[wplug] AOL looking to buy Red Hat

[Jonathan S. Billings]

On Saturday, January 19, 2002, at 07:42  PM, Hagbard Celine wrote:

> <some snipping>
>>
>> One other point is that even if AOL swallowed RedHat whole, they 
>> wouldn't be
>> able to mess up Linux too much.  There are other distributions and the
>> software itself is controlled by maintainers.  AOL would just have 
>> control
>> over distribution of one flavor, not over the actual development of 
>> all the
>> software.
>>
> Well, correct me if I'm wrong, please, but doesn't development of such 
> systems
> software as gcc, glibc, automake, autoconf, and a couple of others 
> *depend* on
> the contributions of Red Hat people, and couldn't AOL screw up not only 
> Linux,
> but a whole slough of UNIX platforms by pulling a Netscape on the
> aforementioned packages?

Well, Redhat owns cygnus, so they do quite a bit of development on gcc.  
But they don't "own" gcc, and it's GPLd.  Things like the GNU libc 
(http://www.gnu.org/software/libc/) aren't owned by RedHat.  RedHat does 
put a lot of money into linux, but I'm sure if it was taken out, one of 
it's competitors (Mandrake, SuSE, Turbolinux, Debian) would step up.

What AOL would be doing is buying a segment of the linux business 
market, as well as an alternative OS.  I'd be sad to see something like 
Cygnus go away, since they've been behind the porting of gcc to other 
Unixes.  But I wouldn't worry about them "pulling a netscape" (have you 
seen mozilla?  I think it was a good thing, at least for linux)

   Jonathan Billings
billings+ at cs.cmu.edu