. I'm not sure she uses Quicken any more. She uses AOL's instant messenger and email. The rest of her computer means nothing to her, and could be running anything. When ME meets it's two year obsolescence and her flaming nice PIII laptop starts spitting chunks, I hope AOL sends her a nice Red Hat CD. The other stuff, like Netscape, Electric Eyes, Gimp .... might have her actually use her machine some more and definatly enjoy it more. If AOL bought Correl, she would be very happy indeed.

This could kill Microsoft. It's one thing for my mom to have some friends and her son using Linux, it's another thing when she gets it, it works and does everything she wants it to. AOL has 100 million clients, think of the change in perception the world will have if just 1% revive their dead machines this way instead of buying a new $1,000 computer. AOL users, the scorn of M$ elitist derision having computers that work and cost less. Supposedly the most clueless computer population on earth suddenly having tools and stability M$ loosers pay big money for but never recieve. Surely word of mouth will sweep the world, and M$'s already weakened position with hardware makers will collapse.

Reasonable hardware standards may yet see light of day. Without M$ to hord up ever changing API's and that magic flag on the box, we may see hardware maintains stable open interfaces. I am trully filled with hope today. This is great news.

Re:You've got Linux!

[Tony-A]

I can see it now.
The CDs in the mail install AOLinux.

Re:You've got Linux!

[Dr. Spork]

If AOL bought Correl [sic], she would be very happy indeed

You know, now that you mention it, I bet you they will. They appear to be building a stable of runner-ups. Maybe once they have the second-best product in every area where MS leads the market, they will release them all in one big lump (and we'll probably have AOL DVDs as coasters).

But seriously, if AOL can credibly threaten MS that it might defect form Windows, there has to be an office program that AOL would feel comfortable transitioning its customers to. Buying Corel is one option, another would be to contribute to OpenOffice to get it ready for AOLers. The latter would be pretty good news...

Good or bad?

[niola]

Damn it, I just finally got myself comfortable with RH 7.2 too :)

Well, seriously, when they first bought Netscape it scared the shit out of many people. I remember the shit I heard back then, "It is the end of the web." Blah, blah, blah.

But do we not now have Mozilla? I have to say, they kept up their end of the bargain and left it all open source and now we have possibly the best browser yet. With 0.9.8 approaching it seems weird to look back at the very early betas. It has come so far so fast.

Perhaps AOL Time Warner will provide the Linux community the resources it could use to further grow and mature. It would be like Mozilla and Netscape 6 where one is good for those of us who like solid software without all the other shit and Netscape 6 with all the consumer BS. I could see a more user-friendly dumbed down Linux distro for consumers, while the existing RedHat distro would be wide open for the rest of us.

Then again, god only knows. There's always Debian :)

--Jon

Dammit, I hate having to change my viewpoint...

[boopus]

AOL used to be just as evil as microsoft, with no redeeming features. If they actualy take on microsoft and go anywhere with it, I might forgive them for their sins. That's a big IF, though, as so far they've built up a big armada and havn't let it sail. Netscape and winamp could take over the desktop market and leave Microsoft with MS Office, the one product they seem to actualy be able to make. So when does the armda set sail for Redmond?

I can see it now

[A_Non_Moose]

1) Red hat AOL user (aka RHAOL...pronounced RAH-OOL) fires up the AOL security check and hears "you got owned".

2) Just when you think it can't get any worse, they place ads on TV with Scooby Doo as the spokes 'toon saying "Red Rat Ray-roh-rel rits rumber run!'

3) The Red hat on the Redhat symbol gets down to the "chin level" to hide its shame.

4) A vulnerability in sendmail allows a script kiddie to parse all the email from AOL thru the "borkinator" script (inserts Swedish Chef comments into text)...oddly enough, no one notices for 2 years even when calling tech support and "this is (insert name of tech) how may I BORK! BORK! BORK! Help you".

5) World-wide several BSD and Slackware users are hospitalized for asphixiation from laughing so hard they could not breath for several minutes.

Just a few thoughts.

Dind't anyone tell AOL...

[Junta]

That you can download Redhat for free :) On a related note, most companies buy *licenses* for OSes, when AOL gets interested, they buy the *OS*.

More seriously this seems plain wrong. Not too long ago I was AOL free. Then they bought my cable company and with it my internet connection and a good deal of the channels I like to watch. And now they may buy up the company that produces my distro. Well, if things go ok, then I could always switch to another distro, hopefully. Of course, with a player like AOL in the Linux distro market, I could see trouble waiting to happen with efforts not only to control RedHat distribution, but other distributions as well.. Looking to make a redhat-derived distribution? May not be as easy (I know, the GPL should legally prevent this, but big corps seem to be able to pour enough money at legal problems to make them go away.)

It's crap to say AOL "let Nullsoft be..."

[Sleepy]

Why do people talk out their asses in regard to AOL's handling of subsidaries?

1) AOL was "embarrassed" when Nullsoft produced Gnutella, and forced them to stop. http://www.ecommercetimes.com/perl/story/2752.html

2) Nullsoft was interviewed somewhere (sorry no URL), and they complained that they WANTED to compete against Napster, and add download plugins to winamp, but AOL forbade it.

Sorry, that sounds like stifling innovation. AOL wants to be Microsoft, but office politics and infighting will just slow these companies down. Microsoft on the other hand has a clear cut mission... to become a world power.

I don't believe these rumors one bit. It's a lame rumor, and Red Hat is not in trouble (unlike Netscape).

It would make MUCH more sense for AOL to purchase Linux-Mandrake, or the Corel 2.0 assets (which I never used, but Corel 1.0 was seriously ahead of its time). Red Hat is a server OS, and their desktop marketshare is just a side-effect of their server success. Most Red Hat users have never TRIED another distro, and so could not tell you how RH is better or worse than another distro (they're not all the same!).

Re:It's crap to say AOL "let Nullsoft be..."

[ameoba]

Umm... How, exactly is it bad business to forbid your idealistic young underlings from starting a project that will get you into a massive legal battle?

Remember, Napster was started by some college kid with no corporate backing, and no legal department saying "Yeah, people will love it, but the RIAA will sue our asses into the ground".

Re:It's crap to say AOL "let Nullsoft be..."

[Sleepy]

>Why, then, would AOL buying RHAT be a good thing? Well, for one, money. Money is good, and more money to Linux means public awareness to OSS and Linux, it means support from more commercial hardware & software companies, it means more users and more software (open-source and commercial). And that's all good. And there's also the breaking-the-MS-monopoly thingie.

Ah yes... lets distort my post and turn it into a Strawman arguement. If you put on your thinking cap for a second, you might have been able to address the point.

The way Linux companies are run now is they *understand* the Community and how to give-and-take with it (except Caldera ;-). AOL shown no evidence they UNDERSTAND how this works. This is key.

If I may be so presumptious to summarize my understanding of "The Community", ONE of the goals is simply to produce the best software there is, with an open and free license. The fact that Linux *might* unseat Microsoft's is a side-effect.

That last point is important, because we're not looking for a new King to replace Microsoft. However AOL would take that new-monopoly chance in a *heartbeat*.

AOL/RH would still be limited by the GPL of course, but Red Hat employs a LOT of free software programmers, who could be put to other or slightly different tasks. We don't *need* Red Hat from the sense of GPL licensing and the freedom that gives us, but RH for better or worse is what (most) people think of when you mention Linux.

I think the Linux desktop is getting where we need it just fine (GNOME *or* KDE). If AOL wants to hurt Microsoft, then they can do it by providing AOL for Linux, SUPPORT IT, add in some *intelligent* auto-configuration, fund some winmodem driver support, and stay the hell out of our way!

Re:It's crap to say AOL "let Nullsoft be..."

[Sleepy]

I don't disagree with any of your statements above, except for one:

>wouldn't it be nice if we'd have a _legal_ linux DVD player

Oh, you mean a closed-source DVD player with built-in anti-fair-use controls? THAT, I think, is what many FEAR MOST as a result of an AOL move on Red Hat.

The above should not be construed as an anti-closed-source statement (I say use what's best for you), but I get *really* annoyed when a DVD track actually has the power to ignore the fast-forward button (for commercials and FBI Warnings). Not to mention that the highest laws in the land allow for "fair use" of copyrighted content, and this is something that is under attack.

Graceful degradation

[yerricde]

We support standards. The standard for browsing web pages is not Netscape, it's not W3XXX, it is IE(4,5,6).

Can you provide a reference to publicly available (even for a nominal fee) official documentation in the English language as to what constitutes a conforming implementation of such a standard? (In other words, where can I obtain docs about the IE DOM?)

We will degrade gracefully on the other platforms

In order to degrade gracefully, you will have to make all content reasonably accessible to all users. Frown on framesets and unnecessary ECMAScript. Frown on images without appropriate alt text. Frown on sites mostly made in Flash because the visually impaired cannot use Flash content, whereas they can use HTML through a screenreader or Braille display and a text-mode browser such as Lynx, Links, or w3m.

and freely distribute IE (free to distribute after all) to those poor users who don't have IE today.

IE for x86 architecture is part of Microsoft Windows. Where can I pick up my free copy of Windows? And how can I make sure that my copy of IE won't catch Son of Nimda from your server?

Re:Good and Bad. [OT]

[ryanvm]

AOL/TW isn't much better than MS after all, they cater to the lowest common denominator.

If you hate Microsoft because their products are for the "lowest common denominator", then you are hating them for the wrong reason.

My complaint with Microsoft is not that their products are inferior. Generally, after the 3rd or 4th version, they aren't.

The worst of Microsoft's problems can be attributed to one major flaw: If you're not paying your "Microsoft Tax", they aren't very happy with you.

Re:Nope but

[Waffle Iron]

Enable the users to upgrade.

Great news! You've got a version of IE that runs on Linux, so I can "upgrade". What's the URL?

Re:AOL just isn't the 'internet....

[ocbwilg]

I dunno about you, wouldn't you notice if after installing some software, your OS was different?

Even AOL users know better. They launched a class-action lawsuit against AOL when version 6.0 started whacking their other dialup networking connections. Can you imagine the furor over whacking their OS?

Coasters - In 3-CD and 6-CD sets!

[billstewart]

Red Hat already insists on using two CDs, and AOL wants one of their own. They may not be totally full, but the combination will probably include some bloatware, and an entertaining combination would also include StarOffice or a couple of CDs of Koffice, FooOffice, and BarOffice, and probably Quake or whatever the Killer Game Of The Month is by the time they ship.

Any chance they'll be able to do a smaller distribution and a smart enough installer to deal with underpowered hardware like many AOLers use? (e.g. 2GB disks, 32MB RAM, the machine you gave your kids when you upgraded, or the machine your Mom uses to IM her sister and send online greeting cards?) At least picking only one of KDE and Gnome, and getting a basic office package that works with it, and maybe doing a version that can mainly RUN from the CDROM, with a FAT file system for storage? That way, you replace your blue-triangle "AOL" icon with a blue-triangle "LILO" icon wearing a red hat....

What would that be?

[Erris]

f there's one thing they're good at it's preserving their monopoly and they'll do what it takes to keep AOL from switching to Linux.

What, pray tell, will M$ be able to offer AOL? Microsoft never ever held anything back. It's apparent that MicroSquish is trying to conquer all media on the PC with their goofey and inferior "standards". It's apparent that they are trying to move all PC users to the M$Notwork, with invasive advert cramming, spyware and general sleezyness for all. It's also apparent that they are trying to use their desktop share to force such bizare and awful protocalls as activeX on everyone. What will be left for anyone else in such a world? What can AOL do to help M$ achieve this, and what would they offer AOL for their complience? Will they offer to not break Netscape again? Right, who believes that one? M$ thinks it does not need AOL, and their corperate strategy makes no provisions for any other ISP but themselves.

How wrong they are. If any sizable portion of AOL users moved to Linux, M$ would be doomed. There are 100 million or so AOL users out there, almost all of them on M$ platforms. Every year, a substantial proportion of them feel forced to "upgrade" their computer due to M$ induced bit rot. What AOL can now do is offer a free OS that works to those people, who are going to throw the old computer away! Why would they not give it a try? Then swoosh, millions of Linux users are born. Did you hear that? It's the sound of M$'s PC share going to hell and all their power with it.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

I put the Coaster in my Coffee-Cup Holder, and...

[billstewart]

Customer: ... and now it wants me to recompile the kernel.

Tech: Sure, you start by uninstalling GCC 2.9.7 and reinstalling GCC 2.7, and be sure to get the right RPMs to support your sound card.

RHAT

[Waffle Iron]

Well, I bought some RHAT stock after it's huge drop on the theory that a brand name has value in the market and if people want support for Linux, they'll pay for a brand name. I figured it had some prospects for growth in the post-bubble era.

I'm not too happy about the prospect of it being absorbed and diluted into the AOL/TW borg. I don't see how that enormous corporation can grow to be a significant amount larger than its current size. If this happens, I guess I'll wait until the purchase at a premium price, then cash out.

Re:I put the Coaster in my Coffee-Cup Holder, and.

[Jacek Poplawski]

Customer: ... and now it wants me to recompile the kernel.

Tech: Are there any Aunts in your house?

Re:The End of the MS Monopoly

[Ayende Rahien]

*cough* Devices *cough*
*cough* Games *cough*
*cough* Applications *cough*
*cough* Integration *cough*

Devices are going to be a huge problem, are you going to tell me that an AOLer can solve a problem with his X server confilicting with his video card?
Yes, if there is a big push behind AOLinux, then it will improve the situation considerably, but not enough, and it takes just one show stopper to kill it.

Games & Applications with be another show stopper, if they can't run it on AOLinux, many will just use AOLinux as an application with an exceedingly long start time.
Games is obvious, I hope. Applications consist of anything beyond what a simple Office package provides you.
Believe it or not, but people, even non-hackers, use quite a bit of applications. And usually it's *never* the same set of application.
Yes, there are (probably) some equilent on Linux, but would they be able to find/install/use it?
Another thing to consider is a missing feature in one of the supplied applications. Some features you can live without, but some you just *got to have*, and this division is entirely personal.

Integration is another matter, it would require quite a bit of work to get all the applications that you want to look and act the same way in *all ways*.
You *don't* want to give the user 10 different applications that each behave in a different way.
They will get disgusted & frustrated, and finally quit.

Redhat is ALSO cygnus!

[statusbar]

Which means that the top GCC/G++ compiler gurus would be AOL employees. You never know, this could be a good thing...

--jeff

Re:The End of the MS Monopoly

[VAXman]

Um, don't you remember the Internet appliance which was a joint project between AOL, Gateway, and Transmeta? It was a complete and total flop.

Even if an 'Internet appliance' becomes a lucrative item (IMHO, it already missed the boat a year ot two ago), why would AOL be more effective than any other established hardware maker? They have no brand in the PC market, they have zero relationships with parts suppliers, and they have no experience at all in any hardware or manufacturing business.

This rocks; a little "confirmation", long...

[supabeast!]

AOL buying Red Hat would be so cool. IBM has already given Linux some serious credibility in the Business world; if AOL buys Linux, suddenly Linux gains credibility among millions of home users.

Everyone in the industry has already caught on that AOL no longer cares about pissing off Microsoft. XP doesn't come with AOL, Microsoft runs advertisements that insult AOL. MSN messenger (Attempts to.) compete with AIM, one of AOLs coolest marketing gimmicks. If .net and Hailstorm manage to take off, AOL's plan to stop using IE as the AOL browser could be seriously cramped. AOL is very afraid of Microsoft, and Microsoft knows it; at the same time, AOL is in a wonderful position to strike back: AOL has a brand that is almost as well recognized as Microsoft, yet unsullied by numerous mass media reports of security flaws and sleazy corporate dealings.

Promoting and distributing the OS would also be no big problem for AOL; it would just be another CD to add into the millions of free CD packs they mail out every month now. Adding a linux downloads area similar to freshmeat but for newbies would be a great promotion for their broadband efforts. A nice deal with a good OEM to sell AOL/Red Hat based PCs at a discounted rate could take this to a whole new level. If the antitrust suit ends with Microsoft having to stop OEMs from selling dual-boot systems, even better for AOL/Red Hat. A deal for AOL/Red Hat support of a few major video games (Easily done with advance planning and help from the great folks at Loki.) could push things, perhaps with Doom ]|[ or UT II hitting linux.

Personally I think that this story could be quite true. I have a few friends working 60+ hour weeks on some secret Red Hat related research and testing at AOL, and given that most of their servers run on HPUX or Solaris (And the associated hardware), it would not surprise me if this was a result of their work.

I am so hoping that this is not just a rumor. Should this come to pass, Microsoft will suddenly learn the true might of the Penguin, and little Billy Gates will have to hide behind Fester Ballmer as Microsoft faces the full fury of the free software hordes, spurred on by Steve Case.

Re:This rocks; a little "confirmation", long...

[Shanes]

..., and given that most of their servers run on HPUX or Solaris (And the associated hardware), it would not surprise me if this was a result of their work.

Couldn't it be that they want Red Hat (with their tech people) mainly for the servers then? It makes lots of sense to start using Linux on new servers as they expand. And later go all the way and kick out HPUX and Solaris completely.

Re:This rocks; a little "confirmation", long...

[ameoba]

Download.com already autodetects your OS from the browser info string, and sends you to an appropriate webzit. Mac, Windows and Linux.

Re:This rocks; a little "confirmation", long...

[Tony-A]

For their servers? Not likely. An exorbitant support contract would be cheaper and maybe better.
Virus/worm-proofing email and browser in an installation that the dumber users CAN install and set up. An automatic install that preserves user data while it wipes Microsoft Windows requires a lot of savvy and skill. Got a hosed system at home. If you reinstall from the vendor's recovery CD, you lose all your data. Install that AOLinux CD laying around and recover your data.

Re:Why Not?

[Melantha_Bacchae]

TgrMan wrote:

> AOL/Time-Warner already owns pretty much all sources of media so
> this could be a way for them to really compete with the leviathan that
> is Microsoft.

That's the problem: AOL/TW is a leviathan itself. I'm not certain whether it is as evil as Microsoft or not, but being a Mothra devotee, I have come to be wary of the greedy sharks known as "American film producers" (Mothra's most ancient foes). AOL/TW certainly does have shark genes in their conglomerate. It would do no good to be so worried about a tiger shark that one doesn't notice the great white sneaking up until it is too late.

Besides, I doubt that AOL is that interested in putting out AOL/TW/RH Linux as their exclusive platform, because Red Hat is not the only Microsoft competitor that AOL is making friendly overtures towards. AOL is releasing a client for OS X, and is now providing (under the Netscape name) the default portal for Macs. AOL has also been talking to Sony about AOL for the Playstation 2.

"The path of peace is yours to discover for eternity."
"Mosura", 1961

Linux also runs the Sony product

[Jimithing DMB]

Everybody who has posted this obviously didn't read it correctly. It is said soon after the author mentions an AOL product for Sony's PlayStation 2. Thus the sentence "Linux also runs the Sony product" means "Linux also runs AOL's Sony product" which I assume is factually correct seeing as how the product they are referring to is an AOL for the PS2 running Netscape under Linux.

So it seems AOL may actually have a method to its madness. It seems they are interested in buying up as many technologies as possible to drive their online subscribtion service.

People, this makes /so much/ business sense. AOL is in the business of getting repeated revenues. Every month they get $23+ from almost every subscriber. They offer a service that many computer users find usefull. Usefull enough that they are willing to part with over $20 a month for it while other ISPs tried to price compete and most are dead.

When AOL bought Netscape everybody groaned. JWZ left and everybody said good for him, fuck working for AOL. But AOL didn't care. They had no rush to get the new version of Netscape out. They didn't fall into the trap of trying to get as many people as possible to use their free (as in price) software like MS did with IE. No instead what they did is basically sat on it while they continued to make buckets of cash (did I mention revenue at over $20/month for almost every subscriber).

Now they've got a bunch of subscribers, mostly inexperienced computer users, who mostly use their computer for running AOL and probably MS Works (not Office, just Works, plus maybe plain old Word without the rest of Office). These are the people that are easy to move to a different OS. These are the people who don't care as long as they can get on AOL and they can type up some stuff in a word processor. It's never the OS that people care about, it's always the applications.

The only thorn in AOLs side is that all of these subscribers must have MS Windows and MS Internet Explorer to do this. But wait.. they bought Netscape a few years ago and do you think that reports of them using Netscape in some internal betas were just leaked mistakenly? Think again.. that was a big fuck-you to Microsoft. The only thing left is to replace Windows with something else. What worked before will work again... so go look for a company to buy. Let's see.. who has an OS with small but somewhat increasing market share and has the technical know-how to make it work right... hmm.. how about Red Hat. The people here saying they should have gone after Mandrake are forgetting that (I hate to say this and start a flamewar) Mandrake blows. Remember that article earlier about moving from RH6.2 to Mandrake 8 saying that the kernel 2.4 that Mandrake uses just wasn't stable for production use. RH is very active with this. RH knows their kernels and employs several developers who know what they are doing. I don't mean to say that Mandrake is a bunch of morons either. But from my experience Red Hat has had a more quality product (if even only slightly).

Also, to you people who think that AOL is gonna attempt some coup d'etat with MS... think again. Believe me they'll keep their current customers happy. But at the same time they'll hype the hell out of their new improved product that just boots you directly into AOL. Also, don't think they won't test this first. What do you think the whole PlayStation 2 thing is about. That looks to me as if it is blatantly a testbed to see how customers will respond to basically just running AOL on their computers.

AOL seems to me to be doing business the right way. Get lots of repeat customers and keep those customers happy and continue to get lots of repeat revenue. Also: diversify. Own as much different shit as you can. This will keep your profits stable. The company I am working for now (no it's not AOL) follows the diversification strategy. Any good company does. My dad has drilled this into me. He worked for an electric/gas utility company and always pointed out that the best thing they could do was keep it as both electric and gas because that means pretty much no matter what happens they got the bases covered. They also had a company which installed generators into places of business which wanted to generate their own power and not depend on the utility. Basically in direct competition with themselves but.. hmm, wait.. that means they get the money either way, especially considering they weren't just selling the product, but the expertise with maintaing it (on a recurring basis of course). ;-)

Just remember, money and self-interest are not all bad. When balanced properly with ethics capitalism makes the world go 'round.

What about a computer company?

[schwap]

I would rather see IBM buy RedHat. Why? Because they know technology. And it seems, that they have learned from their own mistakes and the mistakes of others. A large media company will only be able to do what it does best: leverage mind-share and sell it's content. A company like IBM is the nuts and bolts behind so much technology and infrastructure. They know what they are doing. Well, maybe not completely; but Ted Turner is going to have a lot harder time adapting to selling something they dont even create, let alone control.

Re:What about Sun?

[Derkec]

Sun and AOL had a fairly loose partnership mostly centering around Netscape's non-browser software. Sun and AOL didn't get along great so Sun more or less bought out that partnership. The resulting product line is iPlanet. I don't think AOL ever had an intent to use Solaris as an operating system to combat MS with and so I think this deal has about 0 effect on the relationship between Sun and AOL.

Re:Lesser of two Evils

[Derkec]

Lesser of two evils? That's not the question. The point is that when two evils are forced to fight for market share, good things tend to happen for consumers. An AOL monopoly would be almost as scary (if not as much or more) as a MS monopoly, but the key is to not have monopolies at all.

Re:uh. they're not buying linux

[J4]

Um, I think his point is that most people think that Red Hat IS Linux....
Hahah Most people think linux is china, or air conditioning, or mebbe that kid in the peanuts cartoon.

On a serious note though, AOL is actually built on a Unix back end, so there are potentially enormous benefits to buying the RedHat expertise.
Also, the "useability" problems that people still harp on with linux are kind of a red herring, if RedHat had a stripped down/dumbed down consumerized version for Joe Sixpack (and
hardware issues are kinda moot at this point) it would be a boon. AOL may just be the one to do this, (and I'm sure this'll be a karma killer) they have the marketing machine and know all about catering to morons.

Re:Same thing as Netscape, eh?

[homer_ca]

Or more likely to be reduced to a bargaining chip against Microsoft. The threat of switching all those millions of AOLers to a non-IE browser is more useful to AOL than the browser itself. They've come out with 3 or 4 new AOL software versions in the time Mozilla's been under development. I *think* they could have released *some* kind of finished browser if they really tried, and I don't mean the half-assed Netscape 6.0 based on Mozilla 0.7.

AOL's strategy

[Jimithing DMB]

AOLs strategy is simple.. get $20+/month revenue from each and every subscriber from a steadily increasing number of subscribers.

What the hell is MSes strategy? The only thing MS seems to want is to monopolize. They don't even seem to necessarily want to directly make money. They just want every PC to run MS software. That is almost a /direct/ quote from Bill Gates himself, something like "A PC on every desk running Microsoft software".

I think AOL has a clear advantage here. MS is trying to play the our technology is better card. AOL is playing the our service is better card. 'Cept more and more people are starting to realize that MS's software is overpriced and generally sucks while at the same time more and more new computer users are signing up for AOL and most of the ones that already have AOL are keeping it. AOL has excellent brand loyalty. MS really doesn't. The only thing keeping MS everywhere is MS's monopoly.

Anyway... as for the "bigger picture" that is a load of crap. You don't make good money speculating on what the next development paradigm will be. You make good money by having loyal customers who give you money on a repeat basis. Wonder why people like free software? Because there isn't any of that crap about trying to come up with a development platform. MS has created that market for themselves to live in. Everyone else functions in the real world where you leave that sort of shit up to the academic world and make your money selling finished, working products (something MS has pretty much been unable to ever do).

Re:Mind Boggling

[Derkec]

"do you really want [average users] running linux?"

I just don't think that AOL would distribute Linux as we know it to the average user. What I would imagine is some sort of internet appliance made for surfing the web. If they were particularly adventurous, they would provide a free word processor as well. Not really a computer, but a $200 + $30/month internet appliance. In that scenerio, AOL could make it very tricky for the average user to break things, particularly since they wouldn't make the root password terribly obvious, much like OS X.

Let's Get This Straight

[unclelib]

AOL has no interest in going head to head with MS in the desktop OS market. Microsoft already has this locked up, and believe it or not, Windows works reliably enough for ALL of their non-techie users.

There is no point in trying to make converts out of the millions of aol users. I don't care how friendly linux is, my grandma isnt doing that type of system maintainance on the computer she got from QVC. (heck it might even void the warranty)

What we could see however, is a set-top box or internet appliance type of device rolled out by AOL which would have limited features and software intended only for use with AOL's internet services, running on a Linux operating system. A pre-packaged system of this type *would* be attractive to non-techies, especially if it were cheap enough.

People might go for something like this, done right of course. A system like this would cut out any OS licensing costs involved with a Windows-based solution.

If they could come up an appliance that did everything you could do on AOL with a PC easily, no one would care what OS was underneath.

Who knows, they might even give these things away if you sign up for the AOL service for a couple of years.

not exactly

[twilight30]

I was a bit afraid my statement would be perceived thus. I meant that in this case, "synergy" would work against the whole community. If proprietary extensions are put into AOL's RH the rest of us will suffer, either through having to develop compatible GPL/BSD software, or through the rapid influx of vast numbers of people demanding dumbed-down digital media management tools.

Re:Perhaps it's time to give Netscape/Mozilla anot

[jejones]

Feh. The standard is the current HTML specification, not IE. Do let me know when you can distribute to me a version of IE that will run on OS/2 or Linux, though.

Not AOL, *AOL/Time Warner*!

[jonabbey]

Well, this could help kill two birds with one stone for AOL/Time Warner. Concerned about a popular Linux distribution out there that doesn't have all the latest in DRM controls for content for all of Time Warner's recording and movie properties?

Ick. I don't know.. if AOL/Time Warner does buy Red Hat, they're going to have one heck of a case of multiple personality disorder to sort out.

Re:The End of the MS Monopoly

[MadAhab]

Man, from the start of your post, I thought you got it. Then I read your post and realized you don't.

This announcement follows suspiciously closely on the heels of confirmation that Microsoft plans to expand Xbox into a more full-featured closed computing/entertainment converged device.

AOLTimeWarner doesn't want to fall behind, so they start planning their own. And what piece are they missing to fight that battle? An OS.

So Linux will only appear on "closed" boxes. Device drivers won't be a problem. Games might be. AOL won't contribute anything to device drivers, but they might bring some real user-focused applications to the deal.

They are probably very worried about MS beating them in an area AOLTW currently owns. But what Microsoft forgets is that manufacturing a consumer electronics device is probably less of a cultural gap for AOLTW than putting together entertainment is for MS.

Care to define?

[omega9]

From the article:

The AOL online software, which consumers can install for free from the Web or a compact disk, is now designed to run on Microsoft's Windows operating system. But the AOL software could be configured to override Windows and launch a version of Red Hat's Linux operating system, sources said.

Exactly what the heck is that supposed to mean? I have a feeling that this was supposed to say "AOL could be configured to run on Red Hat Linux". I'd like to know either what 'source' would actually make such a statement, or who at The Washington Post was stupid enough to make such a misquote.

Think about it logically: You can't simply trounce in and replace someones OS right under their nose without their permission. So what does this gain AOL\TW? It certainly doesn't mean they'll stop making clients for Windows, since that would mean certain death. It would mean that, yes, they'd own a Linux distro and it would be capable of getting on AOL, but it still doesn't force anyone to do anything different since the Windows users still have their clients.

If AOL\TW wants Linux to be able to connect to AOL why don't they just make a Linux client? I still don't see how buying the distro will help them.

MSNBC vs. RHLTV

[xinit]

Next step would be the move to a cable news network under the RedHat banner to compete on that playing field.

I suppose it could work...

RedHat is not an operating system.

[AugstWest]

It would make a great deal of sense for AOL/Time-Warner to acquire an operating system for leverage against Microsoft

RedHat is a brand. Just like Coke, just like AOL.

If we needed something to make us see this (and this rumor is true), it is a deal just like this that would prove that it's just about branding.

Wow, thanks, Sherlock!

[Wakko Warner]

This certainly disproves every premise of the article.

- A.P.

Re:I have to disagree with you...

[moncyb]

HEY SLASHDOT PEOPLE! Let's have a Poll - best free MP3/ogg/wav/cd player...

Goody! A poll

• MP3 - That would have to be madplay, although I currently don't have it installed as I don't use MP3s much anymore, and mpg123 is good enough...
• OGG -- ogg123 works great, why shouldn't I use the one directly from the source!
• WAV -- I made my own little player--the binary is less than 3k stripped, and has no library dependancies (including libc!) I also has the ability to play gzipped wavs by piping through gzip.
• CD player -- Again I made my own little one, although I don't use it much as I play my CDs from my harddrive nowadays (I saved them using cdda2wav and oggenc)

What was my point in telling you that? Well, for one thing, I'm just demonstrating that such a poll wouldn't help your point--as /. users probably choose between a diverse number of media players. However, if such a poll were to take place I bet the #1 would probably end up being MS's "Windows Media Player"--most likely a narrow margin for this crowd though. Xmms would probably be #2. I doubt Winamp would even make the top ten.

...and your point about Netscape/Mozilla being better than IE is a crap point. That's like saying using a blender instead of a lawn mower is better for keeping your hand attached! ;-) Yeah, I know the other guy made the opposite argument--same comment applies. ;-)

You say that AOL pushes technology...then 2 lines downy you say they care nothing for technology, just money.

I think his point was that AOL exploits technology to make money and attract then exploit customers.

I don't believe that AOL buying RedHat would be good for RedHat, but they (IMHO) are a crappy company anyway. It may be good for the Linux community: the more Linux is on the desktop, the more hardware manufacturers will be willing to write device drivers for Linux (or at least release enough specs so that others can.) I don't know...maybe they'll bastardize RedHat's version of the kernel so much that it wouldn't help...who knows?

If you need compatible chat clients, just get an account and use Gaim or Jabber or Imici or Trillian (so far Trill is win-only, i am not sure what your rant is about there).

I'm not sure what his argument might be, but mine is that IM systems shouldn't be tied to one organization. They should be able to implement them so that you can use anyone's servers, not just AOL's--kind of like email. One of the major reasons that instant messaging has this problem, like Microsoft in its spheres of dominance, AOL has fought portibility on every front in this area.

Re:Why MS Succeeds And Others Fail

[Eric Smith]

They do not consider themselves anything other than a software company.

Oh, yeah, and a video game console company. I almost forgot about that one.

Umm. Wait a minute, don't they sell mice, keyboards, and joysticks too?

Err... I vaguely seem to recall a little joint venture called MSNBC.

And something about an online service?

Focus? Focus???! Yeah, they're focused on taking over anything that rakes in money. Not that there's anything wrong with that, if they would only use ethical business practices.

Actually, I've got to admit that they're very ethical, in exactly the same sense that Clinton and Gore said that they would have the most ethical administration in US history. And they did. But ethics is like luck -- there's good luck and there's bad luck.

Re:Probably a few reasons

[Eric Smith]

Red Hat (last I heard) was hemorrhaging money.

Last you heard must have been some time back; have you been living under a rock. They've been profitable lately.

Re:The End of the MS Monopoly

[juju2112]

Then why buy Red Hat?

If AOL/TW needs an OS for an entertainment device, they can obtain it for free, modify it, and distribute a million copies themselves. They don't need Red Hat for this.

Set Top Boxes??

[rlp]

Perhaps AOL wants their own branded OS to run on set-top boxes. They own AOL ISP service, TW cable & TW RR ISP; they could use RedHat to build a customized embedded Linux to run on a cable set-top box to provide digital cable + broadband ISP (and maybe PVR) via the set-top box. But, I don't understand why they would have to own RedHat to do this. I'd expect them to just do a deal with Sci. Atl. or Motorola.

Re:Set Top Boxes??

[kindbud]

But, I don't understand why they would have to own RedHat to do this.

Pfft! You silly... they're AOL !

Please.

[Tony-A]

Not when I'm drinking coffee.

For revenge. Imagine running AOL on Terminal Server.

Re:The End of the MS Monopoly

[Hieronymus Howard]

.. a Linux distro with an AOL client strapped on

For some reason, that sounds . . . arousing.

Just think what it could do to Bill Gates.

Re:Would RedHat target the desktop now ?

[msaavedra]

RedHat has largely focused on the server/embeded market. If bought by AOL, I assume they will now seriously target desktop users...

That might be too big an assumption. I was thinking that they are more likely to want linux in a combination digital-cable-box/AOL-Client/video-on-demand type set-top box. Maybe even throw in a personal video recorder like Tivo, though Warner Bros would probably make sure it had a really fascist anti-copying policy.

I'm guessing that the GUI for this thing would be more appliance-like than desktop-like. I imagine they'd write it in XUL and run the gecko rendering engine right on the frame buffer (not sure if its been ported yet, but probably wouldn't be too difficult), so they wouldn't even need X.

AOL-TW owns a whole lot of media companies, cable companies, and of course the largest ISP in the world. So far, they haven't integrated them well. This might be a good way to accomplish that. Redhat is probably the most qualified company to produce such a thing, though I'm not sure what this would do to Redhat as a stand-alone distro.

AOL is acquiring anti-MS weapons, plain & simp

[Cardinal]

A few people have touched on this, but if put together, the strategy becomes clear, and simple.

AOL needs to fight MS in every way it can. AOL's known this for years, which is why they partnered with Sun & Netscape, and why they're buying strategic projects. Think about the most visible points of contact with MS software.

* MSN Service, IM
AOL's got these, always have. But picking up ICQ was a quick way to buy up a bigger userbase. MS is actually the ones fighting back on this front, partnering agressively with broadband providers like Qwest to push MSN-branded net access.

* IE
AOL has used IE as long as they've had a browser, but you can be sure it's not because they liked the idea. There just wasn't a viable non-MS browser out there. You can be sure they'll switch to NS6 as soon as they feel it's ready.
* Media Player
A biggie. Especially with the changes made in XP. MS wants to push WMP as the RIAA-friendly media, figuring if they can get support from the labels, it won't matter what the users want, because WMP will be the one that has the copy protection the RIAA will support. AOL picked up WinAmp because it was the player with the best chance of pushing back against WMP.

* IIS
All three partners in the deal, AOL, Sun, and Netscape, went in with one goal in mind. Fight MS. Did it work? Eh, not really. But they've still got a lot of NS server software available for use at some point, if they can find a good use.

* Windows
So, picking up a Linux distro is perfectly logical for them. They're trying as best they can on all the above fronts, so why not pick up an OS and push it as an alternative? Imagine what a company with AOL's media control powers could do with RedHat. Build AOL services right into the desktop, stick it in a set-top (To fight WebTV).

Finally, the AOL CD's will be usefull!!!!

[StormyWeather]

Wooo I can finally tell folks to KEEP their CD's. D00d, what are you thinking! Don't trash that AOL CD, it's got a current kernel on it!

Re:The End of the MS Monopoly

[ameoba]

Go beyond... Think about it. They could run the angle that an AOL subscription will get you -all- the software on your computer both legally AND free. Not to mention that the public would be more receptive to a subscription-based-service becoming an OS/software supplier than a OS/Software supplier trying to become a subscription-based-service. And since the software is still free, there's no 'lost profits' from people 'stealing' your software.

This is probably really good for Linux in general

[Calvinhood]

The gist of this may have been posted already, so forgive me if I'm being redundant, but looking through the posts, I haven't found anything that is really close to what I think, so here goes.

This is probably one of the best things that could have happened to linux, as long as AOL handles this correctly. As some have already mentioned, all the average user really wants out of his or her computer is word possessing and, for lack of a better term, a way to waste time (via surfing the web, e-mail, chatting, AIM, mp3s, whatever). Obviously, some users may want more, but the point is that everything the average user wants can already be found for Linux, and typically for free. However, there's a caveat, most users also lack the knowledge and/or the courage to make anything but the most trivial changes to their computer. If you ask them to install a new OS on their machine, you might as well ask them to perform brain surgery while their at it. If AOL is going to succeed with a Linux distro bundled with their Internet software, the whole process is going to have to be incredibly simple. If the user has to do anything more complicated than put a disk in their cdrom drive and press the reset button, you might as well forget it.

After installing the OS, everything had better work. This is a good thing for the Linux community in general, because currently, everything does not work, there's still a great deal of hardware out there that's not supported. AOL has the resources and the clout to either make these things work, or pressure the hardware manufacturers into making them work.

If something doesn't work, however, AOL techs have a wonderful tool in ssh to fix things. Now that the techs don't have to rely completely on a customer describing the problem (the Internet is broken!), can you imagine how much time their going to save? AOL wins because they don't need as many techs, and the customers win because their problems will tend to be solved much more quickly and easily. I suspect that this alone would drive up subscriptions, especially if AOL is supporting the entire OS, not just the Internet connectivity.

Finally, if this leads to more people start using Linux at home for the ease of support (not to mention the added bonus of free software and greater stability), how long do you think it will be before Linux finds greater acceptance in the workplace? CEOs and the like are users too, and if they start seeing how well Linux works at home, they might start pushing their IT departments to migrate to Linux as well, especially if they're getting hammered with licensing audits for Microsoft software.

One thing I want AOL to do for Linux

[Compact Dick]

This could turn out to be a good thing for Linux. Why? AOL can infuse their vast resources of capital into the one thing Linux sorely lacks, namely a decent set of true-type fonts.

X11R6's default font set is so atrocious it's no surprise it repels PC users weaned on Windows' splendid set of TT fonts. Fund the development of a LGPL'd set of core fonts [similar to Microsoft's Core Web Fonts] and you have cleared one of the biggest obstacles in the way of Linux's widespread adoption.

I'm sure the zealots wouldn't mind this too much either :-)

Re:The End of the MS Monopoly

[Tony-A]

Linux ready for the desktop?
If AOL can do what they need to do to make AOLinux work, ... YES!
So that AOL can protect their customer base from virus/worm/whatever, something drastic is needed. Anti-virus software is good for protecting against yesterday. Useless for protecting against tomorrow.

Two important points

[jgarzik]

Two points that nobody AFAICS really commented out. (though "The end of the OS monopoly" subthread got close)

1) Since Linux distros are largely made up of GPL'd software, that means AOL is tapping into a large base of software that Microsoft can never touch nor copy. Microsoft has even made it a point to tell its employees and partners to never look at GPL'd code.

2) What happens if AOL "wins" the OS war, using Linux? Now we are replacing one monopoly with another.

Jeff

Re:Two important points

[warpeightbot]

What happens if AOL "wins" the OS war, using Linux? Now we are replacing one monopoly with another.

No, we're not. You're forgetting that while AOL will likely destroy Red Hat (thus putting a rather severe kink in my personal style, as we ship Red Hat at work), Mandrake is still out there (and for those poo-poohing Mandrake, you haven't gotten hold of 8.1, I can tell.... smooth as an android's bottom... but I digress), and there will ALWAYS be Debian.

Do I think it's going to be good for Red Hat's corporate customers? Probably. Do I think it's going to be good for Joe Sixpack trying to get end user support. Hell, no. That's what scares me, is that li'l ol' me is going to have a bitch of a time getting somebody's attention in Durham to yell about why the installer borks on certain well-known IDE raid cards...

But as has been pointed out for years now, Linux isn't a single entity. Hell, there are three viable kernels out there now, and I'm NOT using Linus', and the world hasn't ended, in fact, it's getting pretty damn good. No, I don't like the idea that one of the Top Five Evil Companies in America Today (the others being M$, DuPont, AT&T and all its progeny (it may be a whole bunch of companies, but its still one evil!), and RJ Reynolds) is taking over the biggest purveyor of Linux on the planet.... but it may well be good for Linux itself.... the purists will flee to Mandrake and Debian and SuSE, and Joe Sixpack will finally get rid of the Bill Gates virus.

It's a terrible price, but who knows, some good may come of it....

This would BLOW !

[CDWert]

I have been a RedHat user since 2.0, a Looonnnng time. I like it for a lot of reasons and can live with its problems compared to other distro's. Redhat has flourished where other early distros failed, Caldera, Yddsgrail, Slackware, there are still users for all (well maybe not Yd :) But redhat has done better than ALL linux distros when it comes to reckognition, they bought the right people up (Cygnus) and played with their $ right. They put out a quality product and I think have the best support of ANY of the early distros. They have been coppied more than any other , and downloaded than any other.

Look at what AOL did to netscape, no I could care less about mozilla, thats open sourcing was in the works PRIOR to the AOL acqusition,

AOL is in for the BUCK period , they care NOTHING of Open Source. This would spell complete disaster for RedHat in my opinon. AOL has dragged ass on Netscape because it didnt do what they thought it would for them INSTANTLY. RedHat would be no different.

Although it would be kinda neat to get a new distro in the mail every week.

Not to mention about 10,000,000 Linux CD sent out around the world, I can see it now, people are stupid enough to load AOL, Make it overwrite their windows install with a Linux Disrto :)

very possible

[stego]

== And a newbie friendly AOLinux.

AOL has a history of making computer stuff easy to do. What if they pulled a slick, easy to use Linux out of this? Look at the interface Apple put on Unix, and they have to keep happy a much more broad user group than AOL...

Re:very possible

[Tony-A]

If they put their minds to it I think that's exactly what they would pull off. Because it's AOL people will expect it to be easy. Because people expect it to be easy, they will find it is easy. The developers know that it must above all else be easy. Things like consistent user interface are not really relevant. About the opposite of OpenBSD except that data integrity, security and privacy are very high priorities. Done right it should stay secure even if no patches are ever applied after it is installed.

Re:A Worry

[ScumBiker]

<off-topic>
He's talking about LSD production, not where it was invented. Although I noticed lately that every time I here about LSD, I start to get that kinda way off feeling again. To much trippin' in the old days I guess. The old days meaning the late 70's. Yep, I'm <i>that</i> old.
</off-topic>

<on-topic>
I quesss I really don't see AOL/TW buying Redhat as a bad thing. One major this is, it signifies a coming of age for Linux. This can only be a good thing, in the long run.
</on-topic>

File under: Be careful what you wish for

[hmarq]

Folks have been bemoaning "Linux on the Desktop" for a few years now -- you want Linux on the desktop? RHAOL, bundled with StarOffice (or Open Office) ... stick it on an inexpensive Duron platform and the AOL terminal is reborn ... it connects to the internet, does 'Office' stuff, comes installed on your computer and has a low price point --

You're wish is granted. Are you happy now?

Re:I'm really not trying to troll here..

[arkanes]

I'm curious if you can point me to a site that has the images in tables thing you talk about, the only display problems I run into are sites that use browser-specific DHTML. And for what it's worth, a small ad banner next to your menu bar is alot less intrusive that pop-up adds.

While I love opera, I have to concede it's less feature-rich than IE or Mozilla in alot of areas. Of course, the ones it does have that they don't, I really like, like toggling images with a single keystroke, and it beats the pants off all them in speed and footprint.

RH + Mozilla = AOL Terminal?

[gtx]

i am of the belief that mozilla (what the unwashed masses would refer to as netscape6 and up) has an incredibly hackable UI. if AOL were to buy red hat, and they already own netscape, wouldn't that possibly lead to an "AOL OS" distro which bundles RH, X, and a copy of an AOLified mozilla? (much in the same sense that AOL the AOL software today is just an AOLified MSIE)

they could set up a tweaked version of X and a tweaked version of mozilla (using mozilla as the UI) to do *nothing but* run their aol client. it'd be the world's most overpowered dumb terminal.

personally i'm all for it in the fact that AOL probably has the financial resources to persuade people to write better winmodem drivers.

-c

"You've got...

[SilentChris]

...embrace and extend!"

One word: Embeded

[Spoing]

AOL, with Gateway, have used Linux in the past for embeded, AOL-branded, Internet devices. Expect more of this in the future regaurdless of what (if anything) happens with AOL/TW and RedHat.

Sure, blame AOL

[rlowe69]

2) Nullsoft was interviewed somewhere (sorry no URL), and they complained that they WANTED to compete against Napster, and add download plugins to winamp, but AOL forbade it.

As much as I don't like taking the side of a superpower like AOL/Time-Warner, I have to say your point is pure bunk. Nullsoft is OWNED by AOL/T-W now. No one twisted their arms and said "Take this stock and cash for Nullsoft or we'll kill your children!". No.

Nullsoft lost control of WinAmp when they sold it. That is the point of selling something, and that is what AOL/T-W was buying - control. If WinAmp is crying now because they can't 'innovate', maybe they should try buying their company/software back. If they do, I wish them luck.

Re:Sure, blame AOL

[Sleepy]

>Nullsoft lost control of WinAmp when they sold it.

You're reading my (and probably other's) posts through the tainted glasses of your own defensiveness:

I don't think anyone is disputing AOL's right to do with Nullsoft as they wish. They can drive them into the ground, remove their autonomy, and make Nullsoft as bland as the current Netscape... I don't dispute their right to do so.

I sincerely doubt that the intent of AOL buying these outside companies, is to crush their spirit. I'm sure the smart lawyers at AOL knew they were buying out some smart-assed but CREATIVE kids, and if they want to keep their investment they probably worded in that autonomy into the contract.

What AOL is facing -- not just with Nullsoft -- is a *massive* culture clash, and they are spread TOO THIN to absorb anything else.

AOL has the right to be conservative, and the talent has the right to walk. Compromises are necessary. If you don't understand that, I hope for the sake of my AOL stock, you NEVER join AOL management... you'll boss the talent right out the door and make a Netscape out of them.

That's *exactly* what I expect them to do

[drew_kime]

You are making the assumption that given sufficient marketshare, AOL/TW wouldn't act exactly like Microsoft and try to gain as much control over their users, and that revenue stream, as MS ever did.

And if another 800 lb. gorilla went toe-to-toe with Microsoft, that would be ... competition. In one move, AOL will have solved the problem the DoJ hasn't been able to do anything about: Make MS into a non-monopoly.

We all know coroporations act in their own interests. As long as they are all fighting against each other, they keep each other in check. (In theory.)

Re:That's *exactly* what I expect them to do

[Jay L]

You are making the assumption that given sufficient marketshare, AOL/TW wouldn't act exactly like Microsoft and try to gain as much control over their users, and that revenue stream, as MS ever did.

The difference between Microsoft and AOL's management style is the difference between Bill Gates and Steve Case.

Gates wants to increase Microsoft's power and control in order to increase revenues and market share. Steve just wants to increase AOL's revenues and market share; power is a byproduct, not the prime goal.

For the most part, when AOL makes an "evil" move, it is being more boneheaded than arrogant. Whenever I would argue against a bad (IMHO) decision, I would almost always find that the proponent honestly believed their idea would provide better, more interesting services to the customers, thus increasing usage and market share.

The difference is important: bad trade-offs can be argued against. If someone thinks an X% increase in functionality is worth a Y% decrease in "legitimacy", it's a lot easier to convince them that they're wrong (and people were always willing to be convinced). If someone thinks that an X% increase in power is worth a Y% decrease in anything at all, well.. you're screwed.

With one obvious and well-discussed exception, I don't recall any major decisions that intentionally limited functionality or spread FUD to create a monopoly. And AOL certainly never pressured suppliers or squeezed customers the way Microsoft does - I can't recall anything on the order of Licensing 6.0.

A favorite story: When AOL first launched, a 10% lifetime discount was given to "charter members". Later, we dropped our prices drastically (the $20/20 hours plan, I think it was), and the billing folks felt that this was already far more than a 10% discount, and so it met the letter of the charter-member promise. I disagreed, and I brought the issue up to Steve. He didn't even hesitate; he just said "We promised these people a lifetime discount." Boom. Charter members got 10% off the new, lower rates. (And I got a reputation for end runs, but such is life.)

Obviously, as the company grew, and Steve became less personally involved, this generalism became less true. Some percentage of people - especially in the media world - are going to be power-hungry bastards. But if AOL buys and subsequently destroys Red Hat, I suspect it'll be due to executive incompetence or bad timing, not Their Evil Ways.

Re:I can see it now

[Curious__George]

Your "Rooby Roo" dialog had me spewing in my keyboard. Funny, funny stuff.

Re:Sure they are!

[rosewood]

Well - again off topic

This post goes to show how stupid you are

"The point is that there is a constitutionally mandated separation between church and state. " No - there isn't. It is consitutionally mandated that there is no establishment of a church by the state. http://www.theggordonliddyshow.com/constitution.sh tml

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;

By giving equally to all - no religion is established or even favored. A la give to the jews and the muslims.

Anyhoo - don't bother replying - I just wanted to have you read the constitiution and then Ill encourage you to find out where the idea of 'seperation of church and state' came from

*Sighs*

[nuintari]

Good thing Sorcery Linux really has my attention, and I have been feeling retro slackish lately too, I can ditch Red Hat if this happens. I kick myself everytime I remember Netscape is already there's.

I can handle mozilla being slightly connected to aol, I can handle being on AIM for the appeasement of all my friends who don't grok irc, but no way in hell is my operating system gonna be "so easy to use, why the fuck isn't it number?"

Re:where's the paranoia where its needed?

[Chris Johnson]

Microsoft is considerably more vicious. It's as simple as that.

If you're buying copies of Windows just to resist the chance that AOL/TW will become as evil as Microsoft, you are a fool.

If it bothers you so much, why not refuse to buy anything from either of them... if you can?

Yeeaaaaahhhh....

[kindbud]

...the AOL software could be configured to override Windows and launch a version of Red Hat's Linux operating system, sources said.

Good idea. NOT! Although, if anyone can bring the joys of dual-booting to the masses, it's AOL.

With such a move, AOL Time Warner could potentially make significant inroads into Microsoft's bread-and-butter business.

What, pissing off its customers and the OSS movement all at the same time?

An even graver challenge to Microsoft would be for AOL Time Warner to develop a rival operating system that works exclusively with the media giant's own Internet service provider, its Web browser or proprietary content.

That's an even better idea, make the public associate dual-booting and Linux with AOL, busy signals, lousy customer service, spam-by-the-buckets, yeah, that'll topple Redmond.

Sheesh.

Re:The End of the MS Monopoly

[discogravy]

Another case of PENGUIN LUST!

You're kidding...but I'm not.

[Doktor Memory]

IE5 runs more-or-less stably under the most recent Codeweavers WINE Preview release. I suspect that IE4 would be downright usable, but I don't have a copy to test with at the moment.

Fix the fscking JavaScript first!

[Brendan Byrd]

Lack of DHTML control on JavaScript is VERY annoying! I want layer control on my damn JavaScript, and IE doesn't have it! Try this code:

if (self.innerWidth) { }
else if (document.body.clientWidth) { }
else if (screen.availWidth) { }
else if (screen.width) { }

Of course, the one that would best work (self.innerWidth) doesn't work because IE STILL doesn't support CSS properties in JS.

Re:AOL is acquiring anti-MS weapons, plain & s

[Phroggy]

But they've still got a lot of NS server software available for use at some point, if they can find a good use.

Don't forget AOL Server, which I understand has some advantages over Apache (faster, works well with databases, built around Tcl if that's what floats your boat) and is open source (Mozilla Public License, apparently). Never used it myself, but AOL does.

Re:The End of the MS Monopoly

[Phroggy]

Throw in a little special version of Abiword. Throw in a special version Gnumeric.

Why not throw in StarOffice? AOL already has a relationship with Sun, and StarOffice is disturbingly similar to Microsoft Office in many ways, down to the placement and naming of menus.

Why is AOL Buying?

[WildBeast]

This reminds me of an article on ArsTechnica which was published a couple of years ago. Take a look and draw your own conclusions

At some point it all breaks down...

[Svartalf]

How many jobs are in this country to buy the stuff that you cheaply produced over there in that 3rd world country? They're not going up right at the moment. I'm not saying that people shouldn't do some of this, but what I am saying is that it's a system and a somewhat fragile one at that. At some point you reach a threshold and you quit making money because people can't buy (because they can't afford it and/or don't have a job to do so...). At some point, it's less about making big sums of money, for down that path lies recessions and depressions.

Clever...

[Svartalf]

A most impressive demonstration of how EMto do JavaScript coding, as opposed to many sites which demonstrate how not to do it.

delete the "EM" there...

[Svartalf]

I botched the HTML code- that'll teach me not to preview stuff... :->

Dumb

[StormyMonday]

Red Hat's market capatalization is about $1.45e9.

AOL could get all the functionality they need with a minimal custom distro and a few extra apps. Take a dozen programmers about six months, for a total cost of about 0.1% of the cost of Red Hat. They also wouldn't have to worry about all the good folks at Red Hat jumping ship.

Biggest problem would be getting it to play nice with Windows. Perhaps they should buy VMWare instead?

Unfortunately, the Big Shots know a lot about how to take over companies, and very little about technical matters.

GPL to the rescue

[Ogerman]

If anyone has been looking for a good example of why the GPL's anti-proprietary protections make it superior to the BSD license, here's a great one. (from a community perspective at least..) Imagine if Linux and associated GNU software used the BSD license instead. AOL could buy RedHat and then release a proprietary kernel, libc, etc. with DRM integrated throughout, backdoors as desired, phone-home capability to reap marketing data, forced advertisements, and other horrible evils. With GPL, the worst they can do is include a proprietary version of Mozilla and perhaps a DRM kernel module, which both can be easily removed. So if AOL ships out GPL'ed software, you can be rest assured that it is the real thing or at least come with full source to document any potentially undesirable changes. With BSD, we'd be screwed.

Saying that the GPL is less free than BSD is like saying the US is less free without slavery.

Re:GPL to the rescue

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

Yes, if Linux et. al. were under the BSD license, AOL could release a proprietary kernel with all the things you state, but probably nobody would use it. The reason people use software under the BSD license is because it works for them, in some manner. In this case, I don't see why anyone would ditch their distro to get the "enhanced with 33% more spying and 64.3% more ads!!" AOL-hosed RedHat one.

Also the non-enhanced source would still exist somewhere on some server holding it. AOL would not be capable of destroying the source code nor eliminating its general availability, only using it in their work. It still exists. Microsoft has BSD command line ftp in various versions of their software. But it still exists in the BSD distro, it didn't "go away".

Saying that the GPL is less free than BSD is like saying the US is less free without slavery.

BSD gives freedom to developers, GPL limits some freedoms on developers with a side effect of giving more freedom to consumers/users of software. They're both tools; use whatever tool makes the most sense to you. If you care more about what rights users have to seeing the underlying code, by all means, go GPL. If you want your code given the most possible uses, go BSD.

possible future hardware business ?

[beanerspace]

My 2 cents about "why" ... has me thinking tht AOL might want to offer their own out-of-the-box-internet-ready-computers ... bundle them with a subscription as well ... the only problem ... the operating system. If all a user wants to do is surf, and occasionally write a document to their local county council person ... wouldn't RH and some office-suite, alonge with Netscrape get it done ? All for $399.99 ?

Who do you want to lose, really?

[Angwe]

Let's take a look.

M$ runs a software house that produces the most widely lused operating systems and groupware in the US.

AOL/TW runs a media conglomerate that owns almost every media outlet Americans can see.

Now, think real hard about who can do more damage to your freedom.

Answer: AOL/TW...duh.

Solution: None. The only thing that scares me more than AOL/TW getting into the OS market is the possibility of Disney entering. (To rip-off an idea from Neal Stephanson, wholesale, if Disney ever entered the OS market, they'd kick M$'s ASS!)

Just my comment. Take it or lump it.

Re:Who do you want to lose, really?

[pressman]

The Disney comment is hilarious because of the rumors abounding for years that Disney might buy Apple (all totally bogus of course). So we'd have M$ putting out their usual garbage, AOL/TW putting out a version of Linux and Disney distributing Darwin/FreeBSD.

So an actual software company distibuting bloated, buggy, insecure crap and you'd have 2 media outlets distributing secure, stable and powerful software. It's just freaking hilarious.

I'll believe it when I start seeing -

[bstrahm]

from:linust@aol.com
to:slashdot
subject:New kernel same place
date: ???
It is now time to download kernel 2.6.0. You can find it in the usual places. Happy compiling

Re:Switch to Linux? They're already on BSD ...

[HiThere]

In a way it hardly matters. The *nix-es are all pretty much alike at a bunch of levels. (As well, of course, as all having their differences.)

But the interesting question is, why did they want a GPL code base when they already had a *BSD code base. Not to mention that they could get either of them for free.

It must be either the name or the people. The name isn't well known outside of a quite small community. The people are rather independant sorts, and likely to leave if subjected to an uncomfortable ideology. So the question of what they want is quite intriging.
.

Re:It's all about fighting .Net

[HiThere]

If it's Mono they want to control, they should buy Ximian. It would be bound to be cheaper. But I guess that you're suggesting that they may buy it in addition to Red Hat. Not an impossible scenario. But my guess is that they would be all in favor of it. Especially if they could ensure that it was (or at least could be) independant of the passport system.
.

Out of curiosity....

[Wntrmute]

...what is your problem with iPlanet. I've been using for awhile, and haven't seen any serious problems with it. Having the integrated JSP engine is quite useful (though I've not tried Apache+Tomcat yet) and it has the advantage of being multithreaded which allows it avoid some of Apache's problems.

I like Apache, especially for mass webhosting, but it's lack of multithreadedness can be a pretty serious performance issue in certain applications. iPlanet solves this for my company.

Note that I've only used iPlanet's webserver and LDAP server, so I can't speak about anything else in the suite.

Re:Out of curiosity....

[Chagrin]

The only time that iPlanet's multithreadedness is going to help you is if you're serving static content and you're looking at raw hits being transmitted. If you have that type of performance issue, then you look into using Squid in its accelerator proxy mode.

Aside from that, the inflexibilities in iPlanet, and the terrible method of configuration for it, just makes it completely inferior to Apache.

Free Linux CD's?

[gir]

Does this mean that AOL will start sending me hundereds of CD's that contain something I want, linux?

Thanks AOL, saves me the time it takes to download ISOs.

Re:I can see it now

[Wntrmute]

Don't expect AOL to write free programs

Really?

Override Windows?

[pressman]

Taken from an article on MSNBC

The AOL online software, which consumers can install for free from the Web or a compact disk, is now designed to run on Microsoft's Windows operating system. But the AOL software could be configured to override Windows and launch a version of Red Hat's Linux operating system, sources said.

I hope this wouldn't be done by default. There had better be a lot of warnings indicating that the disk was about to be reformatted and that data could (and probably would) be lost.

Now, I have no problem with Windows being overwritten. I just hope end users are made fully aware of the potential risks to their data.

I don't get it

[glwtta]

Having read through much of this thread, I can agree with a lot of arguments from both sides, but one this I don't get - why do people think that AOL/TimeWarner (yes, not just AOL, that is an important distinction) is somehow a 'nicer' company than MS? Because they don't have the computer market by the balls?

It'd be nice if they took enough OS market share from MS to create serious competition for them, but what if - as some (undoubtedly a little overly excited) readers have suggested - they "crush" MS and, therefore become the ones dominating the OS market? Then you'll have a monopoly to make you cry for the good old days of the loveable and friendly Microsoft.

Mind you, none of that will happen of course, even if AOL/TimeWarner does buy RedHat. What really bothers me is the distro they picked (mostly likely going by the most known name, I presume), RH has always been the enterprise distro, used for serious applications and very rarely for the desktop - i.e. precisely the opposite of AOL's target audience. On the other hand, I am glad they didn't go for a better desktop distro, such as Mandrake (I am ready to listen to compelling arguments of why RH is a better desktop than Mandrake - oh, and for 7.2 vs 8.1; not 6.2 and 7.0 ;) ), because I just wouldn't be able to stand being an "AOL User"!

UK dialup - Re:Why, It's free already?

[RallyDriver]

I don't think that your point holds now, though it may have when you first signed up with AOL UK.

Over the holidays I was back to the UK and just switched my mother over to BT openworld's 24x7 thing - unlimited use via 0800 number, 15 quid a month all in, works fine with Linux (I even used RH7.2 GUI dialup config). I don't see a big benefit of using AOL over that.

Being stuck with AOL just because you have an aol.co.uk address is a different matter - I guess you could use AOL's mail server from someone else's dialup, but that adds cost and defeats the purpose

Maybe OFTEL should get involved and enforce "email portability" on ISP's?

Re:UK dialup - Re:Why, It's free already?

[RussGarrett]

...BT openworld's 24x7 thing - unlimited use via 0800 number, 15 quid a month all in...

Your mother is a lucky person :). Many people (including myself) have had great problems with the 24x7 thing (SurfTime Anytime) - it's extremely heavily oversubscribed, and (at least when I'd tried it, a few years back now) the dedicated Surftime tie-lines which link the exchanges with the ISPs' dedicated modem racks were almost constantly engaged.

Mind you, I tend to blame everything currently wrong in the world on BT...;) - Their ADSL service is really crap, and that's exacerbated by the poor quality of their local loops, which they don't seem to thrilled on spending much money maintaining or replacing. Thank God I have an NTL cable modem now...

New Red Hat Install Sound Clip

[commodoresloat]

"You've got root!"

My transparent system

[ca1v1n]

I love my transparent operating system (Linux). You can't sneak stuff in here like you can with windows. This could be a way to take Linux to the mainstream. AOL is good at making software that even my grandmother can use. If a lot of people are presented with the choice, maybe enough of them will switch, and then I'll get some freaking printer drivers, even if I'm not using their distro.

Re:Sure they are!

[ocbwilg]

By giving equally to all - no religion is established or even favored. A la give to the jews and the muslims.

Anyhoo - don't bother replying - I just wanted to have you read the constitiution and then Ill encourage you to find out where the idea of 'seperation of church and state' came from

Apparently I had you too busy frothing at the mouth to actually read what I wrote. Here I shall quote the relevant passage for you, since you obviously missed it: "The point is that there is a constitutionally mandated separation between church and state. As such, federal funding of religious groups is illegal, as the constitution is currently interpreted by the Supreme Court."

Note the relevant portion in bold. The US Supreme Court, also known as the highest legal authority in the nation, has coined the phrase separation of church and state. It is their interpretation of the constitution that derives the mandate of the separation. I never said "constitutionally stated," because only a moron actually believes that the words "separation of church and state" is in the constitution. I said "as the constitution is currently interpreted by the Supreme Court" which is the key here. The SCOTUS have interpreted the constitution to mandate the separation. If you can't cope with it...well...fuck off.

Re:Sure they are!

[ocbwilg]

Wait a minute...some guy tries to pick a fight with me over my sig, and I get modded flamebait for a rational, reasonable (although profanity-laced) response?

Will nobody beat some sense into these idiot moderators?

Re:I'm really not trying to troll here..

[arkanes]

Not sure what your problem is, actaully. When I go to doomworld with new opera, it renders EXACTLY as IE does. I can mail you my screenshot, if you like.

As for the DHTML... well, yeah, the JS support isn't all there yet. But assuming the sites usable without it, then it's not so much of a problem (I've only gone to a couple sites that were literally unusable in Opera, and I didn't like them much in IE or Mozilla, either.

Re:Switch to Linux? They're already on BSD ...

[Tsujigiri]

But the interesting question is, why did they want a GPL code base when they already had a *BSD code base. Not to mention that they could get either of them for free.

I would say that it would be RedHat's involvement in the embedded space that would particularly interest them.

They would gain the programming expertise to not only produce a Linux based desktop client/OS/environment for AOL, but the embedded skills to produce a complete set top box AOL client that could be combined into the Time Warner Cable system.

This would allow AOL to reach a lot of cable using people who otherwise would not bother with internet access. Then all they need is to license the Sun ONE Webtop suite (essentially web enabled star office) and they would be set.

Summary, or, A tale of two slashdot positions...

[msouth]

It is the best of news, it is the worst of news. It is another encroachment of evil corporations, it is a victory for Free Software. It is the spring of hope, it is the winter of despair. It is completely believable, it is completely incredible. It was modded down as overrated, it was modded up as funny...

(that strange sound you're hearing is Dickens spinning in his grave)

Hey AOL, have some WINE with dinner...

[msouth]

Here's what I think would go perfectly with this acquisition--put some serious resources into WINE, and then offer an "OS upgrade" (free of charge) with the next client upgrade. Keep all the user's windows apps, just run them with WINE under AOLinux. Now the whole computer is as easy to use and dependabe as AOL itself has always been...

or something like that.

Actually

[Uart]

Actually they bought Netscape for the Netscape.com portal site, which Steve Case had been lusting over for quite some time. They gave all of the software that came with the Netscape deal either to Sun or to the public, through Mozilla, which they proceeded to not use. AOL TimeWarner is a media company with no use for an operating system like Redhat Linux

There's kicking, and then there's kicking.

[fm6]

Actually, IE does support XML (which includes XHTML) with stylesheets. The tree dump you're complaining about is actually generated by an XSL stylesheet that's provided in an IE resource file, and used when the XML document doesn't specify a stylesheet -- which is actually more than Mozilla does in the same situation. IE breaks some CSS and XSL rules, of course, but so does Mozilla.

On the other hand, Mozilla does crash rather less often than IE 6. The only thing that keeps me from switching back is a really nasty memory leak.

So what stylesheet should I use?

[yerricde]

The tree dump you're complaining about is actually generated by an XSL stylesheet that's provided in an IE resource file, and used when the XML document doesn't specify a stylesheet

Thank you. (Hint to moderators: parent is Informative.) One question remains, though: which standard stylesheet should I use for XHTML documents? And why isn't it seeing the stylesheet I specify in <link rel="stylesheet" href="/de.css" /> ? (Yes, I do name stylesheets de.css.)

XHTML?

[fm6]

One question remains, though: which standard stylesheet should I use for XHTML documents?

A good question, and one that should be answered by someone who understands exactly what XHTML is for. That's certainly not me.

Before I commence my rant, let me offer what I do know. In XML documents, stylesheets are never optional. This includes XHTML. I assume the HTML Working Group has documented a set of standard style sheets, but I lack any inclination to research the matter. Judging from the Mozilla IRS XML demo (which also works in IE), there are at least two.

Why am I so indifferent to XHTML? Because it's just not very important. Before XML came along, HTML was the only way to do rich text in a web browser. But now (well, not right now -- neither IE nor Mozilla fully implement CSS or XSL, and we need both) you can use any XML application you want. And there are some very nice ones out there. Docbook is well established and has all the features you could want. (A web-compatible stylesheet would be a pain to write, but I think there will be several available soon enough.) DITA is a very promising XML app for API documents, my own particular interest. Many, many more are currently available or under development. As XML becomes more widely accepted, there will be schemas and stylesheets to suit every interest.

XHTML has to compete with all of these. Even if I had fonder memories of the the HTML Working Group's past efforts, I'd be sceptical that it can. Where's the call for a complex one-size-fits-all XML app?

The HTML Working Group claims that XHTML has two important features. It will work with older browsers that don't support XML, and it will make it easy for HTML hackers to learn XML. But neither claim makes sense. Most older browsers, with their hacked up little features, will just choke on XHTML. And HTML people who can't deal with the paradigm shift are not going to be helped by yet another over-complex spec.