* Would Steve Ballmer wear a red fedora?
Can you imagine Steve Ballmer wearing a red fedora? Doc Searls can. Searls is the editor of Linux Today and he recently speculated in his blog (link below) that Microsoft could be going shopping and come home with Red Hat Linux all wrapped up.
I know Doc. I like Doc. He’s usually a font of wisdom and advice delivered in an entertaining and informative style. But I had to look at the date on this blog entry to be sure it didn’t say April 1.
One reason Searls gave for this deal making good business sense is that “Microsoft could use Red Hat’s enterprise server business”.
While it’s true that Microsoft would like Red Hat’s server business, it wants to supplant it, not acquire it. Microsoft could also “use” IBM’s Linux server business, but there’s no chance Microsoft would acquire the pinstripes in Armonk. And even though Steve Ballmer and Scott McNealy managed to share a stage for an hour recently without actually striking one another, that doesn’t presage a friendly (or unfriendly) takeover of the Solaris market by Gates and Co.
We’ve spoken, in this newsletter, of the possibility that you might want to introduce a Linux host/server into your network. It’s an inexpensive way to run a fairly straightforward backroom task such as a Web server, proxy, fax server, what have you. But I can’t think of any type of application that runs on Linux that won’t run on a Windows server.
Others have pointed to Novell’s recent release of Open Enterprise Server, sporting traditional NetWare applications and services running on your choice of either a traditional NetWare kernel or the new SuSE Linux kernel. The speculators think Microsoft might do the same, offering a choice between the Windows Kernel and the Red Hat kernel but with the same services running on top of each.
Does that sound like something Bill Gates would do?
There’s also that intellectual property dispute between Microsoft and the open source community. Searls sidesteps the issue by saying: “And forget the licensing issues, which are non-trivial but surmountable if Microsoft swallowed hard and admitted that the GPL is one reason Linux has been kicking ass.” (The “GPL” is the Gnu Public License. Referring to it, Steve Ballmer has been quoted as saying: “Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches. That’s the way that the license works.”) Somehow, I don’t see Steve jumping around on stage proclaiming that the software wants to be free!
Microsoft may eventually embrace the open source community wholeheartedly, but it won’t be soon and it won’t be by buying Red Hat. Windows networking is strong and vibrant and appears to be growing once again. Red Hat brings no value to Microsoft in terms of servers or networking. This rumor was dead on arrival.
