Novell & SUSE In Link Up?

Novell + ximian by stonebeat.org · 2003-10-27 04:46 · Score: 2

What came out of that merger?

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Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better

Re:Novell + ximian by angusr · 2003-10-27 04:54 · Score: 4, Informative

Well, there's a whole chunk of Ximian technology in the Nterprise Linux Services beta, plus Novell is now selling Ximian Connector via Novell resellers. Besides, that merger was only a few months ago - barely enough time to change the logos on existing Ximian products, really...
Re:Novell + ximian by demaria · 2003-10-27 05:28 · Score: 2, Informative

You can do Linux patch management in ZENWorks for Servers.
Re:Novell + ximian by sharkey · 2003-10-27 05:28 · Score: 2, Funny

Novimian!

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Yoda? by Anonymous Coward · 2003-10-27 04:47 · Score: 2, Funny

here's something from Friday this past.

Yoda, you speak like!

That would have been interesting. by Anonymous Coward · 2003-10-27 04:47 · Score: 3, Interesting

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?

Re:That would have been interesting. by w42w42 · 2003-10-27 05:20 · Score: 2, Insightful

That's a good question, any company owning Suse and ximian would be interesting, and not knowing the track record of the suits involved, possibly a bit scary.
It is a bit interesting that they have chosen to focus on what seems a desktop flavor, considering they went after and purchased ximian. If they wanted a vanilla server distro, I'd think they could get that for less elsewhere.
Perhaps they're not interested in the technology, but the name. Suse has a very good reputation I think in both camps (client/server), and was apparently in Novell's grasp, where I don't think Redhat would be ($$$).
Re:That would have been interesting. by watzinaneihm · 2003-10-27 05:41 · Score: 2, Insightful

As i said in my other post, Novells plan is to get out of the OS business. They plan to be a company which makes services for enterprise, which incidentally will run on Linux. Think of them like GNU in GNU/Linux.
Today all their services run on Netware OS which is kind of old (but good enough for the time being) and it is the services which make any money at all. By netware 7 they plan to move to Linux entirely. To do this they have two choices, run it on a stock OS and be dependant on the distro or roll their own distro. They seem to have found a third option now, which is to buy out a popular distro.

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.ACMD setaloiv siht gnidaeR

Novell 7 SuSe In Link Up? by .com+b4+.storm · 2003-10-27 04:47 · Score: 3, Funny

Novell 7 SuSe In Link Up?

Looks like they succeeded in outlawing the shift key after all. :)

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Apply shift key to produce ampersand. by Ophion · 2003-10-27 04:48 · Score: 3, Funny

It's a handy typing tip!

Conflict of interest? by Polly_was_a_cracker · 2003-10-27 04:49 · Score: 2, Interesting

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)

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Re:Conflict of interest? by beezly · 2003-10-27 04:53 · Score: 2, Interesting

Tell that to the french government (who own a large chunk of Renault).

I don't think it's a "conflict of interest" though.
Re:Conflict of interest? by Anonymous Coward · 2003-10-27 04:56 · Score: 4, Insightful

Yes, what a horrible thing that would be, if a state governing body had a vested interest in the financial success of one of the companies that they themselves are a potential customer of.
Re:Conflict of interest? by KingDaveRa · 2003-10-27 04:57 · Score: 2, Interesting

I agree. Its never a good idea to have a potential supplier under the umbrella of the government. Then again, when the UK was mainly public (British Rail, Gas, etc) it was absolute, so who cared?

Still, it would be interesting to see what Novell would do with their own Linux Distro. Novell Servers, Novell Desktops tied up with ZENWorks - it would be very interesting.
Re:Conflict of interest? by vlad_petric · 2003-10-27 05:01 · Score: 5, Insightful

How about M$ buying its way out of the antitrust trial through the 2000 elections ? Isn't that a conflict of interests as well? It's certainly a more disgusting one.
I'm certainly not for State ownership, but it seems to me that in the US the companies are owning the state (and the only thing that changes when Democrats and Republicans replace each other is the dominant industry).

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The Raven
Re:Conflict of interest? by Ami+Ganguli · 2003-10-27 05:05 · Score: 4, Interesting

If you feel that government should represent the interests of the people, and you feel that SuSe is a good thing for the people of Germany, then this situation makes perfect sense. It's only a conflict if the interests of SuSe don't align with the interests of German citizens (which I'm sure is a case that MS would want to make).

You could, however, say that it's anti free-market. I would reply "so what?", since I think the government needs to intervene in the market from time to time to correct problems.

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It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
Re:Conflict of interest? by christoph_s · 2003-10-27 05:55 · Score: 5, Informative

i can't help but feel that this discussion is senseless since the german government doesn't own shares of suse (the list of investors is available on suse's website: http://www.suse.de/en/company/suse/suse/factsheet. html).

No vell, no thanks by wardk · 2003-10-27 04:54 · Score: 2, Troll

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?

Re:No vell, no thanks by watzinaneihm · 2003-10-27 05:16 · Score: 5, Informative

Well, Novell currently is a Good Company (TM)
They had a good idea with NDS which had no competitor in NT4. Marketing (and application support) won the market for Microsoft. With W2k microsoft came up with ADS which is as good as NDS (though it does not play well with other OSes as netware does). Novell now is trying to move from an OS company to supporting services company. NDS already runs on windows and Linux. You can download it from their website ( Note: Getting it to run on any of the newer Linuxes is a total pain).Novells plan is to move netware to a set of services that run on Linux. So they have an interest in Linux, and so are helping Linux.

Linux currently does not have anything like NDS/ADS that can support a very large and distributed network. So Novell is a good thing to happen to Linux.
Also check out their site Novell forge where they have a lot of stuff they released under GPL like their UDDI server IIRC. So they stand by GPL and put their money where their mouth is .
They also tried to stop SCO by releasing what they thought were some damning counter-evidence on the day of SCOs annual investor meet day. If they had their way SCO would be buried by now.
But what you mentioned is correct, novell has a way of dropping the ball.First against NT4, then against SCO.
Anyway if you are a Linux guy, try using Novell a Netware server (free demo CDs available everywhere).They are damn stable, but their GUI sucks, reminds me of Linux of two years ago.

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.ACMD setaloiv siht gnidaeR
Re:No vell, no thanks by altamira · 2003-10-27 05:39 · Score: 2, Informative

With W2k microsoft came up with ADS which is as good as NDS (though it does not play well with other OSes as netware does).

You are clueless. Value-level (as opposed to replication of full objects only, like ADS does), transitive, event-driven (unlike ADS, which does a scan for changed objects at intervals, the default being 10 (TEN!) minutes) synchronisation; the ability to scale to hundreds of thousands of objects in a single partition; working backup/restore technology - all make NDS eDirectory far superior to ADS.

Oh, and Gartner still agrees on that and regards Novell as the leader in the meta directory field.
Re:No vell, no thanks by Phishcast · 2003-10-27 06:24 · Score: 2, Insightful

Why are you "deleting" servers with Read/Write replicas anyhow? This is an adminsitrative education problem, not a problem with NDS. Remove NDS replicas, then remove the server from the tree.
Try deleting an Active Directory domain controller and see if that doesn't throw a wrench into your domain. Same deal...

too bad... by deviator · 2003-10-27 04:55 · Score: 4, Interesting

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).

Re:too bad... by sphealey · 2003-10-27 05:36 · Score: 4, Informative

I'll take that over the current versions of NetWare that boot off DOS.
Could we give up on this? Please? Netware uses an MS-DOS type system as a bootloader for good and sufficient reasons (simple, reliable, available everywhere in the world, small, fits on a floppy, provides system monitor functionality to Intel-based systems which historically have not had ROM-based monitors). Hell, a friend of mine once managed to get an entire Portugese Netware installation up and running without knowing a word of that language due to the simplicity of the installation model.
But Netware does not run on MS-DOS . And saying so makes you look a bit ill-informed.
sPh

German Goverment by Noizemonger · 2003-10-27 04:58 · Score: 3, Interesting

"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?

Re:German Goverment by christoph_s · 2003-10-27 10:17 · Score: 2, Informative

it's quite funny that someone would write a story without cheching such basic things... the german government doesn't own shares of suse (the list of investors is available on suse's website: http://www.suse.de/en/company/suse/suse/factsheet. html).

Deal? by Espectr0 · 2003-10-27 05:00 · Score: 4, Interesting

According to the article, suse is worth 100 million. They were offered 120 million.

Why didn't they accept?

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Novell's next choice - Mandrake! by capn_buzzcut · 2003-10-27 05:03 · Score: 5, Interesting

Why not?

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Re:Novell's next choice - Mandrake! by Havokmon · 2003-10-27 05:07 · Score: 4, Insightful

Why not?
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.
If Novell bought Mandrake, they'd have an awesome desktop to ship, and integrate, with their Netware 7 Linux product.

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That would be cheap... by tigertiger · 2003-10-27 05:06 · Score: 5, Informative

For one thing, SuSE has nothing to do with the German government - they list their investors on their factsheet (in German, unfortunately). It's IBM, SGI, Intel, Compaq, and some venture capitalists.

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.

Change is bad... by drywater · 2003-10-27 05:18 · Score: 2, Interesting

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!

Re:Microsoft 2 by kfg · 2003-10-27 05:18 · Score: 2, Insightful

Yes, we all know the reasons why the GPL prevents Red Hat from becoming Microsoft 2. I rather suspect that IBM knows it too, no matter how clueless the article's author is. (Yes, I read the article, so I know your post isn't offtopic at all).

Thing is that from IBM's point of view they're just trying to become something vaguely like IBM again.

From Red Hat's, Novell's and some other's point of view though I rather suspect they're trying to become the new Sun since Sun seems to have lost its way.

And then there's SCO, who is trying to not be a Linux company and is aiming for. . .well, good question. Microsoft's hit man maybe? The Blob?

Antarctica sounds like a good resolution to that matter.

KFG

Valuation isn't easy by sjbe · 2003-10-27 05:21 · Score: 4, Informative

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.

Re:Wow, I didn't know ... by tigertiger · 2003-10-27 05:28 · Score: 3, Informative

Again, there is no indication that the German government owns any part of SuSE. Maybe they have some government-backed loans, but I doubt it. From the management team and the board members, IBM and the venture capitalists dominate.

Maybe the author of the original article was thinking about the eMillennium fund - partly owned by Deutsche Bank, which is not by any means a government entity. It only sounds so (the government bank is called the Deutsche Bundesbank, and it does not do investments).

Re:They're stuck in the old game. by BrynM · 2003-10-27 05:47 · Score: 2, Insightful

"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?"

Novell isn't only trying to build technology, they need to re-build their brand. SuSE is a very popular distro with lots of foreign/EU supporters and users. If Novell could get these markets to take them seriously - or even better: like them - they would gain substantial market clout. Novell is also quickly falling behind in relevance to today's tech market. Their previous attempts at adopting new tech (the Win32/NT clients) weren't the big hits that they had hoped for. I believe that they don't think they have the time to build something from scratch. They need to get deeper into these markets and do it in some sort of turn-key fasion.

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Pronounciation? by bucketoftruth · 2003-10-27 05:51 · Score: 2, Interesting

Is it "soos" or "soo see"? I've always wondered

Re:Microsoft 2 by lp_bugman · 2003-10-27 06:26 · Score: 2, Informative

They do have they own distro and is based in RedHat.
Cisco has it's own dristro to. I know this for a fact because a couple of months ago I enterviewed for a job building a Dristro for Cisco under a IBM contract.
Sadly they hired some one else :(

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Re:They're stuck in the old game. by platos_beard · 2003-10-27 06:45 · Score: 2, Informative

The underlying assumption that you buy a company to get its technology is so wrong, even for a technology company. Brand or name recognition, distribution and marketing infrastructure, customer base, alliances / partnerships / connections are in all but the rarest cases far more valuable than any technology gained by a merger or acquisition.

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Netware & GNU/Linux: yes, please by GoneGaryT · 2003-10-27 07:37 · Score: 3, Interesting

My place of work is a Novell shop; I think we'd all love at least a Netware client for GNU/Linux. I imagine that goes for a lot of people. It would make 'Linux on the Desktop' a much closer reality for us.

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.

Re:Novell + SUSE by MuParadigm · 2003-10-27 07:40 · Score: 2, Funny

NoVA.

Novell: "what has changed?" by eGuy · 2003-10-27 09:00 · Score: 2, Interesting

Here is what has changed.

- 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.

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