VMware Looks To Acquire Novell's SUSE Unit

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.

Comments

Re:Not SuSE

[DrgnDancer]

It won't be taken as seriously. You can *say* it's as good as an Enterprise Distro, it might even *be* as good. People that buy OSes for companies want to see a name they recognize. Right now those names are Red Hat (not available), SuSE, and to a less extent Canonical/Ubuntu (not available). Red Hat would probably be the one everyone wants to buy, but between being the market leader and being fairly profitable (not Microsoft or Apple levels of profitable, but plenty of money to keep everyone in kibble for sure), that's not much of an option.

Then Microsoft acquires VMWare

[Rogerborg]

Discovers that it now "accidentally" "owns" "Linux", and GRRRRRAARGH! BALLMER SMASH PUNY KERNEL!

You read it here first, although doubtless many more times below. It's coming. I can feel it coming in the air tonight (drum break).

Re:Then Microsoft acquires VMWare

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe but Microsoft already bought the Virtual PC stuff and has been running with that. They could have bought VMware for cheap back then but did not.

Re:Then Microsoft acquires VMWare

[Bert64]

They used to make a vmware esx client for linux, but not anymore... If you run any of their highend products, you are stuck running windows boxes for management...

As a loyal Novell customer

[m0s3m8n]

This news seems to me to be another bad omen. We run NetWare, Border Manager, ZENworks and Groupwise and have been very happy for many years. However, Novell seems to be a ship without a rudder and as the IT Director will cause me to consider other alternatives, including Microsoft.

Re:As a loyal Novell customer

[FlyingGuy]

Really crud is it? Then Please tell me about: an equivalent open source piece of software that Encompasses all the features of :

• Border Manager
• Zen Works
• NetWare
• GroupWise

Please do educate us ( at least me ) as to ready to install software that can duplicate or exceed the capabilities of each of those that does not have the Microsoft label. Because as it is I am ready to through Novell under the train, but not until I can do so without turning to The Empire.

Re:As a loyal Novell customer

[FlyingGuy]

Because I have a sense of morals and ethics

Some of Microsoft's stuff is not half bad, but I personally will not support that company with my money, or my clients. I had a client that was fairly lucrative and then they got it into their heads that they should go ALL ms ALL the way. I was professional about it and found them a company that would do it, but then I invited the principle to lunch and told them I was letting them go.

Re:why not just acquire all of Novell

[bsDaemon]

Back in the day before "desktops" we had these things called window managers. And as a system admin, if a project is too big to be fixed with Perl, then it probably requires something in C. These are just my personal feelings on the matter though. I did buy a Mac 'cause I was sick of poor power management and lame wifi support on both FreeBSD and Linux, though. I have servers I don't run GUIs on, and I have VMWare for small experiments. I'm happy with the setup.

If they bought SUSE...

[brennanw]

... does that mean we'd eventually see versions of vCenter Server and vCenter Client that run on something other than Windows? That would be nice.

Re:If they bought SUSE...

[MrNemesis]

As much as I'd love that... I doubt it. vCentre is a pretty complex bunch of code, at least a large chunk of it in .net. It's also the flakiest part of the VMware infrastructure IME; the ESX hypervisor hasn't crashed on us since the earliest days of 2.0.

Not saying that VMware couldn't re-implement VC as a linux client but.. biggest issue with a port would be the plugins however; the integrated live P2V management (VMware Converter) runs on windows because it's easy to provide Linux services from a windows host - all you need is an SSH binary. Running the myriad of services windows requires from a linux host would mean alot of reinventing the wheel; not to mention all the other goodies like guided consolidation and recovery manager that would be useless to the majority of shops that run mostly windows (and I've yet to see any business of more than a few dozen people that doesn't have at least one MS server somewhere).

Then there's all the third-party code that integrates into VC - backup clients, hardware monitoring... and VMware are even getting rid of ESX (which gives you a linux console to play with) and shifting to ESXi (much smaller footprint hypervisor with no "proper" console [although you can finagle SSH access if you wish]) and relying on a virtual centre intregrated CLI, in the form of powershell.

ESX might have a bunch of linux in its guts, but VMware's direction over the last few versions has been moving away from linux based frontends to a much more windows-centric approach. I say this as a person who was allowed several years back to become the company expert on VMware cos I was the de facto "Linux guy" in a windows shop (well, not strictly true - we're windows and AIX). Of all the hundred or so people I met doing the various certifications, only three were confident on a linux CLI (they were also the only other people working for a FTSE100), and five more knew how to use `ls`, `service XXXXX restart`... the rest shit bricks whenever they had to use it. Sad but true.

Re:No Single Person Has Done More Damage To Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Erm, like a lot of folks, I disagree with Miguel's position on the desirability of promoting MS standards; but you need to get a grip. The guy has done FAR more for the F/OSS world than most. I think his business acumen is suspect, but his coding ability and commitment to F/OSS are unassailable, as far as I can see. Use Linux? Try turning off every bit of software Miguel has touched, and see what you're left with.

A defensive maneuver for VMWare

[symbolset]

Microsoft is giving away their shiny new hypervisor with their operating systems. What would be more fair than for VMWare to give away operating systems with their hypervisor?

Re:why not just acquire all of Novell

[arivanov]

Dude, whatever you are smoking can you please share it.

Gnome perpetrates Winhoze coding practices into the unix world. Just take any piece of gnome code and read it. Carefully. And follow the code design, not just the code "quality".

Let's just take ekiga as an example, though any gnome app will do.

The state machine is tightly coupled with the UI just like a Windows application. As a result making it use multiple CPUs properly or reusing the code for anything other than another Gnome application is impossible. Not surprisingly it triggers races in underlying (similarly badly coded) libraries like there is no tomorrow. Same for having the UI stripped away. This is impossible. And just do not get me started on the subject of trying to integrate something to a piece of gnome code. Because the apps state machines are built around the UI half of the key functions that should show up on dbus end up as inaccessible. Taking same ekiga as an example - call is exposed while hangup is not because it is so UI-tied up that there is no way in hell to expose it.

Re:why not just acquire all of Novell

[Lennie]

If you don't want to use .net and java, but looking for something similair, why not Vala ?

Re:why not just acquire all of Novell

[Anonymous Coward]

[..] Theo De Raadt is more worth debating (and only just a little more), but the OpenBSD project, whether you use it or not, is responsible for OpenSSL and OpenSSH and damned near the entire world relies on those.[..]

OpenSSH yes.. OpenSSL no.. OpenSSL has nothing to do with OpenBSD other than the word "Open" in their name. The fact is the OpenSSH developers keep bashing in the OpenSSL developer's skulls in every time they do something stupid like change an API for no good reason.

Re:why not just acquire all of Novell

[21mhz]

Let's just take ekiga as an example, though any gnome app will do.

The state machine is tightly coupled with the UI just like a Windows application. As a result making it use multiple CPUs properly or reusing the code for anything other than another Gnome application is impossible. Not surprisingly it triggers races in underlying (similarly badly coded) libraries like there is no tomorrow. Same for having the UI stripped away. This is impossible.

That's why GNOME has switched to Empathy, just another GNOME app but done right.

Re:why not just acquire all of Novell

[fandingo]

I would tend to agree with you about Apple's contributions. However, they are currently in a spat with the FSF over the GCC project. The FSF runs GCC and requires copyright assignment for all code contributions. Presumbably this is so they can quickly upgrade to the newwst GPL license (the Linux kernel is configured almost the opposite way, making the "upgrade" GPLv3 a non-option). Apple has spent a lot of time improving the Objective-C compiler in GCC, but isn't going to assign copyright for that work.
What this means:
1) All code created by Apple is still GPL (not sure of version). Copright: Apple, Inc.: Licensed: GPL.
2) Apple's code is not merged to the official GCC source tree.
3) Not really any user disrruptions.
Mac OS X/iOS are basically the only systems that use Object-C, and Apple provides the best implementation of Ojective-C via Apple's source tree. Other GCC-using platforms probably won't go through the effort of merging Apple's patches, but it's not likely that their users would even be interested in Objective-C.

Really the only thing that matters is that the FSF and Apple have not done a good job of working with one another.

Otherwise, Apple does a good job of working with free software projects. I think one of the best examples is CUPS. About three years ago Apple purchased all of the CUPS code. Apple has kept the project open, and nothing bad happened. Granted, there wasn't much fear of anything bad happening, and CUPS isn't exactly breath-taking technology, but everything worked out great.