Re: Will Redhat Become a Division of AOL Time-Warner? (fwd)

[Rafael <raffi@ark.linwin.com>]

On Sun, Jan 20, 2002 at 09:55:39AM -0600, John J. Boyer wrote:
> Hello,
> I'm a bit concerned that AOL Time Warner is thinking of buying Redhat.
> Mergers and acquisitions usually turn out badly for customers and users.
> The latest example is something very close to many of us - the merger of
> Henter-Joyce and Blazie Engineering to form Freedom Scientific. Many
> people, including myself, have had bad experiences with this company. But
> at least Linux is in the public domain, so if AOL Time Warner ruins
> redhat, we'll have other companies to turn to or can simply distribute it
> ourselves.
> John
> 

I wouldn't worry about that possible merger. Others will pick up from 
where Redhat might drop it. On the other hand, Linux will get better 
positioned in the corporate world which is what many of us want anyway.

As you said, Linux is open source so nobody can hijack or monopolize it
like it happened so many times with other technologies. My expectation is 
that other less known distributions will come forward and gain some 
popularity if people turn away from AOL. That's good, we need better 
distributions than Redhat anyway. It's funny that Linux is the strongest 
in the server arena but the distributions like Redhat don't have it well 
designed in their configuration scripts. To redhat a server is a server, 
no difference between printer or NFS server for example.

By the way, don't tell me that Debian is beter because it's not. It has 
better packaging tool but it's environment is not that well thought out. 
You have to manualy setup too many things in order to get the desired 
server configuration.

Interesting start in new millenium.

--
 Rafael