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

why not just acquire all of Novell

[tomhudson]

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

Re:why not just acquire all of Novell

[JamesP]

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

Re:why not just acquire all of Novell

[ScrewMaster]

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?

Who says he's using a desktop?

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.

Re:why not just acquire all of Novell

[oldspewey]

Real men use punchcards and a teletype.

Re:why not just acquire all of Novell

[bsDaemon]

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.

Re:why not just acquire all of Novell

[mdm-adph]

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? :\

Re:why not just acquire all of Novell

[Nadaka]

Real men use bits of wire and and a soldering iron.

Re:why not just acquire all of Novell

[ducomputergeek]

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.

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

[butalearner]

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

Java is perfectly fine. It's when you want to mess with the bytecode and VM implementation that you can run into trouble. Mono, on the other hand, the main implementation already violates MS patents for which there is no patent protection (e.g. ASP.NET, ADO.NET, Windows Forms).

Re:why not just acquire all of Novell

[rantomaniac]

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.

Re:why not just acquire all of Novell

[DrgnDancer]

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?

Re:why not just acquire all of Novell

[Anonymous Coward]

Winhoze? Seriously?

Re:why not just acquire all of Novell

[NickFortune]

what desktop are you using and what is your language of choice?

If I can jump in here: I use FVWM with a heavily customised config file. Languages of choice, depending on the task at hand, are C, C++, Perl, and (currently) Lua or Ruby. That's running Linux, rather than BSD. I do use some Gnome and KDE apps.

I've never used Java for anything significant. I did use Mono professionally for three to four years, a couple of years ago, I can safely say that I don't miss it in the least.

Gnome is all right, and I quite like KDE, but both of them consume a lot of resources to provide a set of integration features that I don't need and rarely use. And I've rather got used to having a desktop that does things my way, rather than whatever is current trendy in the relevant communities.

Re:why not just acquire all of Novell

[ScrewMaster]

He's probably assuming that the poster above wants to actually use his machine.

Well, that depends upon what you're using it to do. You don't need a fancy GUI for a lot of things. Take someone who's just doing the edit, compile, run routine for an embedded system, for instance. Or, maybe he's from some country where fast computers are hard to come by, and he's running on older hardware.

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

[multipartmixed]

> so... you throw away java, mono and .net, also kde, gnome,... what's left then??

What do you mean, "What's left?" How about - an entire universe less five apps?

Or let's talk about what we NEED and see where these bits fit in.

I need to type commands at a shell prompt. So I need a terminal. I need to be able to use more than one terminal at once, and don't have the desktop space for 100 computers. So I need some kind of multi terminal display thingy. X11 does that fairly well, when your terminal is an xterm. But straight X11 sucks when you have many windows overlapping and stuff -- so I need a window manager, too; I use fvwm 1.24 (and have for well over a decade). I also need to edit source code; I use emacs for that. Emacs will run in either a terminal window, or an X window.

# end of needs

See how I didn't say "KDE", "gnome", or ".net". I sure as hell don't need a program menu, a start button, or semi-transparent windows with spinning skulls and flames in the background.

My whole stack, end-to-end is written in C or C++, except emacs, which has a bunch of LISP in it. My day-to-day application development is done in C, or a CommonJS dialect when speed doesn't matter and I want a garbage collector, exceptions, and so on.

Re:why not just acquire all of Novell

[canistel]

I've been looking into vala, but it's just not up to snuff yet when you compare it to the complete java ecosystem (ide's, documentation, libraries, forum support etc).

Looks very interesting though, and would definitely give it a more serious look once it matures a little more.

Re:why not just acquire all of Novell

[MogNuts]

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.

Re:why not just acquire all of Novell

[rantomaniac]

I never tried Moonlight, but all vm / interpreted languages can usually call native code. That's with .NET, Python, Java, etc.

Sure, but we're talking about web apps, there's a different standard of openness, accessibility and security we expect from those. Neither javascript in browsers nor actionscript in flash allow native code.

Re:why not just acquire all of Novell

[fwarren]

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.

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.

Re:why not just acquire all of Novell

[Nadaka]

oh? http://xkcd.com/505/

Re:why not just acquire all of Novell

[sznupi]

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.

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.

Re:Google Search of WSJ Articles

[drinkypoo]

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.

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:As a loyal Novell customer

[JumpDrive]

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.

Patents holding up the sale

[mikesd81]

It seems that patent portfolios is holding up the sale of Novell. http://gigaom.com/2010/09/16/novells-patents-are-complicating-its-sale/

Re:Then Microsoft acquires VMWare

[oldspewey]

I don't see Microsoft acquiring EMC anytime soon.

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

[derGoldstein]

So first the one-liner slamming Mono gets a +5 Insightful, and now this AC gets a 'funny' for placing the word "shit" and "Miguel" next to one another. Who said hate doesn't pay.

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:Then Microsoft acquires VMWare

[jonescb]

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.

Novell can't afford it

[42sd]

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.

Re:Novell can't afford it

[tsstahl]

I think you missed the news about Novell looking to break itself up into pieces.

Re:Then Microsoft acquires VMWare

[FlyingGuy]

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

interesting move

[slshwtw]

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).

Re:interesting move

[Courageous]

ESX is not "based" on Red Hat, even using a loose reading of the word "based".

When you log onto the console operating system in a ESX environment, you are not, in fact, logging onto ESX at all.

The console operating system is a privileged VM running on the ESX server that solely exists to let you run command lines and the like, to discover information about the hypervisor's state, tell it what to do, and so forth. That has turned out to be the source of numerous security holes, hence the moving away from it.

C//

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...

Re:Not SuSE

[tomhudson]

Mandriva is dead. Almost all the devs have either quit or been fired in the last week. read moe here, the goodbyes on Cooker here, and the newest "plan" - to move development of Mandriva to Brazil here and turn it into a BRIC- country distro. Forget that China already has Red Flag Linux. Forget that they were able to grab Connectiva (a Brazilian distro) and killed the brand. Forget that ALT Linux is an actively maintained Russian distro with a new release earlier today.

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!

You forgot something

[brennz]

VMware has a Linux vcenter in beta..... http://communities.vmware.com/community/beta/vcserver_linux

Re:Then Microsoft acquires VMWare

[kimvette]

And this was modded troll why?

Because many people abuse the mod system so your post wasn't modded for any reason for -1, disagree. Rather than focusing on modding up rather than down, jerks mod non-troll/non-flamebait posts as troll or flamebait to skew the discussion.