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Sun Pondering Buying Novell
Krafty Koder writes "ZDNet are reporting that Sun are considering purchasing Novell and thus gain SUSE Linux.
'With our balance sheet, we're considering all our options,' Sun chief operating officer Jonathan Schwartz said in an interview on Sunday regarding the possibility of acquiring Novell.
'What would owning the operating system on which IBM is dependent be worth? History would suggest we look to Microsoft for comparisons,' he said."
Good-bye Mono.
...when one dying company buys another dying company...
if they think this purchase will let them "own" linux
"What would owning the operating system on which IBM is dependent be worth? History would suggest we look to Microsoft for comparisons," he said.
In other news, Sun still doesn't get it.
So much for all of the advancements Novell was starting to make with Linux. Sun will probably bury it.
If you mod me down, I shall become less powerful than you could possibly imagine.
Schwartz is retarded. I doubt IBM would let themselves be dependent on Sun in the same way they were dependent on Microsoft in the 80s. If Sun bought Novell to get Suse to have leverage on IBM, IBM could just switch to another distro, or roll their own, or whatever. That's the whole freaking point behind IBM moving from proprietary Unix to Linux on the server.
... against the continual chorus of /.-ers who
say that sun is dead. If they own a major linux distro, then surely slashdot posters cannot be all doom and gloom about this company that (a) commercialized bsd linux (b) lead innovation in all areas of computing: clustering, high availability, chip fab, OS, compilers, etc., (c) fscking invented one of the most popular computer languages ever, (d) is known for considerable charitable works, the community-oriented nature of its work force, and for being a responsible corporate citizen. Maybe, just maybe, owning a linux distro would stop the slashdot "sun is dead/dying" festival.
/. will continue to wallow in 14-year-old flame fests.
What the hell was I thinking? Of course
I find it ironic that IBM invested $50 million in Novell so they could outbid Sun, and now Sun are looking to buy Novell..
Also, I'm worried about the rate at which tech corporations are swallowing up other companies... We seem to have lost many medium sized companies (suse, ximian, etc) as well as some huge ones (compaq).
mind enough about Linux, now they want to own a company devoted to Linux, then tommorrow they will probably want to sell it. The other funny part is they very rarely mention that the Java desktop or their new desktop runs on Linux.
Kosh: "Understanding is a 3 edged sword, your side, their side, the Truth."
What are they going to do, put the sqeeze on IBM by owning SUSE? With YAST GPL'd now, exactly how far would that get them? It doesn't seem to me that suse really has any commodity components left that are all that worth controlling. The actual novell stuff might be better, but suse doesn't seem worth it.
Sun has 2 billion in cash and Novell is priced at 3 billion. Looks risky burning your cash reserves. I'm not sure Novell provides the "synergy" that could sparc a Sun revival.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
'What would owning the operating system on which IBM is dependent be worth? History would suggest we look to Microsoft for comparisons,'
Translation: "Look Wall Street and market analysts, we're going to soon own something of value, as far as you know! Please change your rating of us from "Wipe your ass with the stock certificates" to "Eh, keep em around, you never know"!
If Sun makes this move, it could be the worst mistake they've ever made. First off, they do not seem to grasp the nature of the Linux desktop, or any desktop for that matter. Second off, they seem to have this idea that IBM *needs* Novell, when in fact it is the other way around. If Sun comes in, and tries to pull a Microsoft-like bullying technique, I have a strong feeling that IBM will be pulling the plug and switching to another distribution, such as Red Hat, Mandrake, or even developing its own distribution. Sun has not woken up to the new marget reality, and their revenue shortfalls show that. Sun, don't make a billion dollar mistake, just say "no" to aquiring Novell.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
.... Microsoft's hand in this? (Remember the $2b?) Probably MS has confidence - that Sun will not fall short of burying itself along with Novell, Linux and Ximian. That gets rid of the competition to Windows on the Server and desktop both. Much like what happened with Crapaq buying DEC and then HP buying both to kill the Alpha and use it's bones for Itanium - Thus paving the way for Intel to succeed in 64 bit market?! It's another story that AMD hit the right chord as far as 64bit market goes, and that too without any of this politics.
I guess the honeymoon between M$ and Unisys is over.../ 08028430.htm
http://www.unisys.com/about__unisys/news_a_events
of several distros that IBM uses. If he really believes that buying Novel would make IBM dependant on SUN, then there is a lot more wrong at Sun than first glance would suggest.
Umm.. Why nobody does not talk about Mono. Sun's biggest strenght is Java. And right now it is being under thread by Mono. So they wan't to buy Novell to get rid of Mono. If so, let's hope Mono community is as strong as Mozilla community.
So it's not all bad news then!
I wonder if this will happen. I can't help thinking it would be an interesting move for Sun. Mono represents at least a moderate threat to Java/J2EE on non-windows platforms and is sponsored by Novell so Sun could be thinking of trying to bury that and would acquire a good corporate Linux distro in the process rather than trying to build up their own (which is not all that easy). I suspect, though, that they're trying to hold MONO back with a nice bit of FUD of their own.
/. I'm a moderate fan of the company. They've been pretty generous in terms of open source donations (Tomcat, which rocks, and Open Office, which is kind of dull but works spring to mind). I also admire them for trying to do something different where they don't feel (rightly or wrongly) that open source is an option. In the case of Java the source code is available for download, the bug parade is available for public review, and the JCP allows individuals as well as corporates to have an influence on the direction Java/J2EE heads in (and its perfectly possible to fix bugs in the Java source code and have them rolled in to the release - I know because I've done it), I find it hard to imagine IBM or Microsoft or many other proprietary vendors, being so open with their code. (ducks for cover)
Despite the regular bashing that Sun gets on
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Wasn't too long ago I heard of some green handshake between two companies.
(puts on tin foil hat)
Will SuSE disappear like Corel Linux only to reappear as something new later on, or vanish completely?
It seems like whenever a certain Linux distro becomes too "well known" something happens to it.
I smell M$. Flame away, but this smells fishy.
I sometimes think that the interaction of Linux and the GPL is lost on Sun.
They persist in talking about RedHat as if they could execute predatory behavior like Microsoft does. RedHat can try, but at some point the market will kick in and limit what they can get away with because customers will always have a choice (White Box, SuSE, etc.) and thus always have some leverage with RedHat. It's just a question of at what pricing pain point it will happen.
Dear diary,
At the friday drink someone suggested buying into Linux in a big way so we can direct it down a path we want. It seemed very logical when we were drunk but now that I'm back at work trying to make a report of the pro's and con's, the bright possibilities seem rather blurry, if not illogical. But how to phrase it so that the rest of the corporation can see the pitfalls? Wait I'l just leak it to slashd....a forum and use their comments as arguments and counter arguments.
-- Jonathan Schwartz
All I can say is that this will be horrible for SuSe linux. Sun has been mismanaged "everything" they touched for a while and I don't think they will improve linux in any manner.
Sun is dying a slow death and this might be their last try, which might end up taking down SuSE linux with it...
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
The whole idea of Sun buying Novell for their Linux distro is absurd. There are otehr, cheaper distros or Sun could roll their own much more cheaply and effectively for their own hardware.
This is nothing more than business plan testing by public opinion.
How come Slashdot never gets Slashdotted?
for vendors to start *officially* supporting Debian again. HP used to, until the Compaq merger and Bruce Perens left.
IBM has made a consious desision not to have a distro of their own. They depend on commercial distros to provide the platform that runs their hardware and software.
IBM is deeply in bed with both RedHat and SUSE. As with any multi-vendor deal, IBM plays them off each other to make sure neither demand too much.
A hostile SUSE wouldn't be the end of the world, but it would cost IBM significant money and (more importantly) time.
OTOH. Jonathan Schwartz's comment compareing the situation to Microsoft explains a lot about why Sun has pissed away its market position. Their officers are obviously delusional.
Could Sun's decision here be also partly based on the growing success of Novell's Mono project? Mono is an implementation of .Net, which is a threat to Java (from a developer mindshare point-of-view at least), and perhaps this would be a way for Sun to start containing that threat.
.Net flamewar, that's not the intention of this post.
Oh, and spare me the Java vs
SUNW just woke up to the fact that their deals with SCOX didn't mean anything because Novell still owns all of the collateral, including the right to tell SCOX to stifle itself.
If SUNW were to buy Novell, the thinking must go, they could reverse Novell's order telling SCOX to leave IBM alone. Instead, they could harass IBM over AIX, which is a direct competitor to SUNW's server offerings.
SUNW still doesn't see Linux as a strategic threat. Don't be fooled into thinking that our interests are what drive them.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Man, Sun is pissing me off. They have ZERO direction. One day everything is SunONE, then everything is Java desktop.
In four quarters, my Sun Reps when from pushing Solaris Sparc, to Solaris x86, to Linux x86-32, to Linux x86-64. They have no credability. I just can't wait for them to ditch Sparc and Solaris completely. But then they'd have to compete with IBM, Dell, Redhat, and HP. OUCH! So much for high profit margins.
is not Linux, per se, but Unix. Novell almost certainly owns all major rights to Unix. In fact, I do not think that SCO had the ability to take UNix away from IBM. But I am wondering if Novell does. And as I stated earlier, I wonder if SUN would simply turn these nice rights over to SCO. I think a lot depends on wether IBM bought the indefinite license to unix that Sun bought so many years ago.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
With their post-Java-quarrel handshakes, it may not be too much of a stretch for the conspiracy theorists to think these actions are somewhat Microsoft-related. With all that Munich stuff being covered here recently, and all.
With Redhat sort of doing its own thing, SUSE places 2nd, if I recall correctly. I wonder if it's a way to pull a Tonya Harding on the other contender just to slow adoption down a little. You know, the way MS helped SCO out a bit to try and disrupt adoption that way too. Of course as many have pointed out, Linux being Linux, support will just switch to another distro and get on with it.
Hopefully the sale doesn't happen. I'm not sure how well the folks at Ximian would enjoy working for SUN. SUN would take Java Desktop over SUSE, and Java over the mono project. That sounds like a dark cloud in the making.
Actaully this is a feint..
Sun is buying SCO to stop the current court case and get full legal rigths to make solaris open source..
Don't Tread on OpenSource
They would be buying Novell's UNIX copyrights.
They would also get Ximian, which controls Mono and Evolution.
Keep in mind that Sun are already big gnome contributors.
And of course, Suse.
Someone should call up Sun and let them know they can download the sourcecode for Linux --- For FREE!
They probably have all that Microsoft money burning a hole in their pocket...
Chip H.
Ideology aside .NET is likely here to stay simply because of MS's market penetration, never mind that is actually happens to be (IMHO) pretty good.
Having a non-MS implementation that allows .NET applications to run on either MS or non-MS platforms is potentially the holy grail of Linux adoption. If more and more apps Just Worked on Windows or Linux, why keep paying the MS tax? (I'm talking average user here, not people who know enough to use things like WINE)
But herein lies the problem. Platform independence was always the claim/goal of Java. One it has had mixed results in achieving. MS's dirty pool with the JRE is certainly a big reason for its less than stellar success on Windows.
Sun hates .NET. .NET could become what they wanted Java to be... IF projects like Mono are successful. So, what would they likely do? Kill it in the name of Java.
Granted Mono is GPL'd, so they couldn't kill it entirely. But taking funding away from Miguel de Icaza and his team would certainly slow its progress dramatically. I'd hate to see that.
Blockwars: free, realtime, multiplayer game similar to Tetris.
"They do not preach that their god will rouse them, a little before the Nuts work loose." Kipling, 'The Sons of Martha'
Unless you're in the U.K., where the convention is as written. They tend to refer to companies as collective nouns.
The U.S. (and its standards of English) are not the world.
$2Bn cash now qualifies as "almost bankrupt"?
Damn, I wish I was almost bankrupt.
To reapply an old saying about Xerox and IBM...
If Novell bought KFC, they'd market the product as "Hot dead bird."
If Sun bought KFC, they'd market the product as "Warm dead bird."
the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur - A.N. White
sun still has 5.7 billion in the bank, according to their from 10k
The commercial viability of a Linux distribution as an Enterprise offering has little to do with the vendor itself. It has to do with other companies like Oracle and Rational (technically now IBM) supporting those distributions. And really the only thing that prompts those companies is the Linux vendor offering multi-year support contracts that say the versions of the software included will not change over the course of the support contract. So even though every other Linux vendor can produce just about the exact same distribution, they don't offer the support contracts that get the big software companies to port applications.
Yea, thats right... The only reason the Linux desktop even has an office suite that is business ready is because of Sun. Open Office is a key to linux being on the desktop and yet people always seem to forget who gave it to us. Not to mention they also came out with that wonderful little language known as java and fully support it on Linux. Java is going to be a key in the desktop migration, well java and .net. But being able to develop on one platform and know it will run on another without modification is an amazing thing when developing. Sun has been very nice to the OSS community and often donates large sums of money to various projects. Not to mention the whole Project Looking Glass thing. When Looking Glass is released, it will show some real competition with Longhorn and Mac on the desktop.
Regards,
Steve
MS has nothing to do with this. Secondly how does Novell/Suse going under kill Linux? Last time I checked Red Hat not Suse was still #1 on the server front and we still have Debian, Mandrake, Slackware, and Gentoo. Even if Ximian were to disband today GNOME would still be around and a little product called KDE would not be affected in the least. I love a good conspiracy theory especially where MS is concerned, but your post is neither Interesting or Likely.
Bah, freedictionary is evil. They basically copy wikipedia and insert the obligatory reference to wikipedia as a javascript thing so google doesn't see it.
The original wikipedia article as a link: American and British English differences
Microsoft managed to leverage a fortune out of the IBM deal, because Microsoft OWNED the OS. If Sun bought Novell, that would cause maybe a year of disruption before IBM pushed another company into the Novell position, or took over that position themselves. With Linux under the GPL, there is no way to lock others out of the OS market space, so there is no way to leverage the OS market space to be able to control the technology.
The world doesn't need yet another commercial linux distro. Unix is not Unix is not Unix. There are big differences between them, and God knows we've enough work on our plate having to learn at least a couple of commercial unix platforms as well as the two main Linux offerings to be marketable to employers today. One more would be a royal pain in the ass.
The only way is could work for IBM would be if they rolled out a version of Linux that shared the same sysadmin tools and philosophy as AIX. That way they could preserve customers investment in training as the skills would be interchangeable between their platforms.
At the end of the day though, they'd end up with a Linux platform which was no more functional than those from Redhat or SuSE, so would the extra engineering & expense really be worth it. Probably not.
You take two failing companies and put them under one incompetent and ego driven leader in Scott McNealy and it is a sure win-win! I am sure Microsoft would be happy to offer cash incentives to all parties. (feel the sarcasm)
.NET 1.1 profile which would allow them to have a closer integration with MS technologies. As a part of their new "agreement" with MS to collaborate on their enterprise technologies (.NET and J2EE) this would seem like a logic acquisition.
What I find interesting is that Sun would acquire access to the Mono implemention of the
Now if they just had a talented CEO and CTO running the show it would be quite promising. Unfortunately I do expect McNealy to allow his ego to overcome any logical choices and botch the whole venture. But who could do this? How about Miguel de Icaza (Gnome/Mono creator) as CTO, someone who has proven work ethic and the ability to make wise choices?
Brennan Stehling - http://brennan.offwhite.net/blog/
IBM might decide that Novell/SuSE could be a good match for them. It could mean a bidding war for Novell.
Or IBM could just head hunt the best of Novells people and pay them to do OSS work. I do not think Sun will buy them.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
In addition to slashdotters thinking its a bad idea, the Wall Street Journal Online has a follow-up report Novell Acquisition Would Be Bad Move for Sun, Analyst Says
Among the reasons the analyst lists (in case you don't want to subscribe to the WSJ Online):
I would add:
I should also mention Novell recently raised $600 million in a corporate debt offering, about $125 million of which was for a stock buyback (not sure how that might affect their takeover prospects). The rest was for future acquisitions, the rumor on Wall Street is that the inside favorite for a future Novell acquisition is MySQL AB.
That would be a great acquisition, adding MySQL to their software stack would complement both Novell's Mono and J2EE application server offerings. My personal favorite other acquisition would be Zend, giving Novell a LAMP application server software stack!
I'm reading the comments on this story and I'm just amazed at how many comments are so hostile to Sun - I just dont understand where this hostility comes from. Sure I can understand people being critical of Sun, and criticicism is good, but this outright hatred is just weird.
Now, I'm a (recent) Sun employee[2], so maybe I'm blinded by my paycheck, but it seems to me that to consider a company that:
as being a reasonable pariah for the Linux community is just strange.
So Sun still push Solaris over Linux, well why wouldnt Sun? Sun have spent a long time working on it, the people at Sun are proud of Solaris. Surely they have as much right to be proud of their (their, cause I havnt contributed to Solaris) work as the "Linux" developers[1] have to be of theirs? And even so, Sun still do spend money on technologies that are of benefit to Unix in general, be it Solaris, Linux, BSD, whatever.. and spend money marketing what is effectively Linux.
So Sun bought out licence rights from SCO, how evil of them, but if you're responsible for Sun and you have a chance to fully secure your "IP" (yuk) rights wouldn't it be corporate irresponsibility to not do so? Remember, you can be sued by shareholders for your inactions as much as your actions.
So Sun settled a long-running dispute with MS, how evil of them. But MS infringed on Suns' rights, is Sun not allowed to get a fat cheque from MS for MSs' wrongdoing, should Sun instead have continued litigating the matter at great expense and uncertainty? Would Sun maybe then later being awarded a fat cheque from MS by court order have then *not* been evil? The settlement recompenses Sun for wrong done to it and lets Sun get on with things, why is that evil?
At the end of the day, Sun are a Unix company. Sun are not perfect, no entity is, and Sun will have to adapt to changing market conditions, as all companies do, but they're the only big company who are and have been 100% committed to Unix from day one of their existence. Sure, Sun would prefer to sell you Solaris, and why not, Solaris is still Unix, and work on any one Unix ultimately benefits all unixes, be it directly or by virtue of competition. Never mind that Sun also directly contribute to technologies/projects that are key to Linux, as well as many other cross-platform projects, and also market Linux in one segment of the market.
The irony of course is that most of these /. weenies who like to spout this ill-informed "Sun is evil, they hate Linux!!!" clap-trap are likely doing so from the "comfort" of their Win32 PCs.
Linux, Solaris, BSD, etc.. So what, they're all Unix. Unix in part draws it's strength and health from diversity, from not being a heterogenous meritocracy, not a homogenous monopoly. Sun has long been a valuable contributor to that meritocracy of ideas.
Vive la difference!
1. What is a Linux developer exactly, aside from Linux kernel developers? I work on stuff at Sun that runs on Linux and Solaris. It's all Unix to me..
2. NB: I do not speak for Sun, opinions in this post are my own. Statemen
I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.
Of course Miguel could fork it, create a company called Yimian, and Sun would have to buy him again.
The beauty of open source.
Okay, so the Register has already demolished any idea that this is real-world stuff rather than more empty talk from J. Schwartz. And it's clear that even if Sun were somehow to acquire Novell, the self-destructive corporate culture of the McNealy cultus would destroy any value toute suite.
Nevertheless: this would be a good idea, if Sun had a proper management team.
First, Sun's channel sucks, especially in the small-to-medium business range. Novell, despite its decline in recent years, has a quite good SMB channel and a decent consulting network. For a long time it owned the SMB (and much of the gov't) space, and it still has deep roots there.
Second, with the Java Enterprise System, Sun is trying to break into the LAN administration, groupware, and identity management rackets. Novell knows these spaces better than almost everyone.
Third, between Sun's HIG team and the Ximian monkeys, they'd have an unstoppable Gnome desktop squadron.
Fourth, Novell's managers, in contrast to Sun's, seem to know what they're doing and how to keep their mouths shut. Shanghaing a few of them into the parent company would be nothing but helpful.
Fifth, both companies have struggled to break into the J2EE game for a while; they could combine their heretofore ineffectual efforts and have a fighting chance at making it.
A well-run Sun-Novell teamup would be a very good thing for both companies concerned. It would extend Novell's reach up-market and Sun's down-market; it would combine a rock-solid engineering backbone with an effective distribution channel. Of course, it wouldn't be well-run, and it won't happen.
Google confirms: Ruby is the world's most beloved programm
Yes, I know that anyone can fork a project. But there is an inertia that keeps projects from forking. If you employ the majority of the developers on a project, you can guide that project as you like.
At least officially, the open sourcing of Solaris is still a go. However, no firm date has been given and of course full diligence to protect 3rd party code would have to take place. In other words, definitely not tomorrow.
I think you may be remembering that right after the Solaris open source announcement was made, someone else (without approval) said Java would also be open sourced. That statement was retracted with a statement that this option (for Java) is still under consideration but nothing firm has been decided yet.
It is more productive to voice thoughtful opinions (reply) than to judge (moderate) others.
IBM is in the business of selling computer hardware, and service contracts. They do not consider themselves to be in the business of selling software.
IBM has no wish to try to compete with Red Hat or SuSE, especially given how much revenue those companies are making right now (i.e. not very much, by IBM standards).
IBM does have software projects -- for example, AIX. And if you look at what IBM has been doing with AIX, you see that they have been taking every cool feature of AIX and porting it to Linux. Once Linux can replace AIX, IBM will wind down the AIX project, and move the AIX staff to work on other projects.
IBM must view software as just overhead -- something they need to pay for, that enables them to sell more compters and service contracts, but not itself a profit center. If they can transition from in-house (high-overhead) software, to externally developed software, and still make as much money from hardware sales and service contracts -- that's a very easy business decision to make! All the more so when the free nature of Linux means they have no risk of becoming overly dependent on any one company.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Apparently CowboyNeal was left speechless by the news, to the point of leaving the "dept." field blank.
My exception safety is -fno-exceptions.
I don't keep track, but if there are any IBM-Sun negotiations or lawsuits going on, this comment probably has to do with that.
IBM are one of Suns' main competitors. Both sell PC servers, RISC servers, Linux, Unix®, Java, software support, a range of "middleware" software and IT consultancy services.
Sun, like all companies that actually have competition, will jostle for position with, make statements about and generally try to best and outsmart their competition. That's how competition works...
I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.
but not for the reasons everyone else is pointing out. I *like* Novell - and liked them before they dove into Linux. They've got some incredibly great technology for managing huge, unwieldy networks that no one else has.
There were rumors a year ago or so before the SCO fiasco that IBM was looking to buy Novell - that would have been great--IBM would have kept Novell's good parts (ala Lotus) & dumped the rest. But I'm not so sure Sun would be as good as IBM--Sun, unlike IBM, is a company with a definite lack of consistent direction and has an uncertain future as Linux continues to encroach on it. Sun has had/has some really cool technologies, but I honestly don't think they'd really recognize the value of the stuff Novell would bring to the table and would probably screw it up because they'd be so focused on trying to leverage the Linux stuff. Which would be lame.
Actually it is a product of the language spoken by Friesians and other tribes of Angles who settled in Britannia, mixed with latin. Then later the Vikings came along and settled in Angleland, mostly in the north and again influenced the language. Then a bunch of accountants, sorry Normans, (descended from the Vikings who invaded northern Gaul and settled with the local Gauls) invaded from France, and again influenced the language and culture.
After that, England was never invaded again, and the language never again underwent radical changes, just slow evolution, through immigration, exploration and colonisation. Which is why Chaucer's Canterbury tales, 700 hundred odd years old, are still readable, even to a modern english speaker.
I cant think of any differences in modern english that are a product of the USA, other than some trivial spelling and usage differences.
I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.
I agree it's a joke to think to that Sun can outbid IBM. I don't think IBM is interested in owning Novell. On the otherhand I don't think IBM would want Sun to own Novell. So I think IBM will propose a deal to Novell to dramatically increase it's investment Novell. This way IBM neutralizes any acquistion by Sun.