Alan Cox to Leave if RH AOL Buyout Happens?

According to MartinG, Alan has posted to the LKML and said "Im insulted that anyone believes I would continue working for RH if aol/time warner owned them. " This of course refers to the Red Hat/AOL Buyout Rumors that we have been talking about all weekend.

Perhaps you don't realize...

[emil]

...that AOL/TW is a member of the RIAA and MPAA, which are organizations that are funding head-on assaults on our constitutional protections?

Alan Cox no longer feels physically safe in traveling to the United States. Should he willingly work for one of the forces that made this so?

Re:nice words words Alan,

[BCoates]

So, Alan where is your problem?
Don't like opensource OS coders who dare to make money?

Not to put words into his mouth, but maybe he doesn't want to work for AOL/TW because they're pushing for all the laws/technical solutions to not allow people to do what they want with their data and equipment (DMCA, SSSCA, SDMI, etc...)

That and the fact that AOL is nothing but dorks. I mean, ya gotta have some self respect.

--
Benjamin Coates

Re:If RedHat was bought, wouldn't that be good?

[fader]

So if some committee at AOLTW decides at some point in the future to stop licensing it under the GPL, they can.

Good luck. I don't know of any lawyer who would want to deal with opening that legal can o' worms. Do you remember what happened when Mozilla started to get relicensed as dual MPL/GPL? They had to contact every person who had contributed as much as one line of code and get them to sign off that it was okay to change the license.

Even the stuff that RedHat has written in-house isn't 100% RedHat owned. As soon as they use a patch from someone else, someone who doesn't give RedHat the copyright to their code, they're pretty much stuck with GPL.

Re:If RedHat was bought, wouldn't that be good?

[Courageous]

Yes, but that only applies to future distributions of the Red Hat code. They don't possess the authority to uniliterally retract the license from all current licensees, which includes the entire group of individuals who have copies of the software prior to the change in terms of licensing.

C//

Re:If RedHat was bought, wouldn't that be good?

[IntlHarvester]

AOL will want to differentiate their distro so they can charge big bucks for it.

Actually, AOL is probably just thinking about grabbing an embedded platform that they can control for their upcoming media consumption terminals (settop boxes).

The company has no current interests in corporate server or workstation technology, and doesn't seem to be going in that direction. Hopefully they aren't insane enough to go head-to-head with MS in the (increasingly irrelevant) PC OS market. What happened to all of the "enterprise" software they picked up with Netscape? They turned it right over to Sun with iPlanet....

And that is exactly the problem. Sun will want to differentiate their distro so they can charge big bucks for it.

Ahh, it all makes sense now. No wonder Solaris x86 went away.

Look maw, the GPL troll!

[twitter]

First, nobody knows if lawyers (or judges, they still exists, you know) could "break" the GPL. Right now, we only know nobody tried it yet.

Sigh. The GPL grants rights to copy that ordinary copyrights don't. If the GPL does not hold no copyright holds. The GPL has been defended and no one has dared go to court because they knew they would loose.
Furthermore, the important part of Red Hat are not protected by the GPL. Neither their name and credibility, nor their customer base is GPLed. (In fact, I don't even know if all their software is - AFAIK SuSEs Yast is closed source, e.g.)

As far as I can tell, you have never used Red Hat or looked at any of their source. Most is GPL. Show me one "important" piece that is not.