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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?"
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.
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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."
same here. I actually switched from Suse to Ubuntu before Novelle made the "Microsoft" move.
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.
Bruce Perens had a petition running for a while that listed thousands of disgusted and angry linux advocates when novell signed the microsoft pact (see http://www.techp.org/ - note: offline at the moment).
As far as I'm concerned, Novell stabbed the community in the back. I don't use Novell products and neither should you.
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If you are using a Linux system, you are probably touching them with your kernel.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
nteresting idea, but I'm not seeing a business argument for it.
Patents! Patents! Patents!
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
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.
As far as I'm concerned, Novell stabbed the community in the back. I don't use Novell products and neither should you.
Funnily enough when Hovsepian took over as CEO in 2003 I remember him saying how much Novell would do for the Linux Community. Then a few years ago this Interview.
Lets look at what he did for the Linux Community and for the Developers he thinks are so great:
Novell Plans To Lay Off 20% Of Workforce
Novell offshores for cheap developement
Novell cuts SuSe Develpers
Suse Developer Layoffs
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?
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);
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?
Considering most people are a Microsoft centric shop out in the 'real world', this political issue is a non issue. Sure, *I* prefer open solutions, but large corporations at a management level really don't care.
Smaller shops, perhaps it might make a difference, if they understand it.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Clearly owning the Unix copyrights has to be worth something.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
Mono? Yes. They bought Ximian, and are also responsible for a lot of GNOME work. They are the second-largest contributor to OpenOffice.org, behind Sun. They've contributed to GNOME, to the Linux kernel, to Xen, and a number of other projects. But, because they signed a patent licensing deal with Microsoft they are evil and hate the community. Apparently.
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If you're not using a Linux system, but are reading Slashdot, you've probably used OpenOffice.org. Most of the work on making it less slow was done by Novell. Last time I checked, 80% of OO.o contributions came from Sun, 15% from Novell, and 5% from everyone else combined.
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