AOL/TW wants RedHat

[David P. Schwartz]

The article says, "Red Hat makes its money by packaging Linux for commercial and consumer use and by providing services and support to
customers who use it. The operating system itself is freely available on the Internet ...".  They're generating about $100M revenues
annually.  It's not for the OS, it's for the support.

Thus, AOL/TW is purchasing a fairly mature international support organization.

You've gotta wonder what they gained by purchasing Netscape.

I don't see much benefit in trying to compete against Microsoft head-on.  They'd just piss off a big chunk of their users who would
probably jump over to MSN in a heartbeat.

AOL/TW is in the business of creating annuitized cashflows.  Support contracts fit that model.  Competing head-to-head with Microsoft
doesn't.

They'd need a good support organization if they were to start selling set-top boxes in a big way, tho.  It would be doubly helpful if
those boxes happened to run RH or some other version of Linux...

-David

"J.Francois" wrote:

> I am not sure how I like this.
> Does it mean AOL/TW will start trying to make its users smarter?
> Will they try to stop us pesky OpenSource users from making
> anymore MP3s or ripping DVDs?
>
> You decide:
> http://www.washtech.com/news/media/14759-1.html
>
> --
> Jean Francois - JLF Sends...
> "Tell them we are not Gods, but SysAdmins, which is the next best thing"