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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.
Justin Frankel and his nullsoft team created the popular mp3 player for windows, winamp. It was free. It was good. AOL bought them. Justin and the nullsoft team are rich. 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.
Perhaps AOL buying Red Hat might not be a terrible thing. Besides, as with the many alternative mp3 players, there are other linux distrobutions out there.
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Check out my blackbox styles
AOL: "Yes of course."
Red Hat: "I have heard all of these nasty rumors that you are only using me for who I am and that you don't care about me at all. Is this true?
AOL: "Perhaps...Oh wait, I mean NO! NO! Who told you such things?"
Red Hat: "Your ex: Netscape."
AOL: "That stupid bitch."
*shrugs*
stupid advertisement
www.angstmonster.org
He doesn't adress the most plausible scenario, in which AOL is mearly picking up another weapon with which to threaten Microsoft. Like Winamp, Redhat woudl probably be let alone to continue development, but AOL could say, "Look BIll, we would like to see some AIM and AOL integration with Windows. We don't need your cheeseball OS, we can take our ball and go home."
Apparently, AOL hoped to capitalize on the Netscape home page, which most Netscape users left as their default when starting up their browser. That's about the flimsiest grounds I can think of for purchasing a whole company--along with the commitment to maintain and enhance its products.
Perhaps. But as many have pointed out before, one of Netscape's biggest corporate weaknesses was that they didn't capitalize on this, which virtually guaranteed an immediate and huge subscriber base for whatever on-line service they chose to offer. The fact that Microsoft chose to build a competing browser from the ground up and give it away for free, largely to do the same thing, vindicates this strategy. Remember this was when the dot-com upswing was well underway, and everybody and their uncle was turning their site into a portal ...
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
In the article it cites GNN and Netscape as companies that have failed under AOL. The difference is they were admitted failures before AOL even acquired them.
Red Hat on the other hand IS successful. It is a bit of a stretch to suggest AOL is going to kill something that is dying, because it didn't save others that were past their use-by date.
There's already been an AOL client for linux.
What's the best that could happen? They give Bill Gates a good, swift kick in the balls.
Sounds good to me.
Find free books.
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.
i have to admit that i myself have large reservations about capitalism as it is applied in North America, particularly in the freedoms whihc it allows to Corporations. But still, Open Source is about Information, not about little guys VS. corporations. It justhappens that the single largest opponent of Open Source and the GPL is also the single largest corporation(I don't have to say the name of the Beast, do I?).
As a community, we have to be careful about who we decide our enemies are. Linux has benefitted in the past from corporate involvement: Corel for Example. Red Hat(also Mandrake) has been held up as the flagship product of the Linux Community many times in terms of winning over the Windows/Apple user who doesn't want to take the time to understand all of the 'computer tech complexities' that they believe Linux involves. But we have to ask ourselves: If a large number of ex-Windows users get won over by AOL/RedHat Linux, have we really lost? It seems to me that a Linux user is a Linux user and that one more Linux user is one less customer for Bill and one less pocketbook supporting closed source.
Perhaps many of us would personally like to see AOL fall on it's face for unrelated reasons, but if they want to swing some of their weight around to back the Red Hat project, I don't think that we should necessarily get up in arms over it.
lysergically yours
For all the discussion about whether this would be good or bad for RedHat, linux, open source software, etc. an important point has been neglected. RedHat is a public company. It has an obligation to its shareholders.
If AOL offers enough money, RedHat is obliged to accept, even if they believe that being bought by AOL will mean the end of the RedHat distribution.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
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.
Wax-Museum Fire Results In Hundreds Of New Danny DeVito Statues
AOL for a big company has earned alot of Respect.
They have never directly put any other company out of business, and when they have they purchased the Company right before it did (CompuServe?)
AOL buys alot of companies that were doomed and saves them, for our sake, not really because its profitable (Netscape, Mirabilis, Nullsoft) all of these companies would have went out off business if AOL didnt save them.
The one buyout AOL made which i didnt like was the buyout of TimeWarner, I dont like Time Warner.
What I worry about is Time Warner controlling Redhat, if it were AOL(before the merger) there'd be nothing to worry about.
I'd sell Redhat if it were to AOL, but time warner worries me.
It could be an attempt to CONTROL the last grasp of freedom we have, Linux.
I dont know if its a good move to sell because I dont trust Time Warner, not because I dont trust AOL.
AOL seems to be on our side for the most part, as is IBM, I wouldnt mind IBM buying Redhat either.
By being on our side I mean they want to sell services to the consumer, not sell content.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
The fact that Microsoft chose to build a competing browser from the ground up and give it away for free, largely to do the same thing, vindicates this strategy.
It wasn't your point, I realize, but MSFT did not really build IE from the ground up - they started with several large bits of code and functionality from Spyglass, et al. ...)
And Netscape had been giving away their browser for free, as well (it's just they weren't bundling it with a desktop OS for which they had a monopoly
As far as Netscape not capitolizing on the traffic their portal generated; they did make some pretty nice ad revenue from it, it's just they got more interested in selling server software (because of the aforementioned lack of revenues from client software) and thought that'd save their bacon.
The points about buying the eyeballs of everyone who didn't change their default homepage (~90%+ of all users), and of getting a leverage point against MSFT are right on.
Think about this situation, We all could end up getting paid through AOL. AOL subcribers start paying alittle extra a month and this gets paid to us to write open source software (kinda like Mozilla)
I think for the open source economy it could be a good thing, IF AOL has good motives. Subscription for services COULD ruin Microsofts entire idea of "Pay for licenses and products"
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
I think you are overlookin AOL's control.
With major news magazines and cable channels under their control they can squash anyone in there way.
Yes, clueless AOL users still use the web, but they won't switch from AOL. For some AOL is great because it's so easy. Can they make linux that easy? Yes. Because they have the source code.
The only bad thing I can see coming out of this is Microsoft Apps for linux. Closed, of course, but IE 7.0?
I kinda support this, because if AOL gets into the linux game device drivers will suddenly pop-up out of no where. I don't think they will be writing them, or the Rhat team. But a bunch of closed source drivers will show up for things we never seen before. Winmodems? First time an AOL/Linux/GNU/TW user says his modem won't work, AOL will step up their power and get him a driver.
I think RHat would be left to do it's own thing, but it will have it's bigger brother AOL/TW to get the tough shit done.
I just hope someone watches the source code.
As far as AOL depending on MS... I don't think so. Every AOL/TW daughter company has a product to kill MS.
Windows = Linux
IE = Netscape
Windows Media Player = Winamp [no video, yet]
MSN = AOL
MSNBC = CNN
What else? These are going to be two heavyweights battling it out. Hopefully AOL wins. Yes, they are lame, but they will still have linux! [zealot? me? yes!]
It's gonna be a good fight to watch.
Get your Unix fortune now!
Suppose AOLTW bought Red Hat and took the software into Closed Source? Could they try this? Yes. Would they get away with it? One supposes that might depend upon what your definition of "get away with it" means. Who could afford to sue them back into compliance with the GPL? Would the GPL prevail? (It's never been tested in court.) Would tying a lawsuit up the courts for 5-10 years mean they "get away with it" win or lose?
If AOLTW took Red Hat closed source, Mandrake and other Red Hat based distributions would be up the creek. Mandrake (the slickest desktop Linux now) would have to change their base distribution, at great cost and delay. The resulting loss of momentum would surely hurt them and might even stagnate and kill Mandrake. This wouldn't be good.
What follows is a repost of a comment I made on Kuro5hin.
On Slashdot the news of potential purchase of RedHat by AOL has mostly been received with much rejoicing at the potential demise of MSFT's monopoly power.
I am curious as to why people don't fear AOL/TW. From where I sit they already own too much and already influence the perceptions of millions of people with their ownership of Netscape, Nullsoft, ICQ, Time magazine, CNN, WB television network, Time Warner records, Warner Bros. movies, and a lot more that I can't remember right now.
Microsoft may own the OS that most people run but AOL/TW controls the news magazines they read, the music they listen to, the movies and television shows they watch, and how they connect to the Internet as well as most of what they view while online.
Interestingly I'd like to see how a user modifiable OS like Linux interacts with AOL/TW's music and movie divisions that would like to see DRM support implemented in all software from operating systems to browsers. This should be interesting (kinda like NullSoft releasing Gnutella only for AOL to get mad)
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.
Everyone seems to be focusing on AOL trying to supplant Microsoft on the desktop. I don't believe AOL is arrogant enough to believe that they can beat 95% market-share.
.NET. Web services seems to be everyone's obsession these days, not competing on the desktop against a monopoly with unlimited cash.
Perhaps AOL is instead interested in Linux as a server platform which it could use to compete with
AOL certainly has the means to distribute red hat and they know how to cater to computer users. both could be very good for redhat.
aol CDs are EVERYWHERE, every stop at wal mart i grab a dozen or so for coasters and frisbees. imagine if redhat were like that. instead of d/ling the new distro, you just grab it on your way out of the grocery.
i know AOL is dumbed down and simple, but they may be able to streamline redhat and make it as simple to use as aol which would allow aol user types to switch to redhat.
One good thing that will come of this, no matter what happens, is that GNU/Linux will attain greater visibility. "Hmm, if AOL/TW is interested, maybe I should be looking into this..."
--Lawrence Lessig for Congress!
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.
Banish any thought from your head about open-source, about GNU, and even about Linux. AOL doesn't know about it (much), doesn't care about it (much) and has become large, rich and influential without it.
AOL wants it for two reasons:
1. So Microsoft can't buy it
2. So they can become larger, richer, and more powerful, which would be partly stymied by #1 above.
Let me explain. AOL/Time-Warner knows its business quite well, and its business has nothing to do with software and everything to do with charging people for access to content they desire.
They can't do that if Microsoft, through MSN, is charging people for access to THEIR content instead. Therefore, they must counter or thwart every attempt by Microsoft to eliminate other options by which consumers might get to ATW (not MS) content. Since Microsoft pretty much owns the desktop, and with the sellout of the Justice Department effort against them has pretty much a clear shot to extend that domination into online content.
And not just web content. We're talking interactive messaging, video-on-demand, online commerce and a bunch of other potentially-moneyed pursuits that AOL wants to have or keep for itself.
I think AOL realistically looked at it and realized that (as a piece I read on CNet the other day pointed out) most consumers online in Murka are not the techs and geeks of the old days, they're just McCitizens who (a) don't know about and (b) don't care about "the desktop," "the operating system," or even the hardware. They just wanna send pictures to their Aunt Edith, buy some stuff off Eddie Bauer, check out some choice pron, or watch "Sudden Impact" for eleventeenth time.
How they do it, they don't care. In the 1930s, nobody knew what tubes were in their Philco radios, they only wanted to hear Jack Benny. Or how about now -- can you name the theatre chain in which you saw "The Matrix?" Do you really care? What color was the wallpaper?
This means AOL has "network appliance" in their heads. They've watched the stuff being done with embedded Linux (like the DVRs that aren't all that popular yet but they work). They looked to see who was the big cheese, the Biggest Name In Linux, and it was RedHat. They buy RH, they can have them develop an AOL Network Appliance, basically a box you turn on and it delivers... AOL and Time-Warner content. No Microsoft anywhere to be seen, which means no chance for Microsoft to hijack future revenue streams.
I personally think AOL is torqued off about the whole go-round with Instant Messaging and vowed never to get dicked by MS like that again.
This is not the end of Open Source. Anyone who thinks so radically overestimates the influence of RH on the Linux world. Yes, it's a big influence, and a lot of the way things are can be traced to them, but if RH vanished tomorrow, someone else would step up. I wouldn't be surprised, as a matter of fact, if AOL didn't slurp up the company, then spin it right back out after working out some very favorable licensing deals and pulling in key development staff.
Their track record is strange: they pretty well fouled up Netscape by forgetting there are non-AOL users of the tool, but they left Nullsoft alone and they're as fine as ever. But the strength of open-source is... we don't "need" any one distribution. If we did, we'd have been hosed long ago.
Turtle
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Rotate the pod, please, HAL....
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.
I mean, alancox@aol.com? He'd rather shave his beard off...
It's kind of short sighted to look only at Winamp. Sure, it's a great program, and it's swell of them to distribute it. But they're doing it because they think it fits into their agenda.
And on the other hand, they're gutting Time Magazine and using it to shill their movies and records. Are people who pick the bottom line over journalistic integrity going to pick the integrity of a linux distro over that same bottom line?
I hope that this is just a pissing contest, and that they don't buy redhat. It's really hard to make a coherent argument that MS is more evil than AOL/Time-Warner -- these guys are the worst possible people to buy RH.
Gosling made an interesting point about Linux's licenses. Sure, in theory anyone could fork the kernel. But on a practical level, Linus gets to decide what goes in. There are enormous barriers in place that make forking key components very difficult, and RedHat pays an awful lot of developers -- the Cygnus group was a key aquisition. They control gcc.
Don't kid yourself -- if AOL buys RH, they'll have a lot of power over the Linux universe, as much as anyone. It won't be absolute, completely unchallengable power, but it will be real and substantial, and it will be wielded in AOL's interests, not in ours.
What's important? Beating MS at all costs? Is it worth it to have AOL ship a kazillion Linux cds to mopes around the world, even if the Linux on those CDs is philosophically different from what we have now?
Do we want the guys who are shooting for the $230/month cable bill standing on our necks?
Kudos to the folks at ORA for speaking up.
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.
I've been telling AOL to eat me for quite some time now.
Java is the blue pill
Choose the red pill
...with builtin copy protection, etc. AOL/Warner would own your linux box and control a good part of what you did with it. If legislation passes (the SSSCA or whatever it's called) then Redhat, with AOL at the controls, would become the only valid version of linux in the USA (and other contries the USA bullies into passing similar laws) because it would have that builtin copy protection crapola.
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
But why this hostility to AOL as an investor? Their funding of Mozilla seems to have benefitted the open source community greatly. Without that, I doubt Netscape or Mozilla would still be around in any form.
If RedHat investors find it advantageous to sell the company, I don't blame them if they do. RedHat's business model never really impressed me, and it might well be better off as an AOL subsidiary, kept alive as a hedge against Microsoft. And given that Linux is GPL'ed and that AOL has been reasonably well-behaved in the past, I don't see a problem. Let's give these people a break.
HanzoSan writes:
.Net, but I wouldn't get too friendly with them: they might just bite.
> Time Warner however, is dangerous, isnt Time Warner a part of the
> RIAA? Their influence in Linux is what would worry me.
They (the Warner part) are a member of that barrel of sharks called the MPAA (see http://www.mpaa.org/about/), and as such, are part of all the digital rights idiocy that has been going on. That puts them in the dangerous to evil category, as far as Slashdot is concerned. I'm not that fond of Red Hat personally, but as a major Linux distributor, I think that being bought out by a major content conglomerate would be a "bad" thing. AOL/TW has their uses as a foil to Microsoft's
Despite the silly incedent with a part of IBM supporting putting DRM into harddrives, overall I think they'd be a better choice for a buyer. IBM has already done the evil empire thing, to the point of playing footsie with Nazi Germany. They got slapped down hard for it, and have had a chance to learn from their experiences. While I wouldn't trust the new IBM 100%, they are by far a kinder, gentler, wiser company now. Having their own distribution would benefit them with the ability to take Linux to the point where they could use it for everything they do. Having the IBM brand on Linux would further legitimize it. Both could benefit.
"What do you think Mothra would do?" - Moll, "Mosura" 1996
You statethey pretty well fouled up Netscape by forgetting there are non-AOL users of the tool...
Posting from Mozilla on Debian, I have no idea what you people are talking about. Netscape makes fine browsers that are far from dead. There are enough people, such as the Nuclear Regulatory Commision, www.nrc.gov, using their server software with good results for me to not understand that either. While Netscape is far from the "asshole in the middle" that some people might want it to be, the rest of us are happier dealing with the one sphinkter they we own and don't think of immitating it. Did AOL fire everyone at Netscape? Is that what I'm missing? While that would be sad, the remaining people seem to be able to continue providing an excellent bunch of software to the world using Open standards and free software.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
I don't want AOL controlling gcc.
Actually, I think that's the least frightening prospect of the whole thing, since you KNOW the AOL executives are gonna leave that thing alone. There's no strategic market value or power in a compiler, so even if AOL has evil motives or just dumb ideas, the compiler itself is going to remain safe.
And if AOL dev had any control over gcc, I can think of quite a few bugs that would have been fixed much, much more quickly. (The LONG_MAX nightmare comes to mind.)
http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20020120
each company that has attempted to broaden their product line to attack MS has LOST
First, realize we're not sure AOL cares about Red Hat for the desktop at all. They may be interested in future net-appliances (people just don't give up on those, do they?). Or they may want it for the server farms. Either way, I suspect the goal is not to attack MS, per se, but to ensure that AOL is not dependent on the whims (and anticompetitive aggressions) of MS. Big difference.
It's never good to have your core business dependent on suppliers that (a) might not be around tomorrow or (b) won't necessarily act in your best interests. Why do you think there's a mix of HP-UX and Solaris running at AOL? Certainly not because of the similarities and ease of porting. Partly for the specific hardware configs they offer, yes, but largely to avoid a single point of (business) failure.
If Red Hat is, or can be made, stable enough, for AOL's server platform, then it's a great choice to further diversify the servers. But anyone who's been burned by a Cygnus support contract - and I suspect that would include anyone who HAS one - knows that you can't depend on them for fixes. Gotta buy them.
Similarly, if I were still at AOL, I'd be worried about what Microsoft will do for me in the future. IE integration bugs? Windows bugs or limitations that just happen to affect the AOL client? Remember DR-DOS.
Assuming you can create a novice-friendly desktop environment, which AOL excels at, getting Linux on the desktop could be a stable long-term alternative, because AOL could then ensure that the whole package works together. Any AOL-limiting bugs could be instantly fixed.
Sounds like a huge number of potential upsides for AOL, both short and long term.
...and no room for the little guys. Don't you see what could happen? The problem isn't another MS, or even two MS corps controlling the market; the problem is that two extremely large corporations will hold control of everything we see. AOL/Time Warner is a media giant in and out of the computer world. Microsoft IS the computer world and has its own media platforms in and out of it as well. The problem with AOL/TW buying RedHat is that this giant will get bigger. Better press, better distribution, and a good face; Mozilla and RedHat Linux would be platform examples of good community efforts ... that take focus away from the giant's control of what we see on monitors and televisions.
Here's where the American Dream(TM) dies: with corporations controlling everything, the amount a small firm can change lessens. By letting these two companies get bigger and bigger, we let the smaller guys get pushed around.
RedHat has a huge influence on the Linux/Free Software community, like it or not. If AOL/TW buys it, I guarantee AOL/TW will influence RedHat and therefore the Linux/Free Software community.
If you're watching AOL, and your intentions really are true (ie, get into the Linux world for a complete CD distribution/coaster), buy Mandrake, the 'easy to use' distro. Or perhaps Lindows, or some distribution of your own. Wouldn't the announcement of AOLinux be enough without needing to own the most influential of Linux pushers? Look at what IBM is doing! Look, no buyout; hell, they don't even have an IBM-brand distro (AFAIK).
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.