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Could Microsoft Buy Red Hat?
An anonymous reader writes "Various news sources including ZDnet are today reporting that Microsoft is considering buying out Red Hat, speculating that 'Microsoft could see Red Hat's acquisition as a nice way to undermine IBM, but might not consider that a sufficient reason to do it,' adding that Red Hat is however '...a company that wants to be Microsoft and, like Microsoft, makes its living packaging and selling other people's ideas.'" That description seems to miss the key point that Red Hat releases the software they package and sell as Free software, and that both companies pay coders to create and improve software in the first place.
Isn't ZDNet a company that packages and "resells other people's ideas" in its news reports? And didn't it try to become a news monopoly, like every other Web news rollup play in the 1990s? I guess that makes them an authority on monopoly abuse plagarism. Red Hat, of course, gives away its packaged ideas for free, and doesn't even have a monopoly to abuse.
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make install -not war
Sheldon J. Plankton plots to buy-out the Krusty Krab from CEO Eugene H. Krabs, to obtain the legendary Krabby Patty recipe and establish a monopoly in Bikini Bottom's fast food sector. Oh wait... ;-)
Via la Chum Bucket !!!
Yet MS seems to be announcing future features that are already in OSX and KDE. Probably because that's all they have in the bootom of their box. As you say they haven't thought up anything that hasn't already been done.
Microsoft announced features that they wanted to put into Longhorn well in advance of it's release.
and MacOSX and KDE mimmicked them. Not quite to the same caliber, i.e. Microsoft usually builds features that are useful to other developers as well as endusers. But close enough that to the endusers anyway, the basic concept was there.
I guess it depends on how you define innovation. Thinking up the idea, or shipping with it?