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Novell Announces Agreement to Acquire SUSE
Mickey Hill writes "Novell today announced it has entered into an agreement to acquire SUSE LINUX, one of the world's leading enterprise Linux companies, expanding Novell's ability to provide enterprise-class services and support on the Linux platform. Novell expects the transaction to close by the end of its first fiscal quarter (January 2004). This latest move follows Novell's August purchase of Ximian."
two possible results:
1. Novell stuffs this up, and I'm left with no real "Free" solution for buisnesses (I dont care about support, I just want a brand name and is recognizable and usable).
2. Novell doesnt stuff it up, and SUSE takes over Redhat's market share here in north america.
Either way, linux growth is going to stop dead for a good chunk of time while these issues with Redhat and Suse settle down.
After yesterdays' article regarding Redhat's changes, I started looking at SUSE more carefully. Now we've got such serious flux in the two most important linux distributions that it'll take six months to a year before I feel comfortable pitching either of these to buisnesses.
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novell has a long history of fucking up good ideas. only now, at the end, do they realize what has been kicking their ass: limited APP server offerings.
Novell is perceived by most of my customers as a (fairly kick ass) file-print-directory services server only system. but file-print-directory services are only part of what companies need these days. they need groupware/email (groupwise is a joke), they need SQL servers, and they need "Micro Vertical App Server" for Their Tiny Industry that somebody in a garage is addressing. And they want it all on the same platform, with integrated authentication.
small vertical apps is a big one, but it seems to be too much of a bitch to write these VBesque vertical apps on novell, so nobody does. "Small Dentist Office Accounting Pro" gets cooked up on windows by a small software company and not on novell. (incidentally this is a bit of a problem for linux on the desktop front: the crazy apps like "BeeKeeper Ranching and Honey Tracking" are what keep most businesses from switching on the desktop).
looks like Novell is trying to do what they failed to do with the original Unix license they pissed away: create a Novell branded viable app server platform. they screwed up the first time with proprietary unix. maybe a more open system will succeed, but knowing Novell, probably not.
They buy promising company and bug them down in politics. The leader of the bought company run away with their new cash so no new development worth noticing happens. What's left is a company that sells and resells repackaged old product at an ever increasing price. I hope SuSE will be strong enough to resist the Corp politics.
IBM learned from that set of mistakes. The question is: has Novell learned? Or is this the same bunch of guys who think it is still 1993 with Netware holding 85% market share?
sPh
If you look at the Novell product line, they are almost all server software which run on a network and a client from almost any OS can connect to them.They have almost no client part which makes them money. .If you have ever used netware you will know how bad their GUI is (ofcourse with Netware you are not supposed to be using the GUI, but using their web interface instead to manage it). .NET implementation (again maybe some interoperatbility benefits here). They are acquiring Suse so that they get a stable base for their Netware 7 and so that they can use the mindshare to push their enterprise offerings , again in the process acquiring the biggest supporter of KDE (ximian is Gnome and Suse is KDE!).
So, Novell I think has almost no interest in desktop, other than to use them as their "clients" to their servers. So I am sceptical how much novell will do for the desktop especially the GUI
And If my guess is right, they bought Ximian for their connector,so that they can use their mail server software to better integrate with exchange (maybe for migration, i dont know), in the process unintentionally acquiring one of the best desktops and a
What they now have is some stuff they can make money on immediatly and some which maybe they can use later. The future of desktop linux depends on what novell does with the latter.
.ACMD setaloiv siht gnidaeR
NOVELL INC (NasdaqNM:NOVL)
Pre-Market: 7.499 +1.449 (23.95%)
NOVL Market Cap: 2.26B
Let's do the math.
Novell will pay $210 million for Suse, but Novell's market cap goes up by $500 million upon announcing the deal.
So basically, the acquisition of Suse is FREE. Actually, Novell made an extra $300 million in stock value by announcing the deal - so it's better than free.
Gotta love the free market system.
I'm reminded of my reaction to Novell buying Unix System Labs in 92/93 and the sale to SCO in 1995 and the SCO rename to Caldera later. It all seemed to Rosey.
Unix appeared to be in reliable hands and was being freed into Linux, Caldera even said as much.
Then came per seat, and all the rest to the point where we are now with SCO attempting to steal Linux and claim far more in Unix than the law ever intended for.
It keeps me from getting any warm fuzzies over Novell aquireing Suse.
On the Redhat front. I find it odd being a registered adoptee of Redhat (can you really be the owner of OS software?) and a shareholder in the company that I have yet to recieve the email about the end of Redhat Linux.
Redhat's site backed up the stories.
BUT it's being misunderstood.
Yes RH9 appears to be the last in it's line BUT RH Enterprise Linux WS is actually it's repacement.
The License for RHEL WS is the same as for RH9. The only real change is that to get support from Redhat, you are going to HAVE TO PAY for the support.
Your free to get support elsewhere free or otherwise.
Reasonable and overdue, it's a sign of the maturity of commercial Linux.
I'll probably step up to RH Enterprise, and now that Suse is under Novell I'll give it another cautious try, but there really isn't a reason to leave RH.
To stop a $210 million friendly take-over of a private company? Not bloody likely unless it had been in a heavily regulated area (think arms manufacturer, nuclear technology or similar). The regulators involved are likely to do more than yawn - this is peanuts from a government point of view.
Since when has being acquired by Novell been a good thing? Novell has a knack for picking seemingly good targets, but has a history of failing miserably in post-acquisition execution. One example of many is SilverStream. It was one of the pioneering java application servers, and had a lot of mindshare. It was celebrated acquisition, supporters claiming it was a great match and flush with resources, it would really dominate the market. Now I ask, how many people have heard of Novell exteNd?
Novell acquisition press releases are epitaphs.
bp
Err, not quite. While I am not a devotee of RedHat as a distro, I think it's a bit unfair to dub them "evil" when they have actually put a lot of manpower into products that have been released into the public domain free of charge.
While it's not precisely altruism, they have contributed a lot to the Linux user community, and to deny that is churlish.
Save the epithets for the real baddies in Redmond.
RedHat are not abandoning their base!
The are opening up development to the community, this is leading to lots of excitings happening, as I said yesterday.
What RedHat are doing means that anyone can duplicate and sell Fedora CDs and stuff like that, Fedora is becoming more like debian in terms of community involvement -- and this is great!
I dunno much about SuSE, but I do know that the nature of the mode of production of free software is such that it is best done in an open way -- doing it in a closed way is too expensive.
Personally I'd rather be working for RedHat than SuSE right now...
Check out MKDoc a mod_perl CMS
1.) Novell does a f*ck up with SuSE, goes down the drain and pulls SuSE along until they're bought out by somebody else. This is somewhat likely, as SuSE is doing very good as a Linux brand right now. It could hardly get better rather than worse. In germany (most Linux users per capita) SuSE is even synonym for Linux!
All in all that would stall Linux brand recognition but probably be good news for Mandrake, the last one left.
2.) Novell has actually seen the light and plans way ahead into the future, were software won't make a buck anymore, but free software will reign and the business is in services.
3.) Novell/SuSE twitches here and there, barely surviving, taking shares from Mandrake, they all die eventually, Mickeysoft prevails and there is a 5 year setback for OSS, with only Gentoo and Debian to the rescue in the far future, when the OSS model has consumed everything.
Bottom line:
I don't like this news. Sound bad. Chances are to high that this once o-so big company Novell is gonna screw up. And SuSE is my first recomendation to n00bs right now. It would be a real shame for them to go down the drain.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Also, SuSE is doing remarkably well in Europe, where the German government has been giving it a lot of support. Once it's seen as "tainted" by US corporate interests (trust me, Europeans are not happy with the US), it might impact how well SuSE is received by Governments in Europe.
(Especially as SuSE is perceived as being a safe way to avoid backdoors imposed by foreign Governments.)
On the flip-side, development work costs money, and Novell probably has more of that than SuSE. If Novell gets this right, and puts in some serious cash, Linux could get some badly-needed investment in the ease-of-use arena. IBM and SGI have done wonders for filesystems, high-end architectures, etc, but they're not known for producing software for Joe Average. Novell's networking products were popular in schools, at one point, precicely because they were easy for idiots to use.
Since that fits in nicely with SuSE's reputation of easy-to-use, easy-to-install distros, that offers some excellent opportunities.
That's where the skeptisism must come in, unfortunately. An opportunity is not the same thing as a reality. Unless Novell makes use of this, and brings Linux to the masses, this move will do nothing for anyone, SuSE included.
If Novell do bring Linux to the masses... well, that's a different kettle of fish. Then this will be the greatest move imaginable, and everyone will benefit signigicantly.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Except that Novell can just tell SCO that they can't sue - I wonder why we don't hear more on this... Since it appears that SCO can't sue IBM anyway.
Well, Novell stands to gain nothing by suing SCO now.
However:
1) Wait for SCO vs. IBM to work itself out
2) If SCO wins, sue SCO
3) PROFIT!
If SCO loses, Novell then hasn't paid large fees to lawyers and has lost nothing.
Free Gamer - Free games list and commentary
The biggest possibility is that they're going to move to Ximianized GNOME as the desktop. They'd be foolish to throw away a major asset (Ximian GNOME, which is far easier to use than even SuSE's KDE) just because some of their new developers were fans of KDE. I would expect YAST to see some major revisions, too.
Lots of people will want to deny this because they know that it would be a huge blow to the KDE project. I really can't blame them. But Sun and RedHat are both using GNOME now, and Novell seems to be apt to move in that direction, too. Desktop consolidation arrives in the corporate market. We'll see if this changes anything...
-Erwos
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
IBM wants Novell back in the Linux business and that's why IBM is providing the backing for the deal. This is also tied in with the fact that Novell retained the right to require SCO to "amend, supplement, modify or waive any right" under the license agreements sold to SCO for UNIX (and if SCO did not comply, Novell could exercise those rights itself on SCO's behalf). IBM is interested in crushing SCO and Novell needs a distro to further it's investment in the Ximian desktop. It's a symbiotic relationship that will cause the fall of Darl McBride :-) This would be a really good time to get rid of any SCO paper before Scott Tissue takes it over...
Novell has a history of jumping on every bandwagon at it's peak, then abandoning it when something else comes along. Consider their past:
1. Buying the AT&T source, then announcing plans to merge NetWare and UNIX into a hybrid called "SuperNOS"
2. Buying Wordperfect, Quattro Pro and creating WordPerfect Office.
3. Java-on-NetWare. Anyone remember "the world's fastest Java execution environment"?
Every one of these failed, and was quietly abandoned. Now it's Linux. Hopefully they actually stick with this initiative long enough for it to bear some fruit.
This makes Mandrake the only even moderately high profile commercial Linux distribution left in European hands, and as is well known Mandrake's finances are seriously wobbly. And this matters for everyone just now, because the future of Linux in the US is being played out in just that same murky Salt Lake City slime-pool. Fall out from the SCO case will affect all US-owned Linux distributions.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
I dont know about you, But I would be worried if I used SuSe as my Linux Distro.
Why? Because Novell Aquired it. If there's anything that has been proven over the last couple of years is that Novell buying a company out is basicially the Kiss of Death.
Look at Wordperfect (pratcially dead), Quattro Pro (dead) and Caldara (Now SCO. - Suing anything that Produces code for money)
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe their aquiring it in order to expand their networking capability beyond Netware futher, or do away with the netware OS altogether and replace it with a Linux based network server.
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
Fedora release - what release? Redhat did a very poor job of communicating it's strategy to it's customers. There is a ton of confusion right now because of it. This is not the customer's fault it's Redhat's.
They need to get their act together and communicate or they are going to loose lots of people because of it.
I don't care what they intended or what they are doing if I can't figure it out.