[ic] Re: AOL in negotiation to buy Red Hat

Barry Treahy, Jr. interchange-users@interchange.redhat.com
Mon Jan 21 18:03:01 2002


JT Justman wrote:

>Justin? Who's Justin?
>First of all, I don't use M$ products to run my business. I'm as fed up as
>anyone with the trojans, exploits, worms, and whatever else comes with
>Windows. I was not intending to make a pro-Microsoft argument here. Besides
>which, these flaws have little to do with what I was talking about... my
>primary gripe with AOL is that they continue to use proprietary dialer
>software when the Windows dialer works fine. Their software is _designed_ to
>make the windows dialup networking system work poorly, so that other ISP
>connections on the computer will not function well. Is this the sort of
>tactic that we want RH to use?
>
>Also, can you honestly tell me that AOL's browser is really more secure than
>IE?
>
No, I can't because it isn't because it is a rewrap of IE do to 
marketing requirements of MS so that AOL is included in shipped systems. 
 The monopoly in action but if AOL could drop IE, we would probably see 
a major shift once again in the browser market share...  Lets face it, 
as a public company, Redhat can become the target of any hostile take 
over.  If anyone believes that Linux in general, and Redhat in 
particular, is going to be a key player in the next decade, it does make 
sense that they could be swallowed up...

As another poster said earlier today, AOL does know how to push AOL 
products.  Each of us have a couple dozen CD's functioning as table 
coasters...

Barry

ps. sorry about the misspelling of your name, that was not intentional...