Attachmate To Acquire Novell For $2.2B Cash

wiredmikey and a few others wrote in to let us know that Novell has agreed to be acquired by Attachmate Corporation for $6.10 per share in cash, in a transaction valued at approximately $2.2 billion. The Boston Globe reports that the deal also includes the sale of some intellectual assets to a consortium organized by Microsoft. Attachmate plans to operate Novell and SUSE as separate business units. Here is the press release.

Comments

Re:Attachmate

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Attachmate is a venture capital firm, which means:

- They're loaded but you never heard of them,
- VCs usually buy or invest in a company to make a lot of money quickly,
- If Novell's market cap doesn't increase a lot soon, or they don't turn a huge profit soon (fat chance), they're hosed, like most companies taken over by VC money.

In short, expect Novell to be up for sale within 3 years.

Well, well, well

[mlwmohawk]

Microsoft is involved, so that is not good news. SuSE is dead, or soon will be.
What's going to happen to the UNIX copyrights, and will this IP sale be the stick that they will continue to try to beat Linux with?
Software patents? OMG, in the hands of Microsoft?

One can theorize that this is Microsoft's way of trying to get Google. Windows Phone 7 needs a way to beat Android, and I'm sure the whole Linux copyright, patent BS will be focused on the mobile phone market.

Re:Miguel finally gets his job with Microsoft?

[arivanov]

If gnome is being handed off - goodbye and good riddance. With mono together. And with the Microsoft worshipper AKA Miguel de Icasa as an added bonus. Please, pretty please...

I am more concerned about the Unix copyrights. That may allow restart of the whole sorry SCO affair on a whole new level - not just going after Linux per se, but also after all of the stuff running on top it like Android.

Re:Mono, Monodevelop, etc.

[Noughmad]

Nothing of value will be lost.

Re:I'm not hopeful

[Omnifarious]

Yes, and no. I consider it to be dishonest to customers. And if it weren't for the debt they had been saddled with, they would've been plenty profitable enough to avoid doing it at all.

Additionally, programmers are not easily replaceable. Every single project I've ever worked on inside a corporation had an amazing amount of 'tribal knowledge' locked in the heads of various developers. So not only are you battening down the hatches for the present when you lay them off, you're mortgaging your future by destroying the core intellectual base for the stuff you have.

Seniority was a big criteria when they did this, but the morale destruction caused a lot of their most senior and competent people to leave.

The whole fiasco painted a picture (to me) of management that didn't see a quality product as the key to improving their bottom line, but rather was more interested in the appearance of a quality product and making short-term decisions in the interests of the bottom line. They traded on their reputation with their customers to the detriment of those same customers.

You could argue that having the company go under would be even worse for those customers. But the only reason why that was a danger at all was because of previous decisions that teated profits as an end to themselves rather than as a reward for a job well done.