[lug] [OT] AOL to buy RedHat?

[Mindless Child]

Moot info.  Word now is that AOL's not planning on buying RH...Which
actually makes sense.


On Mon, 21 Jan 2002, Sean Reifschneider wrote:

> On Mon, Jan 21, 2002 at 12:59:56PM -0700, D. Stimits wrote:
> >like AOL could break RH for everyone. I can see them doing a lot of
> >things to make linux more profitable, provided they are smart enough to
> >not break half of it in the process with proprietary nature.
> 
> As somone who was on the net back in 1994, the year September never ended,
> I understand how AOL got it's reputation.  However, the actions of AOL's
> users have little to do with a reasonable evaluation of the impact of AOL
> and RedHat merging.
> 
> Of late I've certainly been giving some thought to the AOL/RedHat merger --
> how it will impact KRUD (our RedHat-based distribution), but also wether it
> will be a good thing in general.  To do this, I've looked at AOL (remember:
> the company, not their users) has dealt with open source and Unix.
> 
> The examples that come to mind for me are, of course, Mozilla and
> AOLServer.  AOL has thrown a lot of resources into the development of
> Mozilla and it's related technologies (XUL, XPCOM, Gecko, bugzilla, etc).
> The Netscape crew had expected to have a lot more public development
> support than they have received thus far.  Mozilla has continued to make
> progress and at this point is quite a respectable browser with lots of
> other tools that the Open Source community uses.
> 
> While I was never really a FAN of Netscape, I did use it.  To paraphrase
> the "mutt" motto, "They all suck, this one just sucks less".  I didn't like
> Netscape because it was slow, and sucked down a ton of memory, and crashed
> all the time.  Over the years I have tried other browsers (Konqueror and
> Opera being two of the most recent ones).  However, I found they usually
> had little annoyances that made me less than enthusiastic to switch to
> them.
> 
> Up until about 2 months ago, I was still using Netscape as my primary
> browser (though at times I was running 2 or 3 other browsers, trying to
> be able to switch over).  Then, 2 months ago, I tried out Galeon, a GTK
> front-end on top of Mozilla.  I have completely switched over to using it
> since then.  It has a ton of handy features, usually works as I expect it
> to, and is at least as fast and as stable as Netscape.  More importantly,
> it properly handles *ALL* the pages I *HAVE* to use on a daily basis for
> work, something I can't say about most of the alternatives I've tried.
> 
> Moving on to AOLserver, it is an Apache alternative which was designed for
> embedded scripting and extensability using Tcl and C.  My exposure to it is
> limited to what I know about the efforts to include Python capability to
> it.  The folks who run the "PyWX" effort were quite happy with AOLserver as
> a base for the extensions and it's performance and architecture.
> 
> AOLserver is open source and freely available.  Apprarently, it's also
> pretty good...
> 
> So, I think that AOL at least somewhat has a handle on Open Source.  I'd
> love to see people who are currently locked in to Microsoft because of
> their use of AOL, be able to use Linux.  Should this deal go through, I
> can imagine more and more systems coming out for general consumption which
> run Linux and are designed for talking to AOL.
> 
> It'll probably be a while before we see Linux on the HP machine you walk
> out of your local reseller with, simply because of the collection of other
> applications that such a general-purpose device needs to do (largely
> MS-based).  However, I can see the smaller, single-use "web terminal"
> things coming with Linux fairly quickly.
> 
> Could AOL screw up?  Of course.  But what do we lose if they do?  The
> source code is still freed, there's not much they can do (though based on
> Netscape it doesn't seem that they would even try).  You can only really
> force users to run applications they don't want to if the source is closed.
> As long as it's open, we can definitely pull it out.
> 
> I'm cautiously optimistic about what is going to happen with RedHat and
> AOL.
> 
> Sean
> -- 
>  "I feel so insignificant...  Like people are laughing at me."
>  "You--You ARE a clown..."  -- Bob Newhart
> Sean Reifschneider, Inimitably Superfluous <jafo at tummy.com>
> tummy.com - Linux Consulting since 1995. Qmail, KRUD, Firewalls, Python
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