Novell & SUSE In Link Up?

dmorelli writes "Since it seems to be a SuSE news day, here's something from Friday this past. Novell tried and failed to buy SuSE, according to the Linux Business week story."

Re:Conflict of interest?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, what a horrible thing that would be, if a state governing body had a vested interest in the financial success of one of the companies that they themselves are a potential customer of. [google.com]

Re:Conflict of interest?

[vlad_petric]

How about M$ buying its way out of the antitrust trial through the 2000 elections ? Isn't that a conflict of interests as well? It's certainly a more disgusting one.

I'm certainly not for State ownership, but it seems to me that in the US the companies are owning the state (and the only thing that changes when Democrats and Republicans replace each other is the dominant industry).

Re:Novell's next choice - Mandrake!

[Havokmon]

Why not?

No kidding. MS has a half-hearted desktop and a shitty server that's nothing more than the desktop with multi-user perms - but they DO integrate better than any other desktop/server combination.

If Novell bought Mandrake, they'd have an awesome desktop to ship, and integrate, with their Netware 7 Linux product.

Re:too bad...

[cyberchondriac]

Oh well, they'll just release their own distro of Linux now (called Netware 7).

I'll take that over the current versions of NetWare that boot off DOS. While it's a fine OS for file sharing, I'm still put off by the lack of built in tools like traceroute that a "network" OS like this should have. Add to that the problems I almost always experience trying to get NLMs to run in a protected memory space, and sometimes I suspect it's not much more than a glorified DOS in many aspects. It's most redeeming feature is the extended attribute file system, but Novell won't maintain a lead there much longer. eDirectory is a great thing, but in many regards, NetWare, as an OS (or NOS to be more precise) is still years behind everyone else.
I'll be happy to see NetWare move to a linux kernel. Now if more third party developers would just lose the notion that NetWare = IPX, it would move ahead even faster.

Re:Microsoft 2

[kfg]

Yes, we all know the reasons why the GPL prevents Red Hat from becoming Microsoft 2. I rather suspect that IBM knows it too, no matter how clueless the article's author is. (Yes, I read the article, so I know your post isn't offtopic at all).

Thing is that from IBM's point of view they're just trying to become something vaguely like IBM again.

From Red Hat's, Novell's and some other's point of view though I rather suspect they're trying to become the new Sun since Sun seems to have lost its way.

And then there's SCO, who is trying to not be a Linux company and is aiming for. . .well, good question. Microsoft's hit man maybe? The Blob?

Antarctica sounds like a good resolution to that matter.

KFG

Re:That would have been interesting.

[w42w42]

That's a good question, any company owning Suse and ximian would be interesting, and not knowing the track record of the suits involved, possibly a bit scary.

It is a bit interesting that they have chosen to focus on what seems a desktop flavor, considering they went after and purchased ximian. If they wanted a vanilla server distro, I'd think they could get that for less elsewhere.

Perhaps they're not interested in the technology, but the name. Suse has a very good reputation I think in both camps (client/server), and was apparently in Novell's grasp, where I don't think Redhat would be ($$$).

Re:No vell, no thanks

[wardk]

I sure can blame it on Novell :-)

hell, when SCO exposed themselves as shiftless vultures they and Novell didn't even seem to KNOW what sort of contracts they had signed. And we still don't know for sure who owns what. Novell also got real quiet after the 2nd or 3rd volley from SCO.

If Novell is so qualified/desirable to be a Unix vendor, how does one explain Unixware?

I love SuSE Linux, I don't want it to get *any* Novell directly on it. Note to SuSE....resist!!

Re:That would have been interesting.

[watzinaneihm]

As i said in my other post, Novells plan is to get out of the OS business. They plan to be a company which makes services for enterprise, which incidentally will run on Linux. Think of them like GNU in GNU/Linux.
Today all their services run on Netware OS which is kind of old (but good enough for the time being) and it is the services which make any money at all. By netware 7 they plan to move to Linux entirely. To do this they have two choices, run it on a stock OS and be dependant on the distro or roll their own distro. They seem to have found a third option now, which is to buy out a popular distro.

Re:They're stuck in the old game.

[BrynM]

"Why not just put a couple developers on your payroll and have them work on stuff that's important to you and release it for all the distributions?"

Novell isn't only trying to build technology, they need to re-build their brand. SuSE is a very popular distro with lots of foreign/EU supporters and users. If Novell could get these markets to take them seriously - or even better: like them - they would gain substantial market clout. Novell is also quickly falling behind in relevance to today's tech market. Their previous attempts at adopting new tech (the Win32/NT clients) weren't the big hits that they had hoped for. I believe that they don't think they have the time to build something from scratch. They need to get deeper into these markets and do it in some sort of turn-key fasion.

Re:No vell, no thanks

[Phishcast]

Why are you "deleting" servers with Read/Write replicas anyhow? This is an adminsitrative education problem, not a problem with NDS. Remove NDS replicas, then remove the server from the tree.

Try deleting an Active Directory domain controller and see if that doesn't throw a wrench into your domain. Same deal...