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Alan Cox to Leave if RH AOL Buyout Happens?
According to MartinG,
Alan has posted to the LKML and said "Im
insulted that anyone believes I would continue working for RH if aol/time
warner owned them. " This of course refers to the
Red Hat/AOL
Buyout Rumors that we have been
talking about
all weekend.
Hope this helps,
MSBob
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
It seems that the Linux fanatics want to have their cake and eat it to.
They want their OS to remain free, yet they want more companies to back it. Everybody wants a paycheck for themselves but God forbid that anyone make a dime from Linux. Everyone works for someone, yet companies are evil things that ought not to intrude on Linux. They want everyone to acknowledge the superiority of Linux yet are unwilling to make entry into the Linux world any easier than it currently is.
This is what's commonly known as a pipe dream.
WinAMP and ICQ were bought by AOL/TW and prosper today. Sure, Netscape has tanked, but the argument could be made that they were damaged goods to begin with.
Do I like AOL/TW? Of course not. I think they're a bunch of left-leaning liberal hand wringers who would sell you out in a second if it made them money. That's why I don't they'd be stupid enough to buy RH and then fuck with it. They know everyone would leave in droves. AOL/TW would just love to put more pressure on Microsoft. This is a political move, if you ask me.
After all, consider that something good MIGHT come out of this, would you? RH could use more money to attract more talent, do more marketing, and improve their product. That would lead to better, more widespread uses of Linux. Isn't that what we all want? Or do we want Linux to remain the purview of server room necromancers who bathe every other week if they think about it?
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
...but AOL is pretty big and might be able to grab even MS employees.
Hell, AOL has the cash to throw around to clone him if they got a piece of that lovely hair.
I can see how he says he would be insulted, in a way, but is it for the right reasons?
Do you really think that AOL would fire the whole staff and replace them with monkeys? No, they would keep most everyone and not touch the company until they've watched in action for a while. It's not like they are buying a cable network.
Is he just going to quit because AOL is 'lame'? IMHO, that is a silly reason. I mean, that is a big thing to do in your life because you are 'too cool'.
This is just the first thing I thought when I read this.
Is this a record for smallest story on slashdot? He only has one sentence, yet it will the most replies ever
Get your Unix fortune now!
Some things just can't be fixed.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
Sure AOL bought Winamp, ICQ, and Netscape and left them mostly unchanged... but that's the problem! Can anyone honestly think of any real improvements made to any of these pieces of software since AOL bought them out? Winamp added that useless browser and that's it... ICQ added "cute" icons and turned into the first spam IM service... Netscape, how long did it take to come up with a new browser that still can't compete with IE? AOL also bought out the cable companies and look what's happened there. Prices are going up. (Read the $230 a month ./ story from last week) Service levels are going down. AOL\TW will just use Redhat as leverage against Microsoft, they aren't going to bring Linux to the desktop! Get real people! As far as I'm conserned AOL is a MUCH bigger threat then MS ever was.
Business is business is business, and when Redhat went into business, they went into business which means things like this buy-out can happen. Alan Cox is just whining because he's a geek and he doesn't want to deal with capitalistic reality. He can make all the complex, serpentine, philosophical excuses he wants to make -- but in the end he's just a whiner.
Let him whine. I'll still use Linux, with or without the support of Alan Cox. One man does not an operating system make (not even Linus).
It was good for Mozilla and Netscape 6.x when jwz left. It was under him that the project scope kept changing, the notion of scheduled milestone releases went out the window, and most of the good longtime coders left.
It was after he left that the team began releasing frequent milestone builds, stopped adding major new features to the project plan, and.. showed signs of having a plan.
The Mozilla/Netscape 6 project is still a mess, with bug fixes and addition of missing features slated for a given milestone pushed off to infinity on a regular basis. But without jwz, it at least resembles a project and has produced what is now a decent browser and mail/news client.
Mr. Zawinski is now running a bar, and the world of software development is blissfully free of his project management "skills".
Alan Cox--who unlike jwz is a really sharp coder and a good project leader--is showing himself to be just as much a child, spoiled and twisted by too much time spent in academic computing, shooting his mouth off before he's got a real situation to evaluate. Hey. If AOL turns Red Hat into an unpleasant place by changing its focus in distressing ways, or by engaging in massive, traumatic waves of layoffs, of course he'd be right in leaving. If Red Hat lets him pick his projects and AOL instead wants him to port the AIM stock ticker to KDE or sit in meetings all day, of course he'd be justified in leaving.
But this knee-jerk aversion to a parent company just because it's a big company? Or because of AOL's commitment to actual ease of use that Cox, jwz and RMS all abhor?
What if AOL is trying to assemble all the pieces necessary to go after Microsoft with Free Software? Doesn't Red Hat also employ some Postgres maintainers? If they bought Staroffice/Openoffice from Sun, they'd be on their way to something mighty compelling. If an AOL-owned Red Hat lets him continue working on low-level kernel pieces and device drivers while they fund an aggressive desktop-oriented Red Hat, why wouldn't he want to come along for the ride? Because they also own an old-line record label and film studio with rabidly protected intellectual property? Okay.
I wish the best of luck to any company, school or organization that wants these guys on its payroll.