[Tech] [OT] AOL e RED HAT (spero non sia un disturbo)

[St0rM]

AOL in talks to buy Redhat
Posted 1/19/2002 - 11:27AM, by Caesar
I hate to admit it, but I didn't see this one coming. This story at
MSNBC
(looks like it is mirrored at the Washington Post, or vice versa)
indicates
that "sources familiar with the matter" are saying that AOL and Redhat
are
in buyout talks. One has to wonder just what exactly AOL thinks it's
getting
from buying Redhat. The article offers its take.

  To counter Microsoft's desktop hegemony, New York-based AOL Time
Warner
could use the deal to couple its America Online software, the market
leader
with more than 33 million Internet subscribers, with Red Hat's
operating-system technology, sources said.

So easy to rm -rf *, it's no wonder it's number one! In all seriousness,
I'm
of two minds on the matter. This situation is funny to me because it
provided me with the impetus to go back and look at a small op-ed I
wrote in
June of 1999 called "Why is AOL Buying?". Some of it is still true today
-
some of it is hilarious, considering all of the AOL-related developments
since that time. But here I am again, wondering "why"? Their immediate
goals
might seem obvious: they want an OS "software and service" company to
call
their own. But that's just it - the OS can never really be their own.
The
OSS/FSF entity that is Linux/GNU software cannot be done asunder by AOL.