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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.
- with one exception - dump Miguel. Please. Mono is something you see a doctor about. Let's keep it that way.
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.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
If you don't present google with the content they won't index it. If they index it, they cache it. I've noticed that some things can't be pulled from google's cache so I assume that they have agreements with some not to display caches. From this half-baked assumption I further assume that they have had the discussion with the newspapers, told them that news wants to be free, and that if they don't like it they can certainly deindex them.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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).
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
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.
Conservative, mod down for violating
It seems that patent portfolios is holding up the sale of Novell. http://gigaom.com/2010/09/16/novells-patents-are-complicating-its-sale/
That which does not kill me only postpones the inevitable.
"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.
I'd place greater emphasis on that last part. If a publisher becomes aware of the cache loophole and contacts Google about it, they most likely send out a canned reply in the spirit of "this is the way we roll. If you don't like it, there's the door.". I can't find the article at the moment but there's been more than one occasion where someone at Google made it clear that they don't design their software according to publisher's needs -- no one's forcing you to remain indexed, the decision is yours. There may be some exceptions with the very big players (Murdoch), but not many.
Entomologically speaking, the spider is not a bug, it's a feature.
... 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.
Eviscerati.Org: All Hail the Eviscerati
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?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
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.
Red Hat has a market cap of around $7 billion. It's possible they will be acquired, if not by VMware, but the stock has always been high-priced relative to earnings, so that makes it unattractive. But buying SUSE is not a great alternative, IMO. Why would you want to own a company that is not profitable? Also, SUSE has no equivalent of the JBoss assets Red Hat has.
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.
An interesting move since VMware's flagship virtualization product (ESX) is based on Red Hat, yet the current release of that product is the last that will support using the full-blown ESX with the privileged (red-hat-like) guest. They are moving to only support the bare hypervisor product (ESXi).
SUSE is now profitable by itself. And quite deployed in some parts of the world / those continuing contracts might be nice.
One that hath name thou can not otter
Why would you re-brand something that is known around the world as a mature, stable enterprise OS?
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
Huh? eDirectory and Identity Manager are major products in that space. It's the preferred IDM solution for SAP, for example. Zenworks (especially with the endpoint security add-ons) has been doing well, and there are still a lot of GroupWise customers (running it on Linux, even). Novell Access Manager (take a look at what it does) is also a really terrific product in its arena as well.
They could be acquired if enough of the preferred shares are available, but a good chunk, if not the majority of Red Hat's preferred shares are in the hands of company officers and Open Source partisans IIRC. Those people could simply refuse to sell the stock at any price. Since the company is doing well (relatively speaking), there's no real leverage to force the issue. Of course someone like Apple or Oracle could dangle so much money that people essentially couldn't refuse, but it would probably take more than $7 billion. There's a pretty small number of companies in the world that could do that, and I don't see most of those having an interest.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
People that buy OSes for companies want to see a name they recognize.
Like, um, Novell?
Free Martian Whores!
What about UNIX copyrights and patents? Will they go to VMware, or to the other buyer which will buy the rest of the old Novell?
I'm not sure what your point is? My parent said that VMWare should buy Mandriva instead or SuSE. I said that buying Mandriva would be a mistake because companies want name recognition in their OS purchases, and that SuSE would be a better choice. Now you say that Novell has name recognition... This is true, but beside the point. Novell is not up for sale, its SuSE division is. Even if it were all of Novell that was up for sale your comment would reinforce my point, not counter it. Yes, having the Novell name associated with your product is good. That's immaterial to whether VMWare buy Mandriva instead of SuSE.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
If VMware buys SuSE that will be a blow to Xen.
Red Hat has already switched to KVM, and Ubuntu doesn't provide a Xen Dom0 kernel. If SuSE goes to a virtualization vendor that competes with products built on Xen, what options will be left for enterprise distros that provide Xen Dom0 support? Oracle Unbreakable Linux?
Just another proletarian malcontent.
They won't have to call it SUSE, they could call it NovellOS, Novell Linux, anything they want. If they're buying a distro company it doesn't really matter which company has the best name, it matters that the product suits their customers' purposes. Microsoft does this all the time; who ever heard of "Stacker" before MS screwed them over?
What I wouldn't like is if they bought Suse just to ruin, kill, and bury it like MS did with Foxpro (I used to love that DBMS).
Free Martian Whores!
Mandriva has lost 30 million euros, unable even to win over its' home market despite the government helping push them in education. It's dead, Jim!
Umm. Novell already owns SuSE. They have for years. They're trying to sell it not buy it. VMWare is the potential buyer and they have no name recognition in the OS field. Hence it would be good for them to buy a recognized name.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
VMware has a Linux vcenter in beta..... http://communities.vmware.com/community/beta/vcserver_linux
Hmm, I guess I got it backwards then. SuSE is a lot more well known than VMWare, to most non-IT people (Like CEOs and CTOs).
The biggest reason for MS' dominance (besides the fact that it's hard to by a non-Apple computer without it preinstalled) is that nobody but nerds have ever heard of Linux.
Free Martian Whores!
At almost every level of the "Windows" UI/GUI almost anything can be exposed: to modify, append-to or straight-up block it completely.
Even a fairly simple language like AutoHotKey: (Script interpreted by an on-the-fly C++ compiler) can do amazing things with DLLCALL and RegisterCallBack.
Or even some of the work by BlackWingCat : BlackWingCat's KDW API Wrapper & Tools or OldCigarettes : OldCigarettes Windows 2000 XP API Wrapper Pack (OCW), which do API wrapping on Binaries like ntdll.dll, user32.dll, kernel32.dll and more -- which add Function calls into Win2K that only Exist in XP. Which enable software and games on Win2K that claim they need XP+.
Don't they know they can just download it for free?
I think you can achieve that with:
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOARCHIVE">
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
There's been a lot of talk about Novell since initial offer to buy it and it seems people haven't checked Novell's site at least 10 years. There's a long list of products on their site http://www.novell.com/products/ beyond Netware, Groupwise and SUSE.
So beside Netware which has been long dead and used mostly by companies too lazy to migrate to Linux there are great products based off eDirectory and running on SUSE. Take there new Zenworks endpoint management, Identity manager, Platespin just start off. Anyone had a look at application virtualization? They bought a good number of good product companies and are integrating them with their other products. Groupwise is an excellent mail system, stable and flexible, and would be so much better if they'd finally finish the design of the client which is still stuck with one leg in nineties, feels like unfinished work. All of services that once were on Netware have been moved to linux years ago and work fine. SUSE is though a platform of choice for most of their products and I can't see how could they sell just SUSE, no way.
They do however need to fire their marketing department.