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Novell & SUSE In Link Up?
dmorelli writes "Since it seems to be a SuSE news day, here's something from Friday this past. Novell tried and failed to buy SuSE, according to the
Linux Business week story."
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What came out of that merger?
Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
here's something from Friday this past.
Yoda, you speak like!
What does this say, exactly, about Novell's current strategy, that they consider Linux so useful to their current plans that they would attempt to buy SUSE?
If they owned SUSE, what most likely would they do with it?
Novell 7 SuSe In Link Up?
Looks like they succeeded in outlawing the shift key after all."Wow, you're like some kind of superhero able to ward off happiness and success at every turn."
-- Ryan Stiles
It's a handy typing tip!
I can't help but feel that the german government owning shares of a company like SUSE seems to be a conflict of interest. I don't believe that government should be able should own any controlling amount of stock of a company they could make or brake. (ie: cities in germany switching to linux over MS)
I have a Cig, but do you have a light?
Nothing whatsoever. Your point? Oh wait you don't have one you're just a boring anti-MS gimp. Monkey want banana?
It sounds like the name of a japanese band: "Novell 7 SuSe".
Their first album would be named "Novell 7 SuSe In Link Up"
I can still hear the faint echo's of Novell suits explaining how they were going to destroy Microsoft with Netware and the latest directory services product. These people were scarily clueless then...what has changed?.
Novell essentially brought us the current incarnation of SCO, haven't they done enough to "help" the Linux/OS community?
that would have been a pretty good fit for what they're currently trying to do. Make no mistake - Novell has some of the best enterprise management software in the industry. Linux definitely needs this.
Oh well, they'll just release their own distro of Linux now (called Netware 7).
If they had been bought, just imagine the internal flame wars between the KDE loving Suzeques and the GNOMing ximanites!
Bye!
RedHat is in danger of turning into Microsoft 2? How and why? Just becuase they are the largest distro of Linux hardly makes them a monopoly. Perhaps IBM is just having a hard time competing with them.
ok, just like most other jokes on slashdot, this is just getting old, and redundant.
I write code.
"the German government, which reportedly owns something like 30% of SUSE ($30 million worth), is supposed to be the speed bump." WTF? My Goverment owns 30% of SUSE? Finally they do something useful with my tax money! Nice. Probably its just a goverment loan but 30% of all shares is quite a lot. I wonder if it was a political decision to finance a OSS-Company. Has anybody more info on this?
According to the article, suse is worth 100 million. They were offered 120 million.
Why didn't they accept?
Open Source Java Web Forum with LDAP authentication
We all know what would happen then.
BIG AMERICAN DANCE PARTY?
Sometimes it is good to sell when a good reasonable offer like this comes around, but other times its worth the long haul.
I think that SUSE made the right decision whether they know it or not.
I have a Cig, but do you have a light?
like the story itself?
litigious bastards
suck it sco!
Why not?
"And now, Frank N. Furter, your time has come. Say 'goodbye' to all of this, and 'hello'... to oblivion!"
Mon 9:02am MSFT Microsoft Announces Official Name and New ODM Partners for Portable Media Center Devices Previously Known as 'Media2Go' - PR Newsforhire
Microsoft could have tried to buy them out. We all know what would happen then.
The Gnashing of Teeth and the Lamentations of the Women?
Also, $120M sounds a very cheap for a company of this size. Red Hat, not quite twice the size by employees, is valued at over 2$ billion.
Now that we're so close to winning, what if 80% of the main distros (_including RH_) get bought?
This wouldn't necessarily suck, since most already are private companies -- but the recent Connectix "desinnovation" by Marketsoft (where they excluded Linux&BSD from the guest OS options) makes me wonder...
We are getting too tasty-looking for our own good... (ok, I know there's Debian, etc., but *a lot* of innovations come from companies like RH, Mandrake and SuSE).
perhaps i should have quoted.. but what's getting old, is the joke presented in the parent. sorry for the confusion.
I write code.
Could be interesting thing long-term - Novell becoming major bad-ass player (again) armed with Ximian desktop / Evolution, always-popular directory thingie and finally Linux distro to integrate everything with. Plus Mono as a hidden weapon.
"No kidding. MS has a half-hearted desktop and a shitty server that's nothing more than the desktop with multi-user perms - but they DO integrate better than any other desktop/server combination."
Oh this is amusing One they're not competing in the server space, kind of like Lindows isn't competing
Two they have the same software that the "server" distributions have, Apache is Apache, OpenLDAP is OpenLDAP, etc, etc.
If they're "shitty" using the same software, then all the others are "shitty".
Massiv in da hood me homeo boy! Safe! Me is bustin' out a rhyme! Check out ma maladie, check out ma maladie.
lookout bullow.
From "Prosperity" (?pr ?firm? hypenosys in yOUR case) to Depression
The country voted for a return to "normalcy" when it elected Warren G. Harding President in 1920, but the ensuing period was a time of rapid change, and the old normalcy was not to be regained. The Republican governments of the decade, although basically committed to laissez faire, actively encouraged corporate mergers and subsidized aviation and the merchant marine. Harding's administration, marred by the Teapot Dome scandal, gave way on his death to the presidency of Calvin Coolidge , and the nation embarked on a spectacular industrial and financial boom. In the 1920s the nation became increasingly urban, and everyday life was transformed as the "consumer revolution" brought the spreading use of automobiles, telephones, radios, and other appliances. The pace of living quickened, and mores became less restrained, while fortunes were rapidly accumulated on the skyrocketing stock market, in real estate speculation, and elsewhere. To some it seemed a golden age. But agriculture was not prosperous, and industry and finance became dangerously overextended.
In 1929 there began the Great Depression , which reached worldwide proportions. In 1931, President Herbert Hoover proposed a moratorium on foreign debts, but this and other measures failed to prevent economic collapse. In the 1932 election Hoover was overwhelmingly defeated by the Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt . The new President immediately instituted his New Deal with vigorous measures. To meet the critical financial emergency he instituted a "bank holiday." Congress, called into special session, enacted a succession of laws, some of them to meet the economic crisis with relief measures, others to put into operation long-range social and economic reforms. Some of the most important agencies created were the National Recovery Administration , the Agricultural Adjustment Administration , the Public Works Administration , the Civilian Conservation Corps , and the Tennessee Valley Authority . This program was further broadened in later sessions with other agencies, notably the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Works Progress Administration (later the Work Projects Administration ).
SuSE Puts out the best distro of Linux (IMHO) and my kneejerk reaction is sheer horror. I know that's not logical, but anything that might change the direction of the company scares me. I just installed SuSE 9 over the weekend and it's a wonderful product. My selfish desire is for SuSE to be left alone and to continue to produce and improve SuSE Linux. I don't want to have to change distros again!
that SuSE is partially (30%...!?)owned by the German government. Obviously Germany is betting their future on open source. Watch your steps Mr. Ballmer. Not to mention coalition of Asian governments to develop a new OS. Maybe his Frequent Flyers Miles will go up high with trips to Germany and Asian countries. (oh wait, there's no such thing as FFM for a private jet, are there?)
With 50% of the company owned by the German government and ("reportedly") IBM, who owns the rest of SuSE? I'm just curious.
According to the article, suse is worth 100 million. They were offered 120 million. Why didn't they accept?
Because valuing a company is as much art as it is science. Especially for companies like SuSE whose assets are largely intangible. They don't have much in the way of hard assets like manufacturing equipment or buildings. They have no proprietary code to speak of. Their only real assets are their brand name, whatever cash they have and the people they have working for them.
So how do you value that? It's tough. Companies are considered to be worth the present value of all their future cash flows. But how fast is SuSE going to grow? What sort of margins will they pull down? What does the competitive landscape look like? Will they grow steadily or will they grow fast and then slow down? I don't know about you, but my crystal ball isn't that good.
It's not a trivial problem to value a company. You can't answer it just by checking their market capitalization. That's just the market's current concensus on the value of the equity in the company. But debt holder, preferred stock holders and the government (taxes) all have claims to the cash flows of the company that come before the common stockholders. And the market doesn't even get the equity part right all the time. Witness the recent tech bubble bursting.
So in short, there probably was a difference of opinion on the valuation. If I think my business is worth $150 million and you think it's worth $100 million, who is right? Hard to say. It's also possible that they didn't sell just because the key shareholders didn't like the buyer. Happens all the time. Maybe the terms of the deal weren't good. If I'm the buyer and Novell is offering me stock, I'm going to think about it real hard. Novell's stock isn't exactly blue-chip. What happens if I sell and Novell tanks? Could be SuSE management wanted cash and Novell wasn't offering.
In short there are lot of reasons why it fell through. Some reasons are very sensible, some aren't. Why they turned them down? I have no idea, but I can think of a lot of possible reasons.
doesn't mean it's for the better. more often it's for the fraudulent losing bettors, from the regime that's in power when the phonIE bullshipping industrIE begins WANing into coolapps/the abyss.
agreed on suse quality, & caution towards greed/fear based payper liesense stock markup FraUD corepirate nazIE borg absorbtion.
You make a joke, but the corporate culture clash is something that should never be underestimated in a merger/buy-out.
How _would_ former SuSE employees take the new GNOME focus? Probably pretty well, but you never know.
-Erwos
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
generally speaking, as a rule, despite the terabytes of fairytail preseNTations buy phonIE ?pr? ?firm? payper liesense stock markup FraUD felons/execrable.
As any Compaq (former) employee will unhappily attest to.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Mmmm... I like those chicks on C.S.I.
Why buy SuSE?
Why not just put a couple developers on your payroll and have them work on stuff that's important to you and release it for all the distributions?
I think they're still stuck in the old game of trying to control (and reap profits from) the various components.
How many programmers could you hire for how long with the money you'd spend on buying a whole company? Why not do that instead?
Microsoft could have tried to buy them out. We all know what would happen then.
Not at all what you think. First, MS would scream in triumph "We own Linux we bought it."
Then Sco would come back with "Oh no you didn't. We own, we have this old program we bought a long time ago from Novell. We own Linux."
Linus would say "It's a community thing, bugger off or I'll sick Big Blue on you."
Finally, IBM would have it's feelings hurt when Billie G tells them "None of this would have happened if you would have bought an OS in the first place."
Nothing a Slashdot poster could do or say or have happen by freak chance could get a woman to lament... :)
Welcome to the wonderful fact-checked and excellent reporting done by Mrs Maureen O'Gara, and her well informed sources ;-)
That SUSE should be owned by the German gov't is just too funny.
(please tell me that on /. at least one person knows what the heck I'm talking about.)
Little Brother, watching the watchers
Knoppix is just incredible.
Give him 1 million $/year. It'd be a bargain compared to $120M. Hire a few more Linux gurus with proven track records in networking. Might be interesting.
1000 SlashDot sigs
If they owned SUSE, what most likely would they do with it?
They'd then get bought by IBM.
Actually in German (auf Deutsche, bitte), it's pronounced more like "ZOO zuh", but in Americanized English, it's probably best pronounced like "SOO zuh", kinda the same as the last name of John Philip Sousa, the famous marching tune composer of the late 19th - early 20th century.
NUSE?
Nahhh...
One man's -1 Flamebait is another man's +5 Funny.
I agree. I think we should screw flanders.
This suit, it's like wearing nothing at all.
Nothing at all
Nothing at all
(stupid sexy flanders)
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"Novell has some of the best enterprise management software in the industry. Linux definitely needs this."
Here's my point of view as someone more interested in Free Software for everyone then just having Linux take over the enterprise. I will admit that I will always cheer when Linux gets some big Enterprise scale win since less Windows in the world mean less headaches, but commercial success isn't any utopia IMO.
So knowing that I guess you could say that in reality I don't give a fart if Novell has some magic proprietary software that makes Linux win 100% market-share. What matters most is that Linux gets to the top using Free software. Any other way negates the positive effect of making the same software that Fortune 100 companies use available to the 10 node business or single user at home.
Is that possible? I think so. It may take a while, but I have no doubt that truly Free directory services that match or exceed AD and NDS will eventually come about. I'd really be upset if people left that piece of the puzzle to proprietary software.
The thing is while users would love it if many of the 3rd party proprietary commercial apps came to Linux we'd be stuck in the same situation we are now. Forget the Microsoft "tax", its the proprietary apps that tie us to the OS and limit who can afford to buy them. Making sure that users and businesses have everything they need for Free is really what matters.
I realize my view of the situation leaves out some aspects of the Free software debate. Realize though that when I look at how far we've come and much you can do with the Free software that comes with any distro, I have to ask why taint a good thing with non-Free software? Dance with the one who "brung ya" and finish out the way we started.
So from the view of a Free software advocate does Linux really "need this" proprietary technology? I think not.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
MWAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!
That's Blighty for you, old boy.
Considering that SuSE is the single largest employer of KDE developers (with Trolltech itself coming in second, IIRC), I doubt it would go over "pretty well".
Some of KDE's top developers are at SuSE and consider SuSE to have a KDE friendly and oriented corporate culture.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
i think novell is decent. but they would of killed suse like all their products. and suse would try its hardest to escape that fate. smart move on suse's part! amercian big business has lost all grips on reality. business is the step child of the public, we need to beat them down with a stick. look what big business has done to this country. management is a joke. managed into the ground. lean manifacturing, please...
Also, we have a rolling hardware upgrade program here and too many viable PCs just end up in the skip. The 300MHz PIIs w/64Mb RAM are next for the chop, but they'd be totally acceptable general office-use machines if they ran GNU/Linux. Tending to the luxurious, in fact. My home PC, for example, is a 133MHz Cyrix w/64Mb and I can't be arsed to upgrade, the point being that the economy of Slackware 9 (or whatever the distro of the minute) let's me get away with not being arsed.
You can see the appeal of it, really. Free at last etc.
System und Software Entwicklung
or
System and software building
- The Executive Commitee for Novell looks entirely different than it did when it put MS as enemy #1.
- More than half of management underneath the executive committe has changed since then.
In other words 'These people' who where 'scarily clueless' are gone. I guess these 'suits' went to SCO for employment.
And it's available here... http://forge.novell.com/modules/xfmod/project/?nwc unix
Enjoy!
First, a SuSE presentation I saw at LinuxWorld said they were doing $40M, not $31 (a nit pick).
But let's compare to Red Hat (or as I like to call them, the New Microsoft). They have a market cap of $2.3 billion on revenues of around $100 million. That's a multiple of 23 cap/rev. If the alleged $120M was true, then the multiple being proposed to buy SuSE was a mere 3X, which is absurdly low for the #2 in the market with a virtual stranglehold on European Linux customer. Given Red Hat's multiples, SuSE should be worth almost eight times what was offered.
I think there may be some other inaccuracies. There web site lists all of there investors, and don't see a single government listed, much less the entire German state. And I've heard (but can't confirm) that IBM has at best a 4% stake in SuSE.
Novell doesn't have any experience at running a Linux distribution.
They'd be trying to support their Novell brand by associating it with SuSe.
But that doesn't work now. A company in decline cannot turn itself around by buying a company on the rise. All it will do is waste money and bring both companies down.
Rather than doing that, Novell needs to understand what the GPL means and start getting Novell licensed code out there. Novell should form a partnership with SuSe and Red Hat and pay for the development of the technology Novell needs to link with Linux.
Just 1/100th of the price they offered should be enough to make eDirectory the prefered directory on Linux workstations and servers.
I just found this Link And aparently was writen by the guy that got the job:
" The team responsible for developing a Cisco Linux distribution agreed early on that utilizing pre-packaged software to make up a distribution was key to success. A Cisco Linux distribution would be loosely based on a RedHat Linux release with the addition of in-house, third party and public domain packages. With all software installed as RPMs (Redhat Package Manager), a distinct set of packages could be grouped to form a particular release with relative ease. Additionally, with this list of packages under a form of version control, recalling the set of packages from a past release could be easily accomplished".
I can't give you any IBM links but IBM was the contractor. Lots o projects never come out to the problic.
BSD licensed software can't be stolen....
This is kind of thin, basically a non-article. How does this 3 sentence with no fact crap even get called a story in the first place.
The parent poster has a valid point. SCO (in the form of Caldera) was a friend of open-source too. They were going to bring in big bucks for development, build an enterprise-friendly Linux, use their experience in the business systems market to open the door for Linux, pretty much all the stuff people think Novell would do for SuSe. Then Linux started outperforming Caldera/SCO's proprietary offering, at a lower price. If you read /. you know how things have gone between SCO and the Linux community since then.
Novell now sounds a lot like SCO did in 1999, a deep-pocketed sponsor with a long record in enterprise systems. Why would things turn out differently with Novell when some open-source system can beat NDS? Samba/OpenLDAP isn't there yet, but could be in 4 or 5 years. Why *wouldn't* Novell turn and sue them?
0 1 - just my two bits
I'm curious about how well E-Directory runs, and the level of control over a Linux desktop.
Once ZenWorks for Linux desktops is released, I think that a lot of enterprises that previously didn't consider Linux as an alternative platform will sit up and pay attention.
This should address some of the requirements many large companies have for their desktop management suite:
1) Remote Software package distribution.
2) Asset/Inventory management.
3) Desktop policy management (Lockdown etc)
4) Security Patch management.
Hopefully with their weight in the market, they can improve the MS Office filters in Open/Star office as well. Thats not a slight to any developers, but if you can't accurately display a complex Word file, people are unlikely to consider you as a viable option.
IMHO
Novell is a will be a sponsor and exhibitor at SCALE 2003 Come ask them all your questions about the future of Novell and Linux.
how is this a fucking troll? I was in more than one novell suit show where they laughed about how NDS would kill NT. they are idiots.
now you are too
Hey, Hatrisc You moderated away all my Karma. I rarely post jokes and this one seemed quite appropriate given the recent survey about overlords. Gimmie a break! I didn't have that much Karma to play with anyway!
-- TT
TT
Heretofore ne'er explored avenues of extensitial drivel have been examined by the blessed.
TT