Novell/SUSE Prime for Aquisition?
Ho Kooshy Fly writes "Supposedly Novell/SUSE looks like a good buyout target now. The likes of the obvious, IBM and the less obvious Cisco might be interested in integrating in the new Novell/SUSE company into their portfolio." Lucent, AT&T, and HP are also mentioned as possible buyers, but it's important to remember that it's all still just speculation.
After reading all the posts here, people don't see the major problem with IBM buying Novell.
IBM is a very big and powerful company, and them "consolidating" is NOT a good thing. Do we really want just TWO companies running everything?
I for one LIKE competition and IBM has a history of being assholes. These guys may be opening up to Linux(and I think they're sincere), but they are still an "old world" company that relies on patents (look at their SCO countersuit).
Novell's QA and UI teams must be either a) non-existant or b) incompetent, because I've never had so much trouble with any software as I have had with Novell software. Their latest NetWare client breaks the "lock workstation" functionality in Win2k, and slows down systems to a crawl. GroupWise takes over all MAPI stuff on the computer, and is poorly written - you're lucky that Outlook will even work after you've installed the GroupWise client (that is, you're lucky if it'll even work with GroupWise, because after you install it you can't use Outlook for anything else but GroupWise as it completely hijacks MAPI). Oh, and the GroupWise client has a UI that makes me think of Windows 3.1. The latest NetWare server version went up and down 5 times a day for MONTHS until Novell could finally fix the problems. Personally, I think IBM would pass - it would take too much work to integrate the products, and IBM programmers would be lucky to figure out the crappy code they'd get from Novell.
What I find so interesting is that Linux advocates think that they need a convicted monopolist to buy up Linux companies in order to compete against a johnny has-been named SCO.
So much for ideology, I guess.