Analysts speculate that MS may try to acquire Red Hat

Never happen. A stupid article by someone who thinks Redhat = LInux. The only one to benefit if such a thing were to happen would be RHAT stockholders and the only loser would be M$, which would throw a lot of money away.

M$ would never buy something they could not profit from. They are evil, not stupid!

I find it funny how the author of this article just off-handedly adds "If IBM were to settle their case at this point..." Why on earth would IBM settle? By all accounts (if I read my Groklaw correctly) they're WINNING. The author even says at the end of the article that it's "highly improbable", so why even entertain the idea and write an article about it?

This rumour has been making the rounds lately.

I have two points on why it doesn't matter.

1) Whitebox, and centOS already are shipping RHEL AS without the trademark items. People can switch out of MSFT Red Hat instantly.

2)IBM is a big Red Hat distributor, but like any intelligent business they have a back up already running(Novell).

3)MSFT doesn't want to deal with GPL source code, buying Red Hat only takes out USA distro. The rest of the world is buying more linux than the USA.

4) because I started by saying there were 2 things.

5) The only thing buying Red Hat would do for MSFT is slow down some corporate linux deployments, until those businesses they aren't limited to one company anymore, and are free to choose another.

Not to mention that most of the developers would quit immediately. Didn't this dumb idea make the rounds a few years ago?

wcooley: recently, it seems. Someone posted a "future article" about what would be the fallout of Microsoft making a Linux distribution. I think it was around december. It was in the form of a letter to steve ballmer if I remember (it was a phoney post-dated letter -- still an interesting article, but contrived).