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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.
Attachmate's strategy for the economic downturn was to lay off most of their development staff while still collecting maintenance from all their customers. And they only had to follow that strategy because the private equity group that owns them had sucked a ton of money out of the company by saddling it with a gigantic debt.
I don't feel very good about the prospects for sane, customer focused management from this particular company.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Another one (that made a deal with MS) bites the dust.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
I for one would be wondering whether this move was intended to acquire the Unix copyrights that Novell owns (as determined by the SCO case). The idea here is that SCO was stopped largely because they didn't actually have copyright on what they claimed infringement for.
Not that there weren't lots of other reasons why the case didn't hold water, but this does look like potentially a way to get the whole thing started up again.
I am officially gone from
There is a reason for that according to netcraft:
Walker, Richer Quinn Incorporated IT Operations 1500 Dexter Avenue North Seattle WA US 98109 150.215.214.130 Windows Server 2003 Microsoft-IIS/6.0 31-Jul-2010
Attachmate Corp. 1233 West Loop South Suite 1800 Houston TX US 77027 149.82.9.36 Windows Server 2003 Microsoft-IIS/6.0 25-Feb-2010
Get a web developer
Maybe the Attachmate CEO just ran out of shit to kill and has moved on to companies.
From Wikipedia:
Jeff Hawn—the president and CEO of Seattle-based Attachmate who lives in Austin, Texas—has been sentenced to 10 days in jail for authorizing the slaughter of 32 of his neighbor's bison that wandered onto his Colorado ranch. Hawn pleaded guilty in November to criminal mischief and animal cruelty. Hawn and hired hands shot and killed 32 bison, which had wandered onto and near his property from a neighboring ranch in Park County, Colorado — including cows carrying calfs. In Colorado, bison are allowed to wander under open-range laws.
The arrest warrant said most were left to rot.
Hawn, plead guilty to criminal mischief and cruelty to animals and was released free on a $15,000 bail. The Denver Post reports that the judge sentenced Hawn to 10 days in jail.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
As long as we're making guesses, I'm guessing it will include:
Mono... maybe.
eDirectory (formerly NDS) - To end the lawsuit threat Novell has had over MS since Active Directory, MS's NDS clone, debuted in 2000. Oh, and MS will kill eDirectory and encourage users to move to Active Directory... along with Windows Server if they currently use Linux.
ZenWorks Desktop Management - To my knowledge, this is like nothing MS currently has. Used for centrally managing the software installed on networked computers.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
...is "What IP did Microsoft acquire in this deal?" If they've acquired the UNIX copyrights, we could very well see the zombie corpse of SCO rise from the grave to terrorize the world again.
Umm, not exactly.
Attachmate may be a VC firm now, but it started out as an IBM (or at least, mainframe) terminal emulation company. They used to make boards that emulated a 3270 that you could install in PCs. Plenty of people have heard of them.
-- "In order to have power, I must be taken seriously." -Mojo Jojo
The question is...what "IP" has been sold to Microsoft?
Probably 127.0.0.1.
*buh-boom tick*
I'll be here all night.
Just sent two tweets to Miguel de Icaza about this:
@migueldeicaza So does it mean you will be somehow now working for Microsoft
@migueldeicaza Sorry meant to add a question mark... And how about IP rights for Mono? What does it mean copyrights-wise? Not worried?
And here's his answer:
@2green Dont know the answer to that.
Wow.
This sucks...
I read this on another site. I have not yet checked for myself.
NOVL has now filed its 8K. The IP deal is for 882 patents.
A quick search of the Patent-Pair Assignment database indicates that this likely every "friggin" patent Novell owns. That is Patent-Pair has 1711 entries with Novell as an assignee, but since these include duplicate application and granted patents, as well as other stuff, the total patents sold down the river to Redmond likely represents everything touched by Novell.