Anyways most of what is RedHat is a free open-source program. So what would Microsoft be buying.
1. A building.
2. Its Employees (many of which would jump ship)
3. Some private code
4. The name (would would immediently be destroyed in many peoples eyes when Microsoft buys it)
This would effectivly be the worlds largest waste of money. While it may have some small long term goal of shutting down their compitition. Microsoft share holders would NEVER go for a billion+ dollar aquasition that would have almost nothing tangable about it.
I agree with you with the one addition that I don't think that RHAT's customers are bystanders. I would think that service contracts run both ways -- the customers expect a certain level of support and service. I would also expect that a Microsoft buyout would start the alarm bells ringing immediately.
RHAT's customers already went with a non-Microsoft operating system, which must mean that they made that choice in spite of the availability of Microsoft products. I would anticipate that one of two scenarios might play out:
1) Customer has contract that they do not want to change/move or that they cannot change/move to another vendor. Customer makes sure that new owner follows every aspect of existing contract (which may specify releases of pending software - I don't know how these things are written).
2) Customer has contract that allows them to switch vendors upon this type of change of control. Customer does due diligence, taking into account the fact that they are already using Linux.
For (1) above, Microsoft must fulfill the signed contracts (granted, just to the letter), which means that the immediate payoff for buying RHAT as far as movement over to 'their' OS's is muted. For (2) above, they essentially flushed a couple billion for the privilege of pitching their software to the newly liberated former customers of RHAT that originally stayed away from Microsoft products.
I don't see this being anywhere close to something that would payoff for MS...
I don't have any experience with this and IANAL, but if the working terms of an agreement change materially (I would think change of ownership would do this), don't many of them become subject to review by both parties? I suppose that depends on how the agreement was originally worded, but I would think that there may be actual legal ramifications that would take the bite out of a change of ownership/control play by Microsoft.
Hell, Slashdot is the only place in the *world* where you'll see somebody argue that Windows XP is a bad operating system because, at one point, Microsoft released BOB.
Are you suggesting that those people were wrong?!!?
There is one issue that I'd bring up that kind of corresponds to your point. Although someone who is familiar with two or more OS's may be able to transition between them, there are the 'hardcoded' expectations external (web apps, media file formats, etc.) that make Windows a bit more entrenched. This is the major problem I see right now for the future of all non-Windows operating systems on non-computer-geek owned computers.
Even if you harmonize on a distro, you will still be fighting to get people off of.WMP, the handy text or html editor that pops up on ebay/yahoo/etc. for Windows only,.doc,.xls, etc. (I know that OO.org can do much with these last few, but that info is not broadly available to the people we are talking about.)
That means they make $1.30 per CD track, versus $0.65 per digital track.
Are you starting to see why they might think the pricing is "too low" for the digital tracks? It has nothing to do with what it costs, it has everything to do with how much money they can bring in from CDs versus digital tracks.
Again, I am not defending the RIAA, only business logistics.
[snip]
Assuming this is correct, the only thing I think is overlooked above is the fact that every story about buying music that I've read lately (granted that most of it is anecdotal) indicates that people who normally don't buy much music have been tempted back to purchasing a reasonable number of tracks from the online sources.
I know this is the case for me. I *think* that I bought my last CD about 6-7 years ago. I listened to other outlets or listened to my CD collection, but I wasn't buying much because I didn't see the value in buying a $15 CD for the few tracks that I was passingly interested in. Lately, I have been spending $3-$8 monthly (I know that's not much, but it's a lot more than $0 and it's a monthly number, which means it adds up to much more than my 1 CD in 6 years rate). If prices go up, I might continue to spend some money, but I know it would slow down the rate significantly. These are sales that the music companies would never have gotten through traditional channels. These are the types of sales that can make the $0.65/track still a better deal for the music companies compared to $1.30/track in the analysis above.
One other thing that I would add is that buying tracks ala-carte has also increased my interest in some bands enough to start looking at buying CDs. These sales (at the higher per track price, if you buy the analysis above) also would not be forthcoming without the cheaper downloads. Increasing the price of those downloads will, IMHO, cut into sales of not only the digital tracks but the CD sales to people like me (using a few popular digital tracks to determine if the full CDs are worthwhile).
One of the other responses (sorry, I'm too lazy to look it up right now) suggested changing file permissions to prevent the user account from overwriting your files. I would suggest something possibly more convenient in that if you know you're going to be 'wandering' the web, use a separate login id. I do this a bit on my home machine and for 80% of my web use, it works well and doesn't expose anything but a 'throw-away' account to the world. I'm sure somebody will come up with a reason that I'm a lamer (I never professed to be a hardcore geek) for doing this, but it seems that you could minimize the exposure of your personal files by not using your personal account for random browsing. For known websites that you use often, use any account. For looking up unknown info, use the web account and save what you need into a shared directory to be accessed by other accounts, if need be.
The comment about functioning clipboard and cut-and-paste is the biggest thing to consider, IMHO. I have installed X11 (the one from Apple - too lazy to look up what the official name is...) and I installed OO.o. Everything went fine as far as the installation was concerned. It acts (as far as I can tell so far) just like the Windows version (and this is a good thing - I have that version on my PC).
It acts ok until you try to move information out of the X11 area. At that point you might just as well be writing everything longhand. I understand that I have gotten my moneys' (smirk) worth from the application and I will use this for now because I don't really want to go to MS for the light amount of work that these applications would see on my home machine. The issue is that this application acts as if it is in a vacuum as far as communication goes. Who wants to save a separate file every time you want to move something from one (OO.o) window to another (OSX)? Given that, I can't use it as a default office application, so I will be looking elsewhere (including the full MS version).
Slashdot Mirror
As a result you are capped at communicating with the person accross the street when you really could communicate with them at blazing speeds.
Wouldn't want to ruin that pasty greenish-white skin tone by going outside and across the street to chat with the neighbor face-to-face, now would we?
I suspect he's doing a lot more than yelling. ;-)
He might be talking to another chip vendor to apply some strategic pressure...
What's a 'smuck'?
Perhaps you meant 'schmuck'?
Anyways most of what is RedHat is a free open-source program. So what would Microsoft be buying.
1. A building.
2. Its Employees (many of which would jump ship)
3. Some private code
4. The name (would would immediently be destroyed in many peoples eyes when Microsoft buys it)
This would effectivly be the worlds largest waste of money. While it may have some small long term goal of shutting down their compitition. Microsoft share holders would NEVER go for a billion+ dollar aquasition that would have almost nothing tangable about it.
I agree with you with the one addition that I don't think that RHAT's customers are bystanders. I would think that service contracts run both ways -- the customers expect a certain level of support and service. I would also expect that a Microsoft buyout would start the alarm bells ringing immediately.
RHAT's customers already went with a non-Microsoft operating system, which must mean that they made that choice in spite of the availability of Microsoft products. I would anticipate that one of two scenarios might play out:
1) Customer has contract that they do not want to change/move or that they cannot change/move to another vendor. Customer makes sure that new owner follows every aspect of existing contract (which may specify releases of pending software - I don't know how these things are written).
2) Customer has contract that allows them to switch vendors upon this type of change of control. Customer does due diligence, taking into account the fact that they are already using Linux.
For (1) above, Microsoft must fulfill the signed contracts (granted, just to the letter), which means that the immediate payoff for buying RHAT as far as movement over to 'their' OS's is muted. For (2) above, they essentially flushed a couple billion for the privilege of pitching their software to the newly liberated former customers of RHAT that originally stayed away from Microsoft products.
I don't see this being anywhere close to something that would payoff for MS...
I don't have any experience with this and IANAL, but if the working terms of an agreement change materially (I would think change of ownership would do this), don't many of them become subject to review by both parties? I suppose that depends on how the agreement was originally worded, but I would think that there may be actual legal ramifications that would take the bite out of a change of ownership/control play by Microsoft.
Hell, Slashdot is the only place in the *world* where you'll see somebody argue that Windows XP is a bad operating system because, at one point, Microsoft released BOB.
Are you suggesting that those people were wrong?!!?
There is one issue that I'd bring up that kind of corresponds to your point. Although someone who is familiar with two or more OS's may be able to transition between them, there are the 'hardcoded' expectations external (web apps, media file formats, etc.) that make Windows a bit more entrenched. This is the major problem I see right now for the future of all non-Windows operating systems on non-computer-geek owned computers.
.WMP, the handy text or html editor that pops up on ebay/yahoo/etc. for Windows only, .doc, .xls, etc. (I know that OO.org can do much with these last few, but that info is not broadly available to the people we are talking about.)
Even if you harmonize on a distro, you will still be fighting to get people off of
One of the other responses (sorry, I'm too lazy to look it up right now) suggested changing file permissions to prevent the user account from overwriting your files. I would suggest something possibly more convenient in that if you know you're going to be 'wandering' the web, use a separate login id. I do this a bit on my home machine and for 80% of my web use, it works well and doesn't expose anything but a 'throw-away' account to the world. I'm sure somebody will come up with a reason that I'm a lamer (I never professed to be a hardcore geek) for doing this, but it seems that you could minimize the exposure of your personal files by not using your personal account for random browsing. For known websites that you use often, use any account. For looking up unknown info, use the web account and save what you need into a shared directory to be accessed by other accounts, if need be.
The comment about functioning clipboard and cut-and-paste is the biggest thing to consider, IMHO. I have installed X11 (the one from Apple - too lazy to look up what the official name is...) and I installed OO.o. Everything went fine as far as the installation was concerned. It acts (as far as I can tell so far) just like the Windows version (and this is a good thing - I have that version on my PC).
It acts ok until you try to move information out of the X11 area. At that point you might just as well be writing everything longhand. I understand that I have gotten my moneys' (smirk) worth from the application and I will use this for now because I don't really want to go to MS for the light amount of work that these applications would see on my home machine. The issue is that this application acts as if it is in a vacuum as far as communication goes. Who wants to save a separate file every time you want to move something from one (OO.o) window to another (OSX)? Given that, I can't use it as a default office application, so I will be looking elsewhere (including the full MS version).