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IBM Invests $50M in Novell, May Ship SUSE Linux
dave writes "Novell announced that it has finalized a $50 million investment from IBM, and that IBM can now begin shipping SUSE Linux on all IBM server platforms. Historically, IBM has been a 'Red Hat shop,' and one has to wonder if this is a harbinger of things to come."
Or, perhaps it's payback time. Novell were very supportive of IBM in the SCO debacle. Perhaps this is IBM saying thankyou. Wouldn't it be ironic if SCO's actions were what caused Linux to become an even stronger corporate presence
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
I'm not in IT either, but aren't they at the forefront of that whole 'don't buy the hardware, buy the service' movement that has been taking off in recent years?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
So. . . this should surprise no-one. IBM is omnipresent in Linux these days, but they have traditionally been the biggest force behind Suse (and now they are backing Novell).
My Guess As to Why? There are things that IBM can do hiding behind the names "Suse" and "Novell" that they cannot do as "IBM".
Anyone think this wasn't a message to Bill Gates?
Except debian of course. Debian seems to always be ahead of everybody (and no, I'm not talking about stable, but about unstable/experimental).
IBM is a company, and a company sells what its customers want. If 6% of IBM's customer base wanted to use dr-dos, im sure IBM would find a means to deliver it. Thats all, theres nothing more to see here. ;). Both home and personal versions on 8.2 and 9.
Suse, for those that havent used it, is a fantastic distro btw... it was the first one to convince me to buy a boxed copy
Also, suse sells 3 foot inflatible penguins on their website, i paid 25 bucks for mine, and TRUST ME... it impresses the ladies.
... of things to come is the great beauty of Linux. You don't have to be tied to "one shop" as this whole industry is so used to doing. You have choice, so you have the potential for competition. IBM is simply being a good consumer. They learned their lessons from the past (when they were dependent upon Microsoft). Makes perfect buiness sense.
Linux will be a business where lots of people get to eat, but no one will get filthy rich -- and that isn't a bad thing.
Server shmerver, when do I get to buy it on a Thinkpad?
The same thing happened with OS/2. Great OS, but the company would make you yank your own teeth out with rusty pliers before the would send it to you. Instead they would shove their own competition down your throte (that' "other" OS).
I would rather be ashes than dust!
Could you please make examples of some of these nice Suse features, other than illustrating the goods of german cars? :-)
Corporate customers love that warm feeling of having someone's ass at the other end of a FIXME button detonated.
Although you'd think that IBM would be more of a Red Hat supporter (would they really want support two distributions?), I think this investment probably started after the SCO fiasco launched and Novell and IBM were forced by need, to cooperate together. Novell is throwing in with Linux like IBM did a few years ago and it doesn't take make much sense to restrict the number of people working on Linux to just your own.
It's also a nice way of saying "$86M to SCO? Ok, $50M to Novell, asshats." Gorilla chess.
Just if IBM releases Lotus Office as Open Source, M$ will fall deep.
...one has to wonder if this is a harbinger of things to come.
No need to inject false drama here. Things have come. No wondering required. Next story please.
Not really fair to mod the parent as redundant, given the number of interesting and insightful replies to it. Should at least be considered a bit 'interesting'.
sorry I sold mine last april when they told almost all of us to sod-off..
Us uers are who MADE redhat. They made the intentional decision to piss us off and to make us look bad to our bosses and company's executive branch. redhat has a bad taste in the mouth of most linux professionals that were buying the stock and support for the machines... we were riding on the freedoms that Open Source and linux gave us... the fact that we can add servers for little to no cost except for adding to the support agreement. Now, RHAS requires a purchase for EVERY machine (read the EULA) and has ZERO cost savings over windows. The legal department blew their top over the redhat EULA clauses even though the MS EULA's are more draconian..
IBM is simply shifting away from the stinky kid that nobody likes anymore.
Unless redhat issues a major change in direction and a public apology to those of us they made them what they are today by fighting to get redhat installed in the back office, myself and many many many others will never use or reccomend them again. And IBM knows this.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
#1). First, Red Hat hasn't exactly been friendly to the Linux community. They write kernel patches all the time for Red Hat and don't submit them to kernel.org That doesn't seem like very friendly community behavior to me.
I suppose employing noted kernel hackers such as Ingo Molnar and Robert Love isn't 'friendly' to you?
Is this rock and roll, or a form of state control?
The biggest problem I've had over the past few months with Redhat is this:
Heaps of apps targeted and marketed towards the Redhat "platform".
Redhat has dropped support for old products... this means no security updates, which upsets corporate IT departments and PHBs. They all say "thou shall upgrade to a supported version"
However, the RH 8 platform is only two years old and unsupported.
Now if your apps are "supported only under Redhat 8", but your servers "must upgrade to a supported version", short of tedious technical assessments, Redhat has effectively killed the products you're using.
PHB's say "I knew we shouldn't have trusted this Linux crap! Now our apps are unsupported!"
Now... does the application developer target RH AS? Which has already crept to 2.1, or do they consider SuSE, Debian, or ditch Linux altogether?
I'm certain IBM has encountered this problem. There are apps on the IBM website which used to show Linux support for Redhat 8 and under, but now that RH8 is unsupported, the apps show no support for Linux at all.
IBM, a company which still provides support for OS/2, and will probably service your ball typewriter if you paid them enough, has to tell its customers "our supplier has dropped support."
Will IBM stick with Redhat?
Something is going to blow very, very soon. Redhat would be wise to offer support for prior versions... and NOW, and drop the BS version creep.
Their stellar stock performance over the past few months has come at the price of customer loyalty.
I dunno, look at any major shared or dedicated hosting company that uses Linux. What are they running? Discount and shared servers run RedHat 9 (and now I'm starting to see Fedora), and professional and dedicated run RHEL 3. Once in awhile I see Debian, but it's a RedHat world in the Linux hosting market. That's a lot of customers. As far as I've observed, SuSE hosting is a rarity.
I've always hated the fickle part of the Linux community. The kind that always rooted for Red Hat to Fall even though they've given away the code to everything they've ever produced. Even back in the mid 90's you had these jackass's calling Red Hat the "Microsoft" of Linux soley because they were the most popular.
Now along comes Novell/Suse. Suse of course has specialized in proprietary restrictive distros. Only just recently has Yast been gpl'd. Novell of course has specialized in proprietary software for like 20 years. These are the company's that you want to lead Linux and OSS for the next 10 years? Let me tell you. Novell may finally allow ISO's of some low end form of Suse to be released but their main goal is combining their proprietary technologies with Suse. So now you'll see a Suse with a GPL Yast but proprietary NDS,Groupwise, Zenworks, Ximian connector etc. Novell btw also doesn't have the best track record for acquisitions and business management for the last 10 years. In fact they have a downright shitty track record. This is the mega-company that you want to "lead" linux for the next 10 years?
Good luck. Oh and Redhate sucks.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
It gets old. You talk about email clients, and someone will insist that you can get by with a plain text mailer -- MIME attachments are passing fad. You talk about off-the-shelf routers, and somebody will wonder why you don't just use an old laptop running BSD. You discuss the problems of providing reliable downloads, and someone will insist that BitTorrent, a tool you need to be a total hacker to use, is a universal solution.
And of course there's the dude who asks, "I have no trouble working with Fedora, why is it a problem for IBM?" Of course it doesn't even occur to him that Red Hat gets the same amount of revenue for Fedora as they get for SuSE. Which is to say, none.
Repeat after me: "OTHER PEOPLE HAVE DIFFERENT NEEDS FROM ME."
Re-read, liscensing was $1,000/4-CPU's or $250/CPU * 16 CPU's for a total of $4,000 which is chump change for including support in an enterprise product. Of course the support doesn't sound like it was helping a lot.....
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.