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Oracle Looks At Buying Novell
Several readers wrote to note Larry Ellison's comments about launching an Oracle Linux Distro (great! yet another!) and that Oracle has/is also looking at purchasing Novell. The great shake-out continues.
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Novell's new tagline should be: We're the most rumored acquisition in Nasdaq! Seriously, what major corp hasn't been rumored to buy them? HP from wayyyyy back, IBM before the whole SCO thing, Cisco...
I'm no 'net historian, but in this geek's memory, it sure seems Novell keeps coming out as low-hanging acquisition fruit. But then buyers get up close and realize "Hey, this fruit is rotten!"
The surest sign of intelligent life in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us. -- Calvin & Hobbes
Hint to Larry (and IBM, HP, Novell, etc): Work together on a single distribution of Linux if you want to get rid of Microsoft.
Hint to pubjames: Larry, IBM, HP, Novell and all the others would go to bed with Microsoft without any moral qualms if it was profitable for them and if it wasn't a dangerous move in the long run.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Xandros would be a much more appropriate acquisition:
1) Best in class business desktop
-Best desktop: LinuxWorld best business product
-Focused on the business user (vs the Novell Gnome focused desktop that is more all-purpose / home user market)
-Designed to provide an easy transition for Windows users (vs all of the other distros - more below)
2) Best in class Linux "business" server
-The new Xandros server offers the print serving, file serving, network management needed to run small businesses. I
-Provides unique capabilities (apart from Microsoft) that would instantly differentiate Oracle from all the other "me-too" Linux players
-Designed to provide an easy transition for Windows users (vs all of the other distros - more below)
3) Better strategic fit
-Xandros is a pure play in the Linux area and would not come with the "hair" and unwanted, sub-leading products that Oracle would pick up from Novell (and have to pay for)
-Xandros comes on top of the Debian server architecture. This would be an immediate and powerful win for Oracle to pick up the Debian Server base.
-Top business focused engineering team with long track record of efficient engineering (that delivered the award winning Corel Linux Desktop)
-Xandros was founded as an Simple Compatible replacement for Windows and Microsoft solutions that would provide an easy transition for Microsft users. Compared to the other Linux distros that have been laboring hard to create a new better product albeit alien to the marketplace. This company has not deviated from this strategy (plans for this server were announced years ago).
Hunger is the best sauce.
Novell Suse Linux 10.0 is the *FIRST* and *ONLY* desktop distro I've tried (RHEL, FC4, Mandriva, Linspire, Ubuntu) that has properly detected all my hardware and installed with barely any tweaking.
... please don't let Oracle destory it! Please!
It's been a dream.
Novell
Frammin' on the jim-jam, frippin' at the krotz!
But when Novell and IBM have finally kicked The SCO Groups butt, Novell ends up with a clear legal right to Unix. A paranoid person might wonder if Oracle is after Unix for some reason.
so we wouldn't need to have a full time guy to test software upgrades with our current Oracle installations, or to troubleshoot errors
LOL. You've never worked with Oracle software have you? They have a very hard time releasing patches, much less testing them. I've spent dozens of hours on the phone with RH, IBM, Oracle, etc, and Oracle are the _last_ people you ever want to due to their gross incompetence and intentional disregard for anything you might know or claim to know.
And now we get SCO round 2, but with a far more powerful and well-funded bank of land sharks.
We ditched Red Hat when they dropped their free distribution in favour of Fredora (really, what business wants to rely on a distro with a version life cycle of a few months?)
So we went to SuSE because it had a longer upgrade cycle. Why am I filled with dread the moment I read the title, why can I see Oracle doing the same with SuSE that Red Hat did with it's distro - the free one becomes their test version with the public as beta testers.
Well, I guess this means I can finally convince my boss to switch to Debian.
To date, Novell is stronger on PR (Google search volumes on "SUSE" are almost at Red Hat levels) but are struggling really badly to monetise this.
The best thing that Oracle could do would be to support both equally. As stupid as it sounds, everyones best interest is served by having two (or more) Linux distributions duking it out.
I have installed and operated several production Oracle db's on both RedHat and SuSE. SuSE is by far superior for Oracle. SuSE supports Oracle much better than RedHat does. It's much easier to install Oracle on SuSE, and SuSE has a very nice mailing list for Oracle dba's, with moderators from both companies. So in this sense, SuSE is a much more attractive acquisition target for Mr. Lawrence "Gotta Have It" Ellison.
"Crude and slow, clansman. Your attack was no better than that of a clumsy child."
So far I've done several fresh installs and 2 upgrades from 8i to 10g in the past quarter. Everything has run rather smoothly. It'd be nice if the OS was already pre-configured to support Oracle. Since the boxes only run Oracle, and no other software, I wouldn't mind using an OS which was fully supported by Oracle, so I wouldn't have to call RH, or look up solutions on Google.
I sort of agree with you, but if I were Oracle I'd be much more interested in OpenBSD, wouldn't you? The license is much better for a company that wants to take the code and wrap it around a big proprietary product.
The global economy is a great thing until you feel it locally.
No sane person wants to get rid of Microsoft. Eliminate Ballmer maybe, but not Microsoft. Competition is good, and aside from Microsoft's redefining terms like "downtime" to appear competitive and obfuscating configuration tools (e.g., tools like Exchange, Active Directory, the IIS metabase) Windows is a good choice for a good number of people. The costs need to come more in line with its real value and maintenance and configuration tools need to improve to bring the true TCO in line with other operating systems, but for a system that Joe Sixpack can click through and get a basic server configuration up and running, you cannot beat Windows. Linux is "getting there" from that perspective, and so is OS X server, but neither is quite there yet.
Competition is good for everyone. You can bet that if Microsoft, Apple, and Sun were gone tomorrow and Linux were considered the be-all-end-all of operating systems, development sponsorship from corporate entities would decrease or simply stop and development would slow to a crawl.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
I imagine this, and it scares me.
I'm not too sure what Oracle would do here, but look at it from Oracle's Standpoint. They Don't like IBM (more Specifically IBM's DB2). Novell's sitting on patents that could theoretically swing the SCO Linux debacle both ways. Linux is one of IBM's big assets, and IBM is moving a lot of their platforms from AIX to Linux. If they buy Novell, they may just swing on the SCO side just to get at IBM to slow them down and spend money in the process.
And it doesn't stop there. kicking Linux also gives MySQL a pot shot since most of their installs are Linux installs. Also a lot of their other competitors run on Linux software. If Oracle wanted to do the evil thing, they could side with SCO and set Linux back for a while and give their competitors headaches.
On the other hand, Siding with IBM gives MS a kick in the groin. So it really comes down to who Ellison hates more in the end. Right now, I'm pretty sure it's Microsoft.
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
it's called Miracle Linux