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Novell & SUSE In Link Up?

Posted by Hemos on from the potential-merger dept.

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."

5 of 209 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Conflict of interest? by vlad_petric · · 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).

    --

    The Raven

  2. Novell's next choice - Mandrake! by capn_buzzcut · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Why not?

    --
    "And now, Frank N. Furter, your time has come. Say 'goodbye' to all of this, and 'hello'... to oblivion!"
  3. That would be cheap... by tigertiger · · 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.

  4. Re:No vell, no thanks by watzinaneihm · · 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.

    --
    .ACMD setaloiv siht gnidaeR
  5. Re:Conflict of interest? by christoph_s · · 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).