AOL in Negotiations to Buy Red Hat (fwd)

ME dugan at passwall.com
Sat Jan 19 15:58:26 PST 2002


On Sat, 19 Jan 2002, Mark Street wrote:
> Yeah, check out /. for more on this.  What say you ME?  Whadda ya think?

What do I think? My opinion does not matter much, but here goes:

RedHat is growing, but too slow. In a period of dot-com failures and
venture capital being weak for tech sector companies, an infusion of
capital for RH will help in the short term.

Over the long term, it would be harder to predict. Much of how this will
impact the Linux users, marketability of Linux and wider use of their
product will depend upon who they bring in to lead and direct the future
of RedHat.

There will be dissenters, but I think they need a strong corporate minded
person with a primary goal being "profitability." (Something that FSF
would complain about I think, and would likely cause grumbling elsewhere.)

Occasional bursts of cash like what could be generated by this deal are
not sustainable over the long term. A "profitability" focus would likely
mean cutting projects that are not used by the masses who would actually
lay down cash for their product. (Harm server-side development funded by
RH, but help general user application development.)

Emphasis for products and projects funded by them would include general
purpose productivity items to help the Tech-Know-Nothing
(techno-nothing) users be able to check e-mail and word process and all
those things that general users like to do.

(If only 1% of the population (geeks) wants a server product and are
willing to pay for it, while 30% of the population (general users) are
willing to pay the same price as the geeks, it would make sense for the
company to make products that would encourage the general users to drop
their money on the counter as it could offer 30 times more money while
also increasing user base. And the geeks can look to other OS if they
want development.)

If they pull in a director/leader for directing RedHat who is a guy that
does not understand OpenSource computing and what exactly can be
profitable, they will flounder and do badly.

If they pull in someone who is not profit oriented, but instead wants to
maintain projects "as-is" then RedHat will do poorly, as the MS
dis-information machine piles up stacks of money to push false information
on "Why Linux is bad and is destroying the Ozone layer and increasing
global warming."

Nobody needs to quote me stats on Linux being the fastest growing OS in
the XYZ market. These stats are used to fool people. If you say have 0.1%
of the market one month, and then 0.2% the next month, you have
effectively doubled your user base in one month, and a 100% increase in
used base is probably going to be a "faster growing base" than OS that
have say 60% of the market and where a 100% increase in used base would
put them at 120% (smirk). "Fastest growing" is meaningless without context
and statistical history as well as magnitude and base values.

Lastly, I would offer a guess that the following would happen:
1) a unification of all of the GUI based tools for configuring redhat into
a larger controller of system information (much like the windows registry,
but possibly not so screwey (I dont like the registry in windows, and I
suspect I would not like something like it in Linux.)
2) a newer variation of a window manager that looks like fvwm95 or Mac
OSX's wm.
3) an increase in the privatization of code created for the above by
RedHat where only binaries are handed out on their CDs. (This may take the
form of a skeleton open source code project with many config files and
images and textures included as packages that are not open source/GPL and
perhaps a GPL-like license for some of their other products
4) From the above, they would likely look to disallow users from editing
config files directly (kind of where they have been going.) They would
also likely improve on the systems for configuring printers, ISP dialup
procedures, and add a happy-feeling GUI for installation of the OS.
5) Range of machines covered by newer distros would be higher end and more
restrictive over time.
6) A possible shift to pay-as-you-play for RPM updates. (Pay a monthlyt
fee of say $5.00, or annual fee of say $20 to gain access to upgrades and
updates.) To mimmic the MS WIndows XP style of revolving payment.
7) Shift to monolithic filesystems (one partition, and swap being a file
used with loopback from that one partition.)

Summary:
Short term - this could be good for RH.
Long term  - depends upon what direction they take RH.

Would it be good or bad depends upon what you want to see happen. You want
Linux to own 90% of the desktop market at any cost? Well, this is a
possible aid to that. You want to see things stay the same? It is probably
bad for that.

> What is a lugod anyway?
LUGOD = Linux User Group Of Davis

It is a group of people that seem to be more technical on average that
most members of nblug - partly because they have a number or EE and CS
students to make up their membership.

Ther tech lst frequently includes coding questions and gets into more
details on hardware problems.

They are very active (2 meetings each month)
http://www.lugod.org/

A number of their members get articles of their posted on /. frequently,
and I know 2 of the people in their group.

If we could get more SSU CS majors over to our LUG, we might be able to
have some more technical talks.

They have a lot of traffic in their mail (broken down to 3
lists: vox-announce, vox-tech, and vox) where vox is for general
discussion and 50% of the time has nothing to do with linux, but more
about socialization of the group and doing stuff, or telling
jokes. vox-tech is more technical and troubleshooting, and vox-announce
should be obvious.)

-ME

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