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Warnings to Red Hat about AOL Buyout
andyo from O'Reilly
submitted linkage to a report he wrote over there where he urges Red Hat to
think twice
about letting AOL eat them.
Talks about GNN, as well as Netscape. I'm sure this isn't the last
word we'll hear on this subject either.
Winamp is still good and free. It's not called AOL Winamp, the presence of AOL is not there in any new version of winamp.
Sorry about nitpicking, but there is a minor presence of AOL. Try installing a newer version of WinAMP - it'll offer you to place some AOL icons on your desktop. If you decline, nothing will happen. This is a pretty fair deal as far as I'm concernced.
BUT - have you installed ICQ 2001 lately? Without even bothering to ask me beforehand, it neatly placed six AOL links pretty much everywhere where there's place for an icon - start menu top level, start menu in some group, quickbar, desktop, favorites, and some other places. I really had to do a global search for "AOL" to wipe 'em all out.
However, if AOL involvement is limited to randomly placing AOL links somewhere on the desktop which today's Linux users surely steer clear of anyway, I'm all for it.
Hate to break it you, but Linux != RedHat.
And, as someone pointed out in the previous discussion, Linus Torvalds owns the Linux trademark and various other legal rights. If RedHat would stray too far from what he has in mind he'll just ask them to stop calling it RedHat Linux, Linux is safe, and the world is a happy place once again.
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Thats not entirely true, because the actual owners of RedHat will always own the largest chunk of shares. This is how companies are able to stay in business while being publicly shared.
Theres 0 percent chance of them making it closed source.
They always supported open source because they dont sell the software itself, they sell the services. The subscribers of AOL pay for winamp, netscape, icq, and so on. You dont buy this stuff, its free.
I dont think we need to worry about them closing source.
As far as other companies, do you really think IBM would sit around and let AOL take over their Linux? Hell no.
IBM would most likely Buy Mandrake and compete with AOL and keep Mandrake Open Source.
IBM invests 1 billion in Linux every year, Mandrake only costs about 20 million from what i hear.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Actually if you get the nicemc plugin for winamp it can play almost any format for movies. I used to use it when I used windows. All they have to do is buy the guy's code and include it with the release. A much better player than Windows Media by any estimation.
MS got to where they are today by taking advantage of several business practices tied directly to their ability to "lock in" their users and partners. For MS, it's all about leverage, not to higher profits, but to doing what will lock in their users in ways that are profitable to them.
With Linux, that's impossible. Due to licensing and open technologies, you can't hide system calls, you can't obscure protocols or file formats. You can stamp up and down and insist that only you can change the technology, but nobody will realy listen, even if you're using an embedded box. (Thus the arise of the Tivo hacker.)
What MS has been trying to do is to extend their lock-in beyond just desktop software -- to servers (mission 40% accomplished), set-tops, portables, and now to data and the internet itself, first with MSN (where they learned it's not so easy) and now with .Net and Passport (where they'll learn they haven't learned their lesson yet, IMO).
If they were to be successful at creating a model that allows them the same sort of monopoly lock-in with set-top boxes as they have had with software, the big corporate media nonsense you see happening right now would be a pittance. Want to burn a copy of that Universal CD you're listening to? MS wants to be the company that gives you the permission - or prevents you - from doing so. Want to play XBox Madden 2005 against your friend in Springfield? MS will make it possible, with your Passport data from zone.com - and keep a record of what you've done.
This is all wild, idle speculation of course. My crystal ball has been totally wrong before. But MS is close to reaching the upper limit on the desktop, as far as how much revenue they can squeeze out of IT departments for forever upgrading Windows and Office. that's why they're now going to software "rental" plans, anti-piracy raids, and XP installation verification.
That's difficult stuff to push on a bust market that's a little skeptical of the promise of tech, but MS has no choice really; if their stock price does not continue to increase, their employees take the hit. For MS, it could be a case of grow or perish. They already gave more stock out once to counter the employee's needs when the stock stagnated for a while... they surely can't do that during an extended period of time.
AOL hasn't taken mozilla "closed source" yet, so why worry about Red Hat? In fact, they changed TO the GPL from their tri-licensing scheme, indicating they do understand the GPL and its advantages. Plus, AOL would get a much bigger advantage from hocking an open-source OS than an open source browser. Sure, Netscape has some enhancements over Mozilla, but I think that if AOLTW buys Red Hat, the open source community would have more serious worries than potential GPL violations.
Red Hat is (AFAIK) the only distribution with absolutely no closed source-software.
Red Hat used to sell some closed-sourced stuff (CDE & Motif come to mind), but they got the religion so hard that they dumped all of it (at least from the standpoint of the Linux environment - the Cygnus stuff is still closed, AFAIK).
Red Hat seemed to be the main reason that TrollTech came up with an open-source license for Qt on UNIX (KDE) - I remember the memos on their website.
Red Hat's fanatical adherence to this open-source philosophy has carried them through some really bad releases (7.0, for example). They also do not take adequate customer input for new release development (I will never run ext[23] again, for example), and the timing of the releases is driven more by marketing/accounting than by quality technology. But you know with a Red Hat distribution that all of it is open, and it will stay open, or it won't be in the distribution anymore.
From this perspective, I wish AOL would buy Mandrake, Suse, or Caldera, and leave the real gem alone.
As I'm sure most /. readers know, the webserver core of GNN is now known as AOLserver.
It's open sourced under the MPL and it's actually a pretty darned interesting hunk of Unix application code.
Personally, I do not care for the way that AOL tries to make their dial-up customers dependant on them. The browser brokenness that their customers and many webmasters have to endure ("AOL customers click here...") would probably not persist if AOL didn't lock less-savy users in the way that they do.
But they have dumped a bunch of money into some very cool stuff and have set it free with an astonishingly small number of strings attached, and I for one have trouble not being thankful for that much.
Back in 1998, both Netscape and Intel invested in Red Hat. See this Article at wired for details. Unless AOL have since sold the shares that Netscape acquired, they already have a piece of RH. The specific details of how much was invested weren't divulged, so who knows, this could have just been a marketing exercise...
AOL buying Red Hat is merely one more sign that AOL is looking to sock it to Microsoft in the core of their business - the OS market, and with AOL's huge amount of capital/resources, perhaps they'll be able to grow RH from a minority player to something much more prevalant. Perhaps the ultimate release of the AOL/Redhat OS would be a distant version of what we know now, but like Apple's OS X, if there's a unix based kernel at the core of the OS, it will let the tech-folk play dirty while the non-geeks can still have a simple-to-operate user experience.
I think Andy's wrong in saying that being bought by AOL is a recipe for failure. Here's a list of acquisitions and how they looked from the inside:
- GNN: That was a flop. No question. It was also one of the first buyouts AOL ever did, and frankly, few people at AOL had any idea what to do with the Internet at the time (like much of the rest of the world). The clumsy attempt at infrastructure integration also hurt. At the time, we were still running on an old, clunky, non-modular architecture that was largely unchanged from its days running Q-Link and PlayNet. Also, if I recall, GNN used BookLink's browser, because we hadn't integrated IE yet. I'm surprised the AOL GNN lasted as long as it did.
- Netscape: I think that's going to be a ninth-inning major success. I think getting the Netcenter home page was certainly one goal, but another was hiring lots of experienced Internet developers, and that's been a HUGE win. Also, now that the Microsoft exclusive contract has expired, I definitely think AOL's gonna end up replacing IE with Netscape. The latest Compuserve beta has the Gecko engine. CS has a few million members, so it's a natural testbed for a technology before it goes into full distribution in the AOL client. Bang.. out of nowhere comes W3C compliance and serious competition for IE.
As for AOL failing to pick up Netscape's vision, well... I'm not sure Netscape had any particular vision by the time we bought them. Heck, most of their executive team did stay on and continue to run the show. Any lack of vision is simply something AOL failed to add, not something they took from Netscape.
- CompuServe: Took a dying service running on 36-bit PDP-10s running custom-made hardware (!) and managed to transition the vast majority of it to a web-based service using the AOL client as a dialer/browser. In effect, this is really the service we tried to create so many years before, but it worked this time. True, you never hear anything about it, but it's still more successful than MSN, so who cares?
- Time Warner: Waaaaay too early to call, but I think there will be some wins. These are two huge companies, and they are being very careful about trying to force them to integrate for buzzword's sake. When I left AOL in August, there was a big push to use AOL's developers as TW's technology infrastructure group, they were setting up ways to find-the-smart-guy-in-the-other-company, and they had combined the help-desk and other support infrastructure. I'm not sure how much difference it will make to end customers, but there are certainly efficiencies they can get as a company.
And don't forget about the less well-known purchases:
- Navisoft. Resulted in AOLServer, one of the best-performing web servers ever, which is free and open-source.
- WinAmp. Still doing fine.
- Personal Library Systems (www.pls.com). Resulted in some excellent intelligent-text-search functionality in the AOL service.
I think Red Hat could be great for a few reasons, aside from the obvious potential for giving Microsoft a run for its money, and creating a workable UI for Linux. Most importantly, AOL has one of the most demanding infrastructures of any site anywhere. We were regularly finding bugs in every OS we ran, even the fault-tolerant ones. And the AOL approach to system operation is fairly rigorous, requiring a lot of maintenance and reporting tools and 24x7 hot-pluggability of everything.
Red Hat could really become a leader in stability, performance and monitorability if AOL is buying it for their own back end.
Anyway, food for thought.
Perhaps when mozilla gets to 1.0.0 they'll take another look at it?
The problem was not just the stability - until this past year, AOL was contractually bound to include *only* IE in their clients, in exchange for which Microsoft would include AOL on the Windows desktop. That contract was not renewed, and so AOL now has the freedom to do whatever they want browser-wise. The latest CompuServe beta has Netscape included, and I suspect if the stability is good the AOL client just might follow.
Red Hat stock would be traded for AOL-TW stock at some approved exchange rate. Even if Red Hat as we know it is completely gutted after the takeover, the board should approve it if the resulting AOL-TW stock their shareholders end up with will be worth more than what Red Hat stock would have been had the merger not happened.
AOL also acquired the Open Directory [dmoz.org] when they bought Netscape.
There were dire predictions from some Open Directory editors at the time. Up to now AOL has not interfered. Smart of them IMO.