A front-page article in this morning's Durham (NC, USA) Herald-Sun reports:
"AOL Time Warner Inc. is in talks to buy Red Hat Inc., a prominent distributor of a Linux-based computer operating system, an acquisition that would position the media giant to challenge archrival Microsoft Corp., according to sources familiar with the matter." Is this A Good Thing? A Bad Thing? Does it make any difference? Is MySQL AB next? Would that make any difference? What if PostgreSQL, not MySQL, were next? Has this story been widely reported? Is this just a big yawner for the MySQL community? It seems to me that if AOL Time Warner had not only Netscape, but also the whole Linux-Apach-MySQL-PHP brigade in their hands, they would indeed have a powerful armamentarium for challenging Microsoft. I am not currently a Linux or MySQL user. But I have been seriously considering using Linux and MySQL for several personal and speculative projects, as a way of breaking free of bloatware and of corporate hegemony. This news does not seem to me to bode well. How open are the major open source players likely to remain? What do others here (most of whom are clearly more knowledgeable than I) think? Perhaps I should add that Durham, NC, is the home of Red Hat, Inc., and is also my home. --Erv Young --------------------------------------------------------------------- Before posting, please check: http://www.mysql.com/manual.php (the manual) http://lists.mysql.com/ (the list archive) To request this thread, e-mail <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, e-mail <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Trouble unsubscribing? Try: http://lists.mysql.com/php/unsubscribe.php
