On 5/15/07, Lan Barnes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On Tue, May 15, 2007 7:55 am, Bob La Quey wrote: > Now an interesting play would be to buy Red Hat. Don't know exactly > what they would do with it, but the could buy it. RHT has a market > cap of around $4 Billion. Twice that would be hard for the institutions > that hold the vast majority of RHT stock to resist. Not hard for M$ to > do a deal like this (well the monopoly issues are the likely deal stopper, > but there are no financial barriers.) > That is an interesting idea, but I can't see it working long term. Because of open source being Free, Red Hat is a brand name and not much more. The PHBs equate RH with business Linux, but if M$ bought it, it would be to retire it (like FoxBase before it). And the former RHEL development team and the Fedora Core team(s) could walk across the street WITH LEGAL COPIES OF THEIR LATEST SOURCE and set themselves up in business that day.
I suspect anothe billion dollars thrown their way together with "not compete" agreements as part of the buy out might well slow that up. A M$ offer of $1 to $100 Million to individual programmers might well test their morals.
They could even call themselves "New Hat."
I like "Old Hat" better :) They could produce a unix for Stewart.
Also, M$ would undeniably be starting out with GPL'd code, the copyrights of which are scattered all over the world; so they couldn't change the license, and they advance the code and sell it without releasing the source under the GPL. They couldn't even argue "this is prioprietary so you can't look."
No the point is not that. The point is to introduce dissention and dissarray into the Open Source community. Money can do that. Like I said see how the moralityof the community stands up to $1 to $100 Million bribes.
> > Meanwhile as best I can discern from the point of view of nearly every > developer I talk with Microsoft is irrelevant. The Web is all that > matters. > Google matters, etc. but Microsoft is no longer a player. Alas would that it were so. We have a strong core of C# advocates here. The .NET crowd morphed into C# when .NET was suddenly not-so-shiny anymore. Microsoftians have a short racial memory.
I guess that me and the guys I talk to don't consider those folks relevant either, chuckle.
> > Just one take, > > That's all I ever have, too. But I always think I'm right. -- Lan Barnes
Me too, but I _am_ right. BobLQ -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
