[wplug] AOL looking to buy Red Hat

[Jack]

On Sat, 19 Jan 2002 19:42:49 -0500 (EST)
Hagbard Celine <hceline at softhome.net> wrote:
<snip>
> 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?  
<snip>

It's not that easy to make permanent changes to these--or any other--open source projects.  As Linus Torvalds likes to say, open source development follows a sort of evolutionary model.  

As we all know, there are many people out there hacking away at the source code of a wide variety of open source programs.  The code that is written can vary widely in quality, however.  If everything just passed unchecked, the open source community would be a very pitiful sight indeed.  In the evolutionary model, organisms/species/whatever that aren't fit to survive don't.  The weak perish because they can't stand the test of time, and the strong survive because they held the necessary characteristics, and were also able to adapt to new conditions.  In the software model, weak code perishes under the watchful eyes of the open source community.  On the high levels, we have the coding gurus who would most definitely be watching for any foolish stunts AOL would be likely to pull (could you imagine ESR and RMS, for example, turning a blind eye to the actions of AOL and letting shifty code pass?).  On the lower levels, we have the users, people who may have never written a line of code in their lives (but at the same time are still passionate about the idea of free software--you don't have to be a guru to have that passion).  These users may not be in the trenches writing code, but they know which applications they like and which they don't, and they know when an application is changing for the worse or the better.

In my opinion, AOL is the least of our concerns.  Stop by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (http://www.eff.org) sometime--there's some really important issues being fought right now that dwarf AOL's current actions.