[lug] [OT] AOL to buy RedHat?

[Sean Reifschneider]

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