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VMware Looks To Acquire Novell's SUSE Unit

Posted by Soulskill on from the talking-turkey dept.

minutetraders writes "According to the Wall Street Journal, VMware is attempting to acquire Novell's SUSE Linux operating system business. This move would give VMware a full stack of enterprise software and allow it to establish itself as a full-blown infrastructure and software vendor in direct competition with Red Hat." The WSJ report is behind a paywall, but it's accessible in full through a Google search.

17 of 161 comments (clear)

  1. why not just acquire all of Novell by tomhudson · · Score: 4, Insightful

    - with one exception - dump Miguel. Please. Mono is something you see a doctor about. Let's keep it that way.

    1. Re:why not just acquire all of Novell by JamesP · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Really, no

      Keep Miguel, he's underrated (and unjustly hated) by lots of people.

      Mono, free software, patents, MS is evil, blah blah blah

      The guy started Gnome (ok, I hate it) but it's a solid work.

      Mono is also a solid work. And Oracle has just shown that there are issues with Java as well w.r.t patents and stuff

      Also, Mono is something I see as embrace-extend backwards, that is, Mono does that to MS

      Really, Miguel may be 'debatable' sometimes, but he's valuable

      --
      how long until /. fixes commenting on Chrome?
    2. Re:why not just acquire all of Novell by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      so... you throw away java, mono and .net, also kde, gnome,... what's left then?? I suppose you're a BSD guy, but I'm *very* curious (seriously! really!) what desktop are you using and what is your language of choice?

    3. Re:why not just acquire all of Novell by bsDaemon · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I would have fully paid the $999 for the BSD/OS license when I was in high school, but they rolled back a bunch of the stuff into FreeBSD, which I could buy for about $30 (this was in dialup days still, and i didn't have the time to actually download stuff that big). I did pay the $150 or whatever for XiG accelerated X server, because it ran better through Linux ABI that XFree86 did natively.

      If you've been around the floss stuff for a while, it can rub off some, but frankly, the older I get the less I care about the politics of "free software" or whatever. I don't mind paying to get something that works and saves me time, rather than cobbling together a less-than-optimal solution for geek credit.

    4. Re:why not just acquire all of Novell by mdm-adph · · Score: 3, Insightful

      If there's suddenly a problem with Java w.r.t. patents and stuff, would the alternative really be something "open source" based upon a Microsoft product? :\

      --
      It is by my will alone my thoughts acquire motion; it is by the juice of the coffee bean that the thoughts acquire speed
    5. Re:why not just acquire all of Novell by ducomputergeek · · Score: 2, Insightful

      You are not Mono's target audience. Big enterprise is Mono's target. I know one shop here in town that is mostly Java on RHEL. A year or two ago they acquired a smaller company which had some Java apps, but a few of their offerings were C#/.Net

      They set up some SLES boxes, configured mono, made some code tweaks to the application (I think most of that was porting the DB from SQLServer to Oracle) and had everything up in running within weeks of acquiring the company and a fraction of the cost of buying & supporting windows servers and licensing costs in addition to their normal linux/oracle stack. It's not just the licenses, but the cost to hire additional people to run the things that quickly adds up.

      Really, it's only the "community" and the zealots (many of whom are here on /.) that really give a crap about the ideology. The rest of the world wants something that works can gives them options.

      --
      "The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
    6. Re:why not just acquire all of Novell by rantomaniac · · Score: 4, Insightful

      While personally I think Mono is a very nice piece of technology, in many ways superior to the Java platform... in my eyes Miguel lost all credibility back when he endorsed OOXML and later Silverlight.
      Helping Microsoft embrace/extend the web with Silverlight by giving the illusion that it's cross-platform was the last straw.
      For reference, Silverlight is neither cross-platform by design, because it's able to call native DLLs, or in practice because Moonlight is waaay behind.

    7. Re:why not just acquire all of Novell by DrgnDancer · · Score: 2, Insightful

      OK, I can understand, if not agree with the sentiment that Apple is bad because they release so little of their software and, have a closed ecosystem, use a Walled Garden approach, etc ad nauseum; but "leeches off free software"? From everything I've read Apple is a pretty good company to work with when it come to them using your project. They follow license terms of course; but also contribute patches, work with project leads, and generally try to be good members of communities. They've also created at least one large project that I know of. I understand that in your ideal world they would simply open up everything they do, but failing that how could they be better members of the community?

      Free Software projects exist to be used. The people that wrote them and released them presumably want people to use them. Apple uses them, follows the rules imposed to use them, and often goes out of their way to be more helpful than they really have to be. What more can you ask for?

      --
      I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
    8. Re:why not just acquire all of Novell by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Winhoze? Seriously?

    9. Re:why not just acquire all of Novell by MogNuts · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I remember those days. I miss them. I remember how XiG was so much faster. But most of all I loved the easy, GUI setup. I used to hate using, what was it, xg86cfg or whatever? Can't even remember. And then setting my monitor's horizontal and vertical values or whatever it was.

      I loved just having Bash at my disposal and exploring the system through a CLI. So much fun. Now everything lacks the mystery and exploration aspect that computers used to have.

    10. Re:why not just acquire all of Novell by fwarren · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Really, it's only the "community" and the zealots (many of whom are here on /.) that really give a crap about the ideology

      I have given a lot of thought to this subject. In regards to politics, copyright law, and free software. It is only the nuts that are unreasonable that change the world. The question is all a matter of timing and is right now the time to fight. There are those who fight to soon and are marginal and die on the sidelines. Then there is a time when people are just a little to soon and are considered inflexible, eccentric or a little nutty.

      Take a look at the founding of the United States, or of Women's Rights, or the Abolition of Slavery, in England, France, the United States etc. Going from horses to cars, harnessing steam, the world being round. All things that we take for granted now. But there was a time people could be killed for expressing such views. Then there was a time they were just considered nutty. Then there was a time where someone was unreasonable and the world bent to their view, instead of the other way around.

      The better question is how principled are we. With all intellectual honesty, it is right that people should be able to govern their lives, have religious freedom, for women to have rights, for a person to not be a slave and enjoy the rewards for the work of the sweat of their brow? Is the same to be said of software freedom? If it is we should stand for it and bend the world to our will. It is up to each of us to determine in the short term if we should run non-free software to get work done now.

      If I sound crazy, then it was just to soon to say this.

      --
      vi + /etc over regedit any day of the week.
    11. Re:why not just acquire all of Novell by sznupi · · Score: 2, Insightful

      The closing sentiment is a thing which can be found even in the earliest written words surviving to our times, anyway. Together with how the moral decay of youth will destroy civilisation.

      --
      One that hath name thou can not otter
  2. No Single Person Has Done More Damage To Linux by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    "with one exception - dump Miguel"

    Not Bill Gates.
    Not Steve Ballmer.
    Not Steve Jobs.

    There hasn't been a single person who has done more damage to Linux than that miserable piece of shit Miguel.

  3. Re:Then Microsoft acquires VMWare by jonescb · · Score: 2, Insightful

    VMWare is actually pretty friendly to open source. Granted their flagship products aren't open source, but they bought Tungsten Graphics a couple years back which was known for their work on Mesa and X.org. And VMWare still employs a bunch of X.org developers. So if they buy Suse, I don't believe they'll do anything harmful with it.

  4. Novell can't afford it by 42sd · · Score: 3, Insightful

    No matter how much VMWare is willing to pay, Novell can't afford to lose that part of the company. They are already hardly relevant. They need SuSe and the clout they have to make sure that they have a suitable place to run all of their other software. I'd guess they'd have to get the whole company instead of just the SuSe division.

  5. Re:Then Microsoft acquires VMWare by FlyingGuy · · Score: 2, Insightful

    It would never get past the DOJ or FTC or their European equivalents not even when Bush was President.

    --
    Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!
  6. Re:As a loyal Novell customer by JumpDrive · · Score: 2, Insightful

    The problem I had with Netware and eDirectory was the price. After pricing the system out for our needs, I was running close to the cost of a MS system. So why would I jump into buying a product which costs almost as much as MS's, and then having to deal with users who everytime we have a problem are going to blame the IT group for buying it because we are such haters of MS .
    It would help if they did some more advertising though.
    It is much easier to use GoDaddy for web services just because they advertise during the SuperBowl.
    Man I never understood the power of 30 seconds during the Super Bowl until I came out into the real world.
    All they would need to do is show a monkey typing on a computer with a network screen in front of him and executives will talk about it. Just need to throw in a woman dancing and Purchase Requests would sail right through.