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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.
Linux out in the open, with big company backing?
Or, are we going to start up with the "elitest want Linux to stay small"?
Linux (even the RedHat distro) has the GPL protecting it. Even AOL/TW's big lawyers can't break it. Why is it such a bad thing??
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
but you forgot to give a reason.
AOL bought ICQ, AOL bought Winamp.
Did anyone notice that one of those products did really change to the worse (besides the ads in ICQ, which is ok I guess because they are not that annoying)?
No, no one noticed, because they didn't.
But what changed is that the coders of ICQ and Winamp got nice paychecks.
So, Alan where is your problem?
Don't like opensource OS coders who dare to make money?
Jamie Zawinski left netscape, as shown here and here shortly after it was AOLized. Here are some highlights from those pages:
April 1st, 1999 will be my last day as an employee of the Netscape Communications division of America Online, and my last day working for mozilla.org.
I think AOL still has all the stigma that it always has, as far as image goes. My friends keep saying ``jwz@aol.com'' and then laughing uncontrollably...
AOL is about centralization and control of content. Everything that is good about the Internet, everything that differentiates it from television, is about empowerment of the individual.
I don't want to be a part of an effort that could result in the elimination of all that.
It is now a brand. Like Coke, or Tommy Hilfiger.
Thank you, AOL, for pointing this out to us.
If he does leave, he loses his chance to put the resources of an enormous company like AOL/TW behind the development and acceptance of Linux. To me this doesn't seem like the smartest move he could make.
There's plenty of time for him to leave afterwards if it looks like AOL/TW is going to do a Bad Thing, but up to and until that time, I think it's in his best interests, and Linux's best interests, to take advantage of the possible benefits of being backed by one of the largest, richest companies on the planet.
End of lesson. You may press the button.
If RH is acquired, then you better believe that AOL/TW would drive RH to become a company that supported the AOL/TW initiative (i.e. world domination by AOL/TW).
AOL/TW is an 800lb gorilla.
MS is an 800lb gorilla.
The RH acquisition would be like giving one of them a dart-gun: while it may hurt, it would stil only be a little weapon.
As a consequence, RH's gameplan would change from Red Hat Domination via Linux to AOL/TW world domination. Linux is dropped from the big picture, and only becomes a little piece of the puzzle.
Having Alan leave for a company that would support the World Domination thru Linux initiative (like Mandrake or SuSe, or Debian) would be a good thing for Linux.
And this is exactly the biggest danger of AOL buying a company - and in one sense, it IS what happened with Netscape.
Don't worry about AOL taking an established, successful company with a real future and running it into the ground. Hasn't happened yet. (Netscape, GNN, CompuServe were already dying when we bought them. CompuServe is a relative success, GNN couldn't be saved, and Netscape has a new lease on life now that the MS contract is dead.)
Don't worry about AOL taking open stuff and making it proprietary. Hasn't happened yet either. (Everything that's proprietary at AOL started that way, and has slowly, if much-too-slowly, grown more open.)
Don't worry about TW's influence on the AOL side. There isn't any. Steve Case and Bob Pittman run the show.
Worry, instead, about people who simply don't want to be associated with AOL, cuz it isn't cool. Is it immature and short-sighted? Probably. Are geeks known for their maturity, social competence and rational decision-making? Not particularly.
Too bad, because when AOL buys a smaller company, that's usually what they're really buying - the brains behind it. Redgate got us Ted Leonsis. WAIS got us Brewster Kahle for a while. Netscape got us hundreds of net-savvy software engineers. Ditto CompuServe. Medior got us Barry Schuler - well, can't win them all.
It's stupid for Red Hat employees to announce they'll leave simply because they don't want a triangle with an O above their main entrance, but if they do, then THEY will have killed Red Hat, not AOL.
I get on very well with my boss.
I regularly grab a beer after work with him.
I also often tell him to fsck off if he gives me work I don't like.
It's a good thing and its based on honesty and mutual respect.
If you don't have that, then you have to realise that many bosses will do whatever they can to exploit you as far as possible, and that old bullshit "putting the food on the table" is one of the buggest reasons It keeps on happening. Can't you see that if people weren't such cowards as to cave in to the "but how am I gonna pay the bills" argument then bosses would be forced to do more of what made their employees happy. All you "food on the table" bods are part of the problem allowing companies to become greedy and exploitative in the first place.
If your employer knows that you fear leaving them, they are suddenly in an extremely powerful position over you.
-- MartinG To mail me: echo kewyjlcxyzvjfxbqwh | tr bcefhjklqvwxyz
Would anyone bat an eyelash if the potential buyer is Microsoft and Alan Cox said this?
Well, many people feel that AOL/TW is just as bad as Microsoft... Microsoft is trying to control the computer OS and application space, AOL/TW is trying to control virtually EVERYTHING you see, hear or do ALL DAY EVERY DAY. Both have extremely questionable business practices, both abuse their positions of power. Which is worse?
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
Yeah, cause if they were right-leaning conservative hand wringers, they'd stand up for Truth, Justice, and the American Way, and never sell out the Linux community just to make a quick buck!
The Free desktop that Just Works
Here are 11 reasons why AOLTW might be considering buying Red Hat.
AOL/TW (The TimeWarner part is very important, this isn't your daddy's AOL anymore, where elitest-non-AOL-attitude might be the primary driving force in Alan's decision) is not just any old large company.
As I mentioned in another post (a reply, actually), if the company considering buying AOL was Microsoft, nobody would bat an eyelash about Alan Cox saying this stuff. Well guess what? AOL/TimeWarner is just as bad, if not worse, than Microsoft. Not only are they wanting to control computer use as much as Microsoft does (just doing a poorer job of it), but they want to control virtually everything you do! Do you have any idea how much of everything you see at the movies or on TV or on the web is eventually controlled by AOL? In many ways they are much more powerful than Microsoft has ever been.
AOL/TW (again, TW being important) is directly involved in much of the backassward technology & lawmaking that Slashdotters decry every day: DMCA, copyrighted CDs, SDMI...
If you REALLY disagree with those laws and the very idea of huge media conglomerations controlling everything we see, how could you possibly suggest someone should just shut up and be happy working for AOL/TimeWarner?
I'm one of the people who often attack Linux users and programmers for their stupid elitest attitudes, but in this case I say bravo, Alan.
AOL will not be happy to have competing version of Linux and they will do what is needed to "standardise" Linux after they have bought it.
And that will be their attitude - they will not act as if they've bought just one distro. Think about why they want to buy RH. They know that, to the extent that the public know about Linux at all, they think of RH (at least in the US). So they are, in the eyes of the general public, buying Linux. For god's sake, how many posts have there been on /. over the years complaining about people equating RH and Linux!?
With this approach, what do you think AOL's attitude to SuSe and Mandrake will be - a spirit of healthy competition? Does they sound like AOL/TW to you?
AOL's one worry in the world is losing the content control war to MS. They will want, and try to make, one, standardised, non-MS, copy-regulated, platform for their content and that is why they want Linux - because they can't have Windows. Standardised means not letting "little guys" do their own Linux and they will do what it takes to get rid of them.
Do not fall into the Charybdis of AOL just to avoid the Scylla of MS!
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
It's crazy to think Alan is "cocky" for saying he would not work for AOL. I worked at CNN.com when AOL bought Time Warner, and I left before the deal could go through because I didn't want to work for AOL.
Lest you think I'm just another lunatic, about 15 of the 20 developers I worked with also left around that time. Of the developers that remained, only one of them was a developer of any quality, and he was big into MS tools.
My point is, working for a faceless conglomerate is one thing. Working for one with significant philosophical differences from your own is another thing entirely.
- Vincit qui patitur.
What a strange assumption I keep reading, that AOL-Time Warner actually have any interest in Red Hat Linux in particualr, or GNU/Linux in general. What advantage would that give them, distributing an OS that actively encourages its users to get a clue and consider alternatives?
What I'd expect to see is for them to buy up a bunch of developers (Red Hat or any other) and set them to work in the bowels of the AOL/TW Death Star producing something based on a Linux kernel, with most of GNU stripped out, no daemons, no package manager, no compiler, a brand new GUI, AOL-only apps with built in copy restrictions and automatic billing (already got your credit card number), and a daemon that hunts down and kills non-AOL approved processes, all for your security and convenience. I expect it to ship branded as "AOL", not "Red Hat" or even "AOL Linux". Possibly "Secure Linux" if they want to resell it as a perfect Son of SSSCA compliant implementation.
Impossible, you say? How much would it cost to develop? Ten million? Twenty? Fifty? A hundred million? A billion dollars? To control the desktop and the distribution and billing of content before Microsoft get in there first with Blackcomb and Homestation, that's pocket change.
They don't need any particular distro to do that, they just need developers. So run Alan, run for the hills, and take as many as you can with you.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
IANAlan Cox, but what 99% of the people in this discussion fail to realize is that this probably has nothing to do with the future of Redhat/Linux, but with the principles involved.
Fact: Alan Cox has serious issues with the DMCA, both practical and philosophical.
Fact: AOL/Time-Warner, being an industry leader in the area of movies and such, is a proponent of the DMCA and other similar laws.
Alan, being a man of principle, probably feels that the merger would be a bad thing becuase of this, and his working in the resulting company would comprimise things that he believes in. Unlike many people in this world (and, it seems, on slashdot), he feels the finding a new job is the proper course of action in this case.
As an aside, the non-Alan consequences of this are interesting - AOL/TW owns RH, in order for RH to play DVDs (which is an important feature of a modern desktop OS) it needs to violate the DMCA, AOL/TW supports the DMCA. So with AOL/TW owns a product that endorses breaking the DMCA, or they give RH (and by that, perhaps all of Linux/x86) a "legal" (if not open) method to play DVDs.
_sig_ is away
Sigh. The GPL grants rights to copy that ordinary copyrights don't. If the GPL does not hold no copyright holds. The GPL has been defended and no one has dared go to court because they knew they would loose.
Furthermore, the important part of Red Hat are not protected by the GPL. Neither their name and credibility, nor their customer base is GPLed. (In fact, I don't even know if all their software is - AFAIK SuSEs Yast is closed source, e.g.)
As far as I can tell, you have never used Red Hat or looked at any of their source. Most is GPL. Show me one "important" piece that is not.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.