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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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Oracle Novell SuSE Desktop Linux!
Gentoo and Ubuntu ought to be enough for anyone. That's it. No more corporate Linuxes.
Schweet, I can't wait...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
RedHat and SuSE are the usual "enterprise" distros that have tweaks for running Oracle, but Redhat dominates. wonder how threatened RedHat would be if Oracle bought and pushed SuSE. Oracle has had a problem in the past four years of trying to make integrated features that really were best left to third party, like for example oracle filesystem and oracle clustering, which are shakier and more trouble to admin than 3rd party.
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
Is it just me, or does it seem like a lot of the IT companies don't get Linux and OSS.
Hint to Larry (and IBM, HP, Novell, etc): Work together on a single distribution of Linux if you want to get rid of Microsoft. Commoditize the OS and make your money providing services and software on top of it.
SuSE is starting to be come fragmented from so many changes. Oracle would only be able to further complicate SuSE development. There have been many core changes since Novell bought SuSE and if gives SuSE that patched together feeling. Companies can't keep doing this to SuSE customers. SuSE customers need a stable reliable platform to develop upon.
You make them sound like Caldera. At least they have the rights to Unix.
Mielipiteet omiani - Opinions personal, facts suspect.
Ladies and Gentlemen, Larry Ellison proudly presents -- Orix!
I for one am not jumping on this bandwagon, because Larry is driving and I don't think he has one hand firmly on the wheel as it is. This is a shotgun marriage and isn't liable to make Oracle any more competitive with Microsoft in the forseeable future. He should have probably done this 5 years ago.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
FT link
eweek.com link
Mysql and postgresql are mysteriously missing from SuSE after the acquisition
http://saveie6.com/
I'll say the proposal of new distro lacks much substance and looks more like driven from Larry's desire to match/surpass Gates. Larry is known to pursue such deals to completion against (almost) everyone else's wish. This decision too is certainly not one of those to taken to reward shareholders.
This sig doesnt exist.
That would put a nail in the "SCO vs The World" coffin.
- Just my $0.02, take with a grain of salt, your mileage may vary.
Oracle on NetWare beens out for a while now.
http://www.orafaq.com/faqnetwr.htm
Personally, I think that it would be a bad move for Oracle to attempt to expand into the desktop OS/app market. They don't have the experience at that level.
Work together on a single distribution of Linux if you want to get rid of Microsoft
I don't think their goal is to get rid of Microsoft, per say. When you buy an automobile, you have the choices ranging from sedans to minivans to heavy duty trucks. Does the Ford F350 really "compete" with a Honda Civic? Does a person purchase a vehicle and decide between the two of those? Not for the most part. For the most part, I've seen IT professionals pick the right tool for the job. When I need to deploy a Microsoft solution, it's usually because it's the best fit for the job. When I need to deploy and Linux solution, it's usually because it's the best fit for the job.
IMHO, there are very few instances where and educated IT professional could actually have to compare a MS or OSS solution in the same way a car buyer would compare a Ford F350 and Honda Civic.
I'm running DBase II over Banyan Vines.
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.
If you're too tied to MS Office then contact the OpenOffice.org people and help with that.
If the desktop isn't 100% the way you want it, then contact the GNOME or KDE people and help with that.
You get the results you want at a FRACTION of the price of "buying" a whole distribution.
Stay agnostic. Focus on the apps/functionality YOU need. Don't focus on a specific distribution or distributor.
Big company supporting Linux...Yea Oracle support for Linux...Good already Larry owned a big chunk of the Linux market...??? It's likely we'll shake out to two enterprise Linux distributions. Just to hard for the majority of large companies to roll and support their own distribution. Most companies will outsource their open source participation. Interesting comparisions on the market from two big companies. IBM is divesting from commodity software to open source (Websphere Community Edition/Apache Geronimo, Cloudscape/Apache Derby) Plus they've never attempted to build their own distribution, or buy a distribution company (both of wich could have been easily done). Oracle is buying open source companies and building a commodity stack. Possibly to have control of where and how their products perform. Buying Novell would give them an OS, plus a bunch of other stuff including headaches. Red Hat (a very small company) is building an open source software stack and trying to turn it all into a commodity. Kind of like Dell with desktop/laptop hardware, except with software. They are trying to be the best support and packaging for stuff you can get off the shelf. Interesting business models.
Hell, let's get Sun into this deal somehow too! Then we could have the trifecta of old school struggling tech companies bound by a hatred of Microsoft.
Rumors of a Novell buyout by Oracle were pre-empted today when Redhat officially announced their aquisition of Novell.
It seems, though that all may not be lost for Oracle. Redhat has indicated that Novell will sell off their Suse division before the Redhat-Novell merger is completed.
"We have been trying to work this deal for a long time," said the head janitor at Redhat's Sao Paulo, Brazil offices. "Why do you think we ejected 'Fedora Directory Services'? We're ready to push eDirectory to its full potential!"
Officials at Oracle did not comment. But a chair was heard smashing against a wall in Redmond, WA.
This is a great idea. All of the Oracle installations I'm currently managing are running a version of Linux. This requires that not only do we need a good dba, but a linux administrator to maintain those machines. Luckily, we have other linux machines so we didn't need to hire a new guy just to manage the new linux boxes. With the new Oracle Linux Distribution, Oracle would provide the support, updates, etc for the OS, so we wouldn't need to have a full time guy to test software upgrades with our current Oracle installations, or to troubleshoot errors. This would solve a lot of headaches, and get more companies to use Oracle and Linux.
PS. I know and support the argument that the huge number of distros is a benefit of Linux. But an Oracle Distro? I don't buy that...
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.
Over the last month or so I've been demoing ZENWorks (for desktops). "Out of the box", installing the management component of zfd on Linux (OES/SUSE), it installs sybase as the backend for the inventory database. Documentation describs how to configure the inventory system to use Oracle and MSSQL on Windows, with ODBC. This is undocumented on the Linux side, which might indicate its not possible to use an alternative DB, or at least that its not supported.
Novell Audit, out of the box, supports MySQL, which is to say that the install process will install mysql, and the documentation covers configuring mysql, in addition to configuring Audit to use it. The documentation covers using Oracle, MSSQL, and JDBC in general, which is to say configuring Audit to use them.
So which is it, Novell? Is your default database of choice MySQL, or Sybase? If MySQL is good enough for a secure logging system, surely it is good enough for deskop inventory. Why do you think its a good idea to bundle YA database with ZFD when you know that the two linux distros you supoort (SUSE9 and OES1) ship with MySQL?
Novell definitly has a lot of internal struggles going on (gnome/kde, java/mono), but it should at least be able to provide a consistent level of inconsistencies.
Oracle has been going to a lot of trouble to shove Novell's IDM out of shops by pressuring sites to switch to their identity management product lately.
Of course, this could just be "Crazy Larry" trying to get IBM to blow a lot of cash buying Novell to prevent Oracle from controlling the intellectual property at issue in the SCO case.
And now we get SCO round 2, but with a far more powerful and well-funded bank of land sharks.
... before Oracle heads down yet another purchasing road, I'd like to see something done with their marketing and sales group - something consistent with the fact that this company is no longer only a database company. My suggestion would be to fire them all and bring in people who are willing to learn and be flexible, instead of the entrenched backbiters they have now.
I'd like to see the user communities that formed around COREid, Xcellerate, and other identity-related software get some support corporately.
I'd like to see the corporate blogging policy reversed, so that the people who are passionate about the software they write can communicate to the people who want to learn about it.
I'd like to see products who previously had 50 discussion forum groups and their own conferences, user groups, and mailing lists be brought back from post-purchase back alleys, where they are lucky if they share a discussion group with 6 other products, and where they are lost in the expanse of generic sugary topics at OpenWorld, on oracle.com, and inside metalink.
If Larry really wants his all-encompassing stack to dominate, he's going to have to learn to communicate, not only through his sales and marketing force, but through the bright minds at his own company.
Get with it Larry, or Oracle will inherit CA's title - the place where good software goes to die.
Pixie
don't mess with those geekgrrls
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.
You're right, can you please post instructions on getting XP to work on a 17" PowerBook G4 and a Sun 10000E ... I want a REAL OS (tm) too!!! You dime a dozen MCSE, point-and-click "techies" make me laugh. Bet you'd shit your pants if somebody took your precious precious mouse away. Oh btw, this is 2006, your driver crap logic hasn't been true since the last time Microsoft was over $30 a share.
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
FTFA: Oracle had considered buying Novell Inc
The way I read it, it means: We looked at buying Novell, but instead will be launching our own Linux distribution.
Oh and they are "considering" their own distro. So to sum the article up: business as usual.
Absolute no decisions are taken and most likely nothing will happen. If this were about Microsoft, the whole article would be called FUD.
Move along, nothing to see here.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
maybe "Larinx".
"larry" plus "*nix", got it ? no ? well, whatever.
What ? Me, worry ?
I used to be a CNE 3/4/5 before Novell became almost irrelevant, but this is the first news I've heard that they might be bought out by another company. Many people have said that Novell's fall from grace was their own fault, but knowing Microsoft, in the end I don't think their was anything Novell could have done about it.
If Novell does get relegated to the history books, I'll be sorry to see them go. I still like the way NDS (um, eDirectory) works and would love to see an open source alternative to it appear. Well, I suppose LDAP could do the trick, but it's still comparatively fiddly to work with and support for it needs to be much more widespread.
As for Oracle, they've got lots of money, so if Larry wants to acquire Novell in order to use their expertise to start building Linux systems using SuSE, eDirectory and Oracle, that sounds fine to me!
As far as I know, the Ubuntu foundation operates independently of Canonical, Ltd. Canonical could pull all support for Ubuntu in favor of Ubuntu Enterprise Edition (a la Red Hat), but free Ubuntu would live on because Canonical can't take away the Ubuntu Foundation's $10,000,000+ war chest.
You should also note the grandparent's use of the word corporate. Red Hat is indeed a publically traded corporation, while Canonical is a privately held Limited Partnership. There's a big difference between those two when it comes to legal rights, shareholder obligations, and overall evil-ness.
...for many reasons. Principally so he can lay waste to the most incompetent fucknozzles ever to wear a suit. Internal slogan: "Novell: The leading provider of useless managers" Sharpen that axe Larry and call me for I have a little list....
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
eh? have you seen Oracle's financials, profitable making money hand over fist.
I blogged about this today: the next step in the commoditization of operating systems: application and tool vendors include the operating system and every thing in one complete software stack.
This is not as crazy as I might have thought a few years ago because of virtualization tools like Xen (etc.) However, if companies like Oracle start selling the 'whole stack' I hope that they offer versions that are built for Xen.
driver crap isn't true? That's funny, my linksys/cisco card won't load on linux without using windows drivers, and it's till a crapshoot at best going about it that way.
If I had a PowerBook G4, I'd load OSX onto it. If I had a Sun 10000E I'd load Solaris onto it, and you can bet your ass everyone else who bought one will too. Last I checked, when you drop 6 figures on a server you want support.
That being said, your point is moot. Knowing I can run linux on a powerbook doesn't chang ethe fact my wireless doesn't work for shit. YOU are all that is wrong with linux right now. Instead of saying "hey, you're right, that's a problem we really need to fix" it's "well f you, that doesn't matter it's not important because of this and this and this". Stop patting yourself on the back, and stop trying to brush a serious problem under the rug. I can only be happy people like yourself aren't running the show or linux would've never made it out of Linus's dorm room.
Only pansys need a distro.. be a man and do it yourself..
Ok, so im only kidding. somewhat.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
You mean Novell owns the rights to Unix, yes? SCO simply re-sells and pretends that they own *nix.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
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."
Would a customized OpenSolaris make more sense?
Yeah they're still supporting KDE.
They even made a version (or two?) upgrade available via rpm. My suse 9.3 looks great and works even better.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
It's not the software that's being purchased here, it's the expertise and customer base. Every SW company acquisition that I've seen happen ended with throwing away, heavily modifying or rewriting software that came with the deal, sooner or later. Which kind of tells you that it's not software that was being purchased, but people and customer base.
I'd prefer IBM buy Novell than Oracle. It'd be nice to see IBM be a software company again, and they have the marketing presence to put a real dent in Microsoft's market share. Once that happens not only will Linux become much better supported by both commercial vendors (I'd LOVE to see the Adobe Creative Suite and Ulead's media suites ported to Linux) and hardware manufacturers (maybe ATI cards will stop sucking, and maybe we'll even see accelerated drivers for the AiW line!). Another benefit is that Microsoft will be once again be forced to compete rather than rest on their laurels; we'll see vast improvements in maintenance scriptability (Don't tell me VBS is a solution; it isn't! VBS is a hack which has had major security holes), better customer support, prices more in line with what they should be charging, and they'll be forced to recognize that when customers buy software, they BUY software and actually DO have the right to sell used licenses on eBay when they decide to quit using it. Everybody wins in that case, whether you want to run Linux or Windows.
Oracle? Oracle appears to be a company that buys companies for the same reason Microsoft does: to kill off any potential competition.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Not only would purchasing Novell bring them are large set of customers, it would also give them a team of business consultants. It's not all about the software. It's business strategy. Why would they buy a distro when they can also have a team of experts to deal with linux customers?
Developers: We can use your help.
Well, hey, if everything is fine and dandy and if they can just keep making money hand over fist with their existing products, they don't need to buy Novell.
Man, the standards for Slashdot articles seem to be slipping by the day. Now all it takes to get people talking is speculation about PAST events that didn't even happen?
Back in 1985, rock guitarist Slash (of later Guns 'n Roses fame) almost joined Poison, to take the spot which eventually went to C.C. Deville. There, babble about the relevance of that for awhile.
I wonder if any of this has to do with Novell's Development on the xgl 3d desktop accelerated X server.. it does look pretty freakin' amazing.. I don't think thats the main reason of course Oracle would be interested in Novell and Linux.. But I wouldn't be surprised after seeing a demonstration of xgl, that there was some pretty excited people out there..
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
Several years ago (circa 1999 or Redhat version 6 ), I read that Oracle on Linux was developed and targeted for Suse. I remember this because I was having issues tweaking RH for an Oracle 8 install, and a lot of the mail lists mentioned that some of the tweaks were not necessary for SuSE. So I would guess that it would be just a bit easier for Oracle to adopt Suse outright, if that is what their developers are already using.
Oh, and BTW.... http://www.novell.com/news/press/item.jsp?id=572
----- I have bad karma for a reason! -----
Oracleenex - now available in two versions: Lite and 2-ply (for redundancy)!!!
heh, they want "mo' money", and probably more control over how an OS is configured to run their warez, right now for a big enterprise deal Oracle and OS (as in redhat and SuSE) and filesystem (as in Veritas and Polyserve) and backup (Veritas, Legato, etc.) and SAN (HP, Hitachi, EMC, etc.) and server vendors (IBM, Sun, HP, Dell) get into each other's hair and drive the client nuts trying to tell them how to set things up. As "Enterprise Unix/Linux Engineer" who does implementations/migrations for clients of a hardware reseller I can tell you things get very, very ugly.
Novell is capitalized at +/- $3 billion. At present, pure SuSE accounts for well under 10 per cent of Novell's turnover, though it was barely 3 per cent a year ago. Novell are sitting on a lot of cash, so one could subtract that from the purchase price, I guess. Even so, after discounting the cash reserves, getting on for £2 billion seems an awful lot of money to pay for SuSE Linux unless Oracle want a lot of Novell's other things, or can figure out how to sell them off. This is a problem that may cause a few companies to blanch at acquiring Novell. I guess even a fraction of that kind of money would pay for a pretty nice Linux distro of your own.
Las qué passoun
tournoun pas maï
and mine was Red Hat (I couldn't even install SUSE), and somebody else had the best experience with Ubuntu, etc, etc. As always, YMMV.
Autoyast - I can't stand it...
Kickstart is so much easier to use and maintain a config file for.
Besides I've had a few servers where for no apparent reason a yast process ( I think it the update check) suddenly takes up 99% of the CPU. Yast is too big and bulky I don't care for it.
bcm43xx.berlios.de You were saying, about those linux drivers for that AE?
While it's interesting that the higher tier distro's are being snapped up to support back-end systems when overlaying on a DCC Common Core Linux distro seems the obvious solution. Maybe it's just me that feels that Oracle doesn't need 8 GB of miscellaneous software, nor a NFS/mail/HTTP on the same server. What's really interesting to me though is that Adobe/Macromedia hasn't linked themselves to a particular distro even though rumour has it that their Linux versions are well underway, then they really need a desktop to role out their workstations on and they no longer seem keen to dance to the Microsoft/Apple tune never mind a GTK based KDE. Could they have their own desktop underway? They do do graphics don't they?
The nice thing about linux is that you do not need to rely on others to fix your problems. If you find some unsupported hardware and you really want to use it you can make it work yourself. Then everyone else who uses linux can use that hardware too. This requires a certian level of skill and tenacity however, but anyone with time and persitance can learn any skill (generally speaking; some exceptions).
Do you have any source for your claim that Larry owns 1/3 of RH? Because I can't find his name here.
Apparently, Oracle is considering buying the United States, and is looking to buy China too
Register the editry.
Oracle doesn't need a Linux distro of its own, it just needs an optimized kernel and then whatever it's their application (Database, AppServer, OIS, etc) _it_ is the distro. It simply doesn't make sense to run anything alongside an Oracle fscking-memory-hog Database in the same server.
That's the beauty of Linux/opensource: a commoditized OS/platform.
it's called Miracle Linux
I asked why the hell they would buy Novell...
but they won't tell.
--Rob
Towards the Singularity.
It could get worse! mshaft could buy or take a 25% stake in Novell and then back SCO and confuse the hell out of the Linux/Oracle users, making it impossible for Oracle to buy Novell.
But, then doing that might make ms look as if they NEED Linux technicians on new/different/diverging projects, or make ms look DESPERATE.
OTOH, Maybe IBM might throw in a wad of cash to merge some Novell technology and Linux here and there with IBM's own stuff, keeping mshaft AND Oracle at bay for a couple business cycles, maybe up to 10 years...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
looking for business in several wrong places.....
The lunatic is in my head
Have you ever written a device driver? There are so many different skills required that it baffles my mind . Let's see what you'll need (in no particular order):
A working knowledge of C (I've been at it for several years and I wouldn't exactly call my code brilliant)
A working knowledge of Linux's architecture (hey! there are books on the subject, depending on how fast you catch on, you could sorta understand it in a couple of months)
A working knowledge of the subsystem you're working on (what does a wifi driver need to do? how does a sound card work?)
Very specific knowledge of the particular device you want to support (good luck with this one--you'll being reading NDA-restricted docs if you're lucky, reverse-engineering windows drivers if you're not)
Time to write this fantasical piece of code (it takes me an afternoon to talk to a PLC over an RS-232 port, but I'm not particularly bright).
How about this--admittedly anecdotal, but somewhat relevant--I'm a 4th year CS major and I've been running Linux since 1997. I've been schooled in C, Linux architecture (nothing heavy), machine language (MIPS, not exactly relevant), and have a fairly good understanding what the magic box does and how it does it. I couldn't write a sound driver; it would take me months to even begin to try.
And you want Joe Schmoe to bang out a driver with little more than "time and persitance" and the warm, fuzzy feeling of contributing to the great Open Source OS?
I have never needed to write a device driver. I have only been using linux for 2 years, and have only programmed in fortran (computerized math). I am just starting with scheme. It will take me some time before I become skilled enough to even begin to attempt to write a device driver for undocumented hardware. Still there is a ton of documentation out there, and If I was to undertake this task "time and persistance" would be exactly what was required.
I dont expect Joe Schmoe to write his own device drivers, I expect him to pay somebody much more productive than he is to "make it all just work".