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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.
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.
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...
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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.
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.
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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.