from a Windows partition (à la 'loadlin' I suppose), so no-one would be forced out of Windows by this.

Will AOL configure their service so as to lock out existing subscribers who don't start using AOLinux? I doubt it! Most of the 10^7 AOLlers are using IE in Win, and used to it, and most of these wouldn't welcome being kicked off. AOL won't want to alienate them.

And, for the same reason, probably not many voluntary takers in the 10^7 either. Maybe a proportion will give it a whirl out of curiosity.

But, because the Web will still be what it was, they will encounter all the standard problems of non-IE users. So most of these adventurous types would revert anyway.

Therefore it looks as though the potential for take-up would lie in new subscribers. Guesses at how many of these might go along (unless the free CD forced them to -- but see above) must be vaguer; but I'm not optimistic. Nor will AOL get even 10^6 new subscribers overnight.

So I can't see this having much more impact than a soft thump in the middle distance.

The other contra is related to the quoted comment above. If you want to try to force Web providers away from IE-inspired web coding in this kind of way, you don't need Linux at all: since AOL already have Netscape, provided this can be fixed so that it doesn't do its freeze/crash thing, they already have a tool which (if the underlying premiss has anything in it) could force the move; you can run this under Windows anyway.

But users will still have IE in their Win istallations, so, when even the most standards-compliant and bug-free Netscape still trips over non-compliant web sites, they wolud tend to drop Netscape [there's an assumption here that IE works on sites where Netscape works ... ]. Where in the end, therefore, is the force which will make Web providers change their ways?

So I'm finding it difficult to imagine a plausible scenario for this story. Interesting and provocative, though.

Best wishes to all, Ted.

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