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Novell Buys Ximian

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the a-cage-full-of-monkeys dept.

Quite a number of people have been submitting the news that Ximian has been purchased by Novell. All I've found so far is the press release linked to above; more links as they come in. Looks like Nat & Miguel will be remaining around, and Novell's continuing to expand its Open Source commitments. Update: 08/04 17:30 GMT by S : viewstyle writes "According to an interview with Ximian's CTO Miguel de Icaza at Eweek.com, Ximian won't be affected at all by Novell's buyout, and will be shipping a PowerPC version of Mono (preview release in Sept)."

2 of 478 comments (clear)

  1. Grumble... by Dr.+Spork · · Score: 3, Redundant

    Usually it's not a good idea to attach a lifeboat to a sinking ship. Novel should be selling off/spinning off divisions that have a chance of surviving, not acquiring more units to pull under.

  2. Novell is dying by swb · · Score: 2, Redundant

    AFAICT Novell is dying, doomed to become another company like Banyan. NDS is a superior technology, but Novell fumbled it with NW 5; we had to switch to Win2k for the sake of our Mac clients, which Novell walked away from.

    All the resellers I talk to say nobody buys Netware new, virtually all of the Novell sales they do are upgrades for a few loyalists that won't switch to anything else.

    I won't argue the superiority of Win2k in any sense; NW4.11 NDS was vastly better, especially when dealing with multi-site and distributed security setups. But Novell became just impossible for us if we wanted to keep our Macs reasonably integrated with the PCs.

    IMHO Novell's purchase of Cambridge Tech Partners was an acknowledgement that their days are numbered. Perhaps purchasing Ximian will enable them to get into the Linux consulting world.