Slashdot Mirror
Novell Reportedly Taking Bids From Up To 20 Companies
Degrees writes "Although Novell rejected the bid from Elliott Associates earlier this year, reports now indicate Novell has decided to embrace the inevitable. According to the Wall Street Journal (sub. required): 'As many as 20 companies have expressed interest in Novell, according to people familiar with the matter. Most, if not all, of the companies expected to lodge serious bids are private equity firms. ... Novell has four separate businesses, each of which could be attractive to a rival technology company. However, it's unlikely that a tech company would bid for all of Novell, these people said. Private equity firms, however, could break up Novell and either sell off the pieces or run them as standalone businesses.' Are there any companies that don't have an enterprise grade Linux distribution, and ought to? Ditto workstation management, directory services, legacy email, and virtualization suite?"
As a developer who works on (closed-source) enterprise software which runs on Linux (amongst other platforms) I'm nervous about Novell being sold. Though I develop on Fedora and primarily use RHEL for informal testing (we do formal testing on all the platforms we support) I'm glad that a solid, serious alternative to RHEL exists.
Obviously a sale of Novell doesn't necessarily imply any change for their Linux business (esp. as I understand it's one of their more profitable divisions) but it is likely (in the short term) to introduce some uncertainty.
The Linux market seems very healthy at the moment and I hope it continues to be at least a duopoly. Red Hat are a very cool company but I wouldn't like to see any company have a (virtual) monopoly in Enterprise Linux.
Struggling to find a day everyone can make? WhenShallWe.com
The moment Novell moved to "legitimize" Microsoft's threats to the Linux/FOSS world, Novell went on my "will never touch with a 1,000 foot pole" list. What they did was a sure action of self-poisoning in the Linux/FOSS community. I wonder how many other people feel the same.
Microsoft Linux, here we come!
If they had, they would be back to being a world leader. Instead, we have this.
Embrace Ninnle today!
Actually, I expect one of their main partners to strongly encourage a litigious patent troll to buy them.
They would be in a very strong position to torpedo Linux adoption for years, if not decades.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
What's it been doing since?
I mean then they would own the UNIX IP and the Linux IP! And since that'd mean Micro$oft paying Micro$oft it'd be a really smooth deal...
Is it the Canopy Group or Microsoft? Hopefully they aren't selling the Unix copyrights or other things that will just start another lawsuit attacking Linux.
Then i WOULD be nervous. If Novell accepts bid from private equity firm, then we can say goodbye to them. Typical scenario in company takeover by private equity firms is extracting whatever capital company has by any means. In such scenario you can safely assume that Novell will be stripped out of things having some value (that can be easily sold), saddled with huge debt and private equity fund will extract all this capital via some form of (huge) dividend. Remaining carcass is typically sold to some fool investor who then sees it bankrupting. While I don't like Novell too much (after that Microsoft debacle), I'm also worried. I suppose that some of their patents will be sold to whoever offers better price. If it will be some patent troll , then we may see problems ahead. Private equity fund (a.k.a financial vulture) managers won't give a crap about it.
But most of the paying business customers out there don't care about that.. They want solid product for a good price, with decent support, from a stable company.
Few really care about the open source politics.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I hope they exclude from consideration private equity firms that are headquartered within an hour's drive time from a certain court in East Texas.
You see, I threw out SuSE when I discovered that they were attempting to re-invent the "one tool does all configurations and gets most of them wrong" championed by so many companies who are excited at being able to centralize things, but who then turn around and get them *wrong*. And don't get me started on SuSE source RPM's. Their kernel SRPM would not build without an RPM which they never published, unless you invented your own fake RPM to take its place. And their RPM's contained tarballs which would pull out individual files depending on shell scripts run at build time. That means you cannot deduce, from the .spec file, which patches were actually used in building your kernel, and modifying the patches for a special environment means modifying the tarballs. And you cannot compare the contents of the SRPM's side by side without a lot of extra steps which interfere with building the patch files.
And don't get me started on how YaST mixes RPM management with out-of-date, broken, and incompatible binary component installers for NVidia, and only allows you to have one kernel installed.
SCO Group (through funding by Microsoft) finalizes the purchase of Novell!
"Who owns Linux now, baby" - Darl McBride
that the partnership with Novel was nothing more than a move so Microsoft could eventually purchase the UNIX copyrights.
regarding what this actually means. This means that a lot of companies with deep pockets (private equity companies) think that in the long term, Novell has potential for a lot of growth, so they would get nice ROI (return on investment) from a Novell purchase made today. This does not mean that Novell is dead, dying or even on the decline. If this was the case, you would be seeing offers from competitors who would want to swallow a competitor awhole, taking their userbase along.
> Are there any companies that don't have an enterprise grade Linux
> distribution, and ought to?
IBM, not that I know of any evidence that they are interested.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
I have worked with Novell products for too long. I recently left my company after they decided to go with Novell over other technologies. Novell over the years have had some great ideas but they have been terribly executed. They squandered the opportunity they had with SUSE by weighing it down with their legacy product lines. Whoever buys it should spin off all the legacy baggage along with the Novell name. The company definitely needs to be rebranded because the Novell name has nothing positive going for it.
I'm expecting to see Red Hat and Canonical duke it out to buy Novell's Linux division.
Canonical could really benefit from Novell's enterprise customers and I'm sure Red Hat knows this.
what do you guys think?
Well here's your chance. Buy Novell.
...maybe SCO can scrape up the cash and buy them. /joke
If anything will be poison it will those who will try to attack GNU/Linux with the Novell's assets they acquire. Thus:
1) All press releases, public announcements, etc in which Novell discusses it's distributions should be archived now. SCO tried to claim it, as Caldara, never released it's products under a GPL license. Power points and press releases found, and lucky they were, afterward rebutted this.
2) One or more people should save the headers in the source of SUSE where it indicates the copyright owners as Novell and that it's GPL. Download a copy of SUSE etc right from Novell, or better - buy a copy right from Novell. Keep the receipt as evidence too.
3) Coordinate with PJ and Groklaw with this, coordating the archiving of Novell's public documentation, as they had done for SCO.
4) Other?
Canonical don't have that kind of spare cash, plus they're focused on improving Ubuntu's profitability and growing its customer base. Asking Novell customers to throw the baby out with the bath water and move from an rpm based system to one based on deb; totally different admin tools, etc and pretty much new 'everything' is a big ask.
Red Hat don't need to saddle themselves with a millstone like that either just to get a few extra enterprise customers that they'll have a good chance of winning anyway if Novell get broken up and sold. Hint: companies usually only merge or get swallowed if their product sets are complementary and don't overlap. There's way too much overlap between Red Hat and Novell's Linux division and very little extra value. Even worse, Red Hat could find they wouldn't be able to kill off SuSE right away due to contractual obligations that Novell have with their customers. So Red Hat would have to fund parallel development for a number of years until they converted ex-Novel customers (or frightened them off). That's expensive when the customer base is small.
Why would Microsoft need UNIX copyrights? They already sold the UNIX copyrights they had in XENIX to the old SCO years ago. And they purchased some rights to UNIX or UNIXWARE from the New SCO group/Caldera.
I wonder what the potential impact is to novell shops. Working in one, and being a windows/linux administrator with a deep hatred for novell ( I am novell trained, for the record ), I can only hope this allows us to finally break the company's bias and get things somewhat modern.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
I wish S.u.S.E. could go back to the way they were before Novell did the damage they did. I dealt with them when they were independent and they were fantastic. Maybe if I put on the ruby slippers and click the heels three times.....
Sure, but where are SCO going to get the money?
Microsoft?
From what I gather, one area suse/Novell excels at is Suse on mainframe. These are big big customers, who are very conservative and an area where RedHat don't seem to be able to conquer. That has got to be worth a lot of $$$ to someone.
http://www.writeitfor.us - Writing IT for the IT generation.
As I understand it: what AT&T sold to novell is unknown. What copyrights AT&T owned was unknown, because the findings of the AT&T vs BSD lawsuit were sealed.
Furthermore, as I understand it, most modern UNIXes don't use a lot of the old copyrights. For example, there is practically no old UNIX copyrights in AIX, IBM re-wrote everything.
And even if Microsoft owned the copyrights, I think msft would still be bound by contracts.
Also, if msft tried to acquire all UNIX copyrights, I think a lot of companies might start complaining about anti-trust. Msft is already considered a monopoly.
I don't think Linux uses any old UNIX copyrights.
They would be in a very strong position to torpedo Linux adoption for years, if not decades.
Pushing back the year of Linux on the desktop
again?
This is a serious problem. Novell was determined by the court to be the owner of the unix patents the SCO claimed to own. A large part of why SCO was tossed on its ass by the judge was due to Novell being the patent holder. If it is sold to the same or different patent trolls, the linux lawsuit can re-emerge.
They could sell the movie rights. John Travolta and Uwe Boll would be a great team for that story.
Novell is their best hope of undermining Linux. I doubt they'll just let the opportunity pass them by.
Canonical has nothing to really gain unless their leadership wants to ditch Ubuntu for SuSE/SLES, which I just don't see happening. I don't see Canonical benefiting from maintaining two very distinct distros. If thinking they'll buy the company and force migrate to Ubuntu, that has more potential to drive them away from Canonical than trying to displace that market without buying it. If they bought and 'forced' customers to change (Enterprise customers are very change-averse), the customers may comply and change to a vendor that didn't force the issue.
Similarly, I see RHAT in the same position.
I could in theory see Oracle, depending on if they want to be more 'differentiated' than Unbreakable lets them be today. I might even see Dell (the only major hardware player without any OS to call 'their own', Oracle has Solaris/Unbreakable, HP has HP-UX and WebOS, IBM has AIX...). IBM seems in theory a potential fit, but they seem to regard Linux cautiously and despite having the Linux investment and capability to deliver a standalone distro to date with instant credibility in the enterprise market, they haven't made any effort. HP could also be interested in an enterprise-credible distribution. Of course, among hardware vendors, putting themselves in competition with RHAT, a current partner would be tricky.
Generally though, I absolutely can't imagine a company already solidly in the linux distro business have anything to gain from acquiring SuSE product/responsibilities.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
The Linux market seems very healthy at the moment and I hope it continues to be at least a duopoly.
Wouldn't that be a tri-opoly considering Oracle's Unbreakable Linux? Or, a quad-opoly, also considering Canonical's Ubuntu server offerings. I'll admit that I don't know much about the difference between Unbreakable Linux and Suse, but it seems that having a company like Oracle behind it would make it a more appealing 2nd option, right?
On a side note, I find it a bit odd that TFA kind of backs up this Redhad/Suse duopoly concept, even though it was written by Matt Asay, COO of Canonical.
I think you need to leave the DistroWatch hype behind mate. Canonical have yet to make any money whatsoever yet, yet alone having enough to bid for a company several times its size and value.
SAP should buy Novell. They use mostly SUSE anyway. They have always been big supporters of SUSE. Why not?
I haven't seen a Novell installation in years. I do mostly PBX work and work in the telephone room/closets of a lot of business. All I ever see is Microsoft anymore.
I don't think people really consider Oracle Unbreakable Linux when talking about the Linux Enterprise market since its mostly a respin of RHEL with Oracle logos and technical support. And while Ubuntu do have a server offering, and it could be considered enterprise, its not quite got the enterprise reputation that RHEL & SUSE have.
I am not as nervous about a monopoly in the Linux world, it isn't as if the source is closed. If Novell shut down, and RH decided to raise fees by 300%, it isn't like you don't have choices. CentOS in the short run (I use it on production servers anyway), and tons of other choices. It wasn't that long ago that Ubuntu was just an idea, and thanks to Debian at the core, it became a reality in a relatively short time.
Most Linux shops aren't paying/using RH anyway, and if there is a void, then someone could come in and fill it rather quickly. Even IBM could pick a flavor and be supporting it in short order, and they wrote the book on software support. If they thought it was easy money (ie: RH only in the marketplace) they would be a lot less likely to be distro agnostic and more likely to sell support contracts.
Oracle is another company that could enter the field rather quickly, particularly after their purchase of Sun, as they understand software support as well.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
When I was at Red Hat, the conventional wisdom even in late 2006 was that Novell was dying and the growing threat was Canonical. Novell was dying before it bought SuSE, and nothing about that acquisition did anything about the unprofitable business lines that were driving Novell to its grave. The main thing Novell brought to the table was its sales channels, but that made for an enterprise Linux company with much more overhead than Red Hat and fewer customers. If SuSE is spun off or sold to a profitable tech company, it could remain quite viable. If it's allowed to languish, Canonical's leaner operation will probably grow fast enough to begin to challenge Red Hat in the enterprise market by the time SuSE fades from the scene, so it's unlikely that there will be a functional monopoly any time soon. If for some reason Canonical fails to execute on that, its history is proof enough that a challenger can be created relatively quickly with an initial investment that's well within the reach of many major tech companies.
There's no failure quite as dissatisfying as a complete and total solution to the wrong problem.
From my understanding from people who deal with it, Unbreakable Linux isn't even that different, apparently support calls go straight to redhat.
I thought the remaining benefit of running Solaris was ZFS support...
Yes, I admit I am biased. And it is true there is a reason that companies use Windows. And there is a gross injustice here, where several decades of underhanded marketing have made an inefficient, bug-ridden, virus infested, standards perverting, heaping smelly pile of spaghetti code, the "Best Choice" for business and government both. I don't know what to do about it. Smarter and more powerful men than I would like to see something better than Microsoft leading the technical march into the future. SO I cannot say you are wrong to use MS products, just sorry you don't have better choices, for the sake of your clients, and for the sake of honesty, in those quiet moments when you realize you are tired of the same old problems that come with MS products.
I actually don't have problems with MS software. Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge linux fan. I love how linux works and prefer it where and when I am able. For instance, linux file servers make perfect sense.
Windows is more complex than linux, certainly. But once you know how to find what you are looking for, it's easier to administrate than linux ( in windows environments ). Troubleshoot? No, linux still wins there.
Windows isn't as bad as everyone likes to make out, it just takes more effort to master.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!