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.

Comments

Ripe why?

[bsayer]

I don't see why IBM would want the combination of them. SuSE by itself I can see, but why would IBM be more interested with Novell as part of the deal? IBM has Notes, so it doesn't need GroupWise.

Novell would make a great buy for IBM

[Anonymous Coward]

Suddenly, they'd hold all of Novell's rights vs. SCO. Since they sold SCO those rights to begin with, SCO could quickly wind up in a pickle... :]

Especially since Novell has those rights to direct SCO to do whatever it wants with respect to the contract between SCO & IBM.

In other words, IBM buying Novell would draw the noose more tightly around SCO's neck (okay, true, that's overkill, but...)

The end of Red Hat?

[todesengel]

If there was a buy out of Novell, it would definately spell the end of Red Hat. Imagine how strong of a Linux powerhouse IBM or Cisco owning Ximian, Suse, and Novell would be. Both desktop and server would benifit immensely. A little side note: check out these two stock graphs of Novell and Red hat, on the day Suse was aquired. Redhat Novell

I don't think so.

[sjvn]

Please! IBM and HP buy a Linux company? 'Why buy a cow when milk is free' has been their attitude towards Linux for a while now. Besides, IBM will soon own a small share of Novell anyway--more than sufficient to do them good if there's anything to the stories of Novell having enough Unix IP rights left to protect any Linux with a Novell brand on it from SCO attacks.

As for the others, sorry, I keep an eye on all of them, and I haven't see any sign of any of them having any interest in getting into the OS business. AT&T & Lucent have their own problems to fix, and Cisco is finally coming around quite nicely by having stuck to their main business lines.

Steven

Not likely, though

[A nonymous Coward]

IBM made a point a few years ago of emphasizing that they wanted to be a service company and work with all Linux distributions neutrally, not make their own. If they were to suddenly favor one distro so strongly, it would discard their neutrality, and I think that would hurt their current business model.