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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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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...
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).
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.
According to the article, suse is worth 100 million. They were offered 120 million.
Why didn't they accept?
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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).
The Raven
Why not?
"And now, Frank N. Furter, your time has come. Say 'goodbye' to all of this, and 'hello'... to oblivion!"
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.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
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.
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.
.ACMD setaloiv siht gnidaeR
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.
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).