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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?"
But aren't they also contributing significantly to the Mono project? .NET apps on Linux definitely seems like a good thing for reducing ties to Windows to me.)
(Before someone says "Mono is evil and helps MS" I'm not so sure. If it does Wine certainly does too, but no-one raises a fuss about Wine, and being able to run my
They did make a deal which, in part, involved patent disputes with Microsoft regarding Linux, but unless there's a way that it "legitimizes" those claims in a legally tangible way I don't see why that's a problem. (And I haven't seen any reason why Novell getting protection against patent suits from Microsoft would affect the legal status of code external to Novell. It seems like paranoia to me.)
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);