Frisco said:
Code or development? You forgot about the third and main reason--Competition. Remember Netscape? Never bought them.
I can see MS, buying RedHat, just like they bought Virtual PC.
Apple should buy them, and if they don't I have lost all respect!
I knew there was a reason I should've lost all respect for Apple by now. I thought it had something to do with set top boxes, but apparently this was it.
Yes, true, competiition is valid. But I don't see how Netscape fits into that model, since MS bought neither Netscape nor any other major web browser developer, AFAIK.
And RedHat is not analagous to the other situations in which MS has done something like that. How does plucking RedHat help MS with competition when there're several other very competent commercial distros such as SuSE?
And Apple, buying RedHat? What would they gain? They already have excellent Unix distro technology. They even already made significant progress making Darwin run on x86, should they ever want to. At best, RedHat would get a competent installer application, but that's about as good as it gets.