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."

That would have been interesting.

[Anonymous Coward]

What does this say, exactly, about Novell's current strategy, that they consider Linux so useful to their current plans that they would attempt to buy SUSE?

If they owned SUSE, what most likely would they do with it?

Conflict of interest?

[Polly_was_a_cracker]

I can't help but feel that the german government owning shares of a company like SUSE seems to be a conflict of interest. I don't believe that government should be able should own any controlling amount of stock of a company they could make or brake. (ie: cities in germany switching to linux over MS)

Re:Conflict of interest?

[beezly]

Tell that to the french government (who own a large chunk of Renault).

I don't think it's a "conflict of interest" though.

too bad...

[deviator]

that would have been a pretty good fit for what they're currently trying to do. Make no mistake - Novell has some of the best enterprise management software in the industry. Linux definitely needs this.

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

Re:Conflict of interest?

[KingDaveRa]

I agree. Its never a good idea to have a potential supplier under the umbrella of the government. Then again, when the UK was mainly public (British Rail, Gas, etc) it was absolute, so who cared?

Still, it would be interesting to see what Novell would do with their own Linux Distro. Novell Servers, Novell Desktops tied up with ZENWorks - it would be very interesting.

German Goverment

[Noizemonger]

"the German government, which reportedly owns something like 30% of SUSE ($30 million worth), is supposed to be the speed bump." WTF? My Goverment owns 30% of SUSE? Finally they do something useful with my tax money! Nice. Probably its just a goverment loan but 30% of all shares is quite a lot. I wonder if it was a political decision to finance a OSS-Company. Has anybody more info on this?

Deal?

[Espectr0]

According to the article, suse is worth 100 million. They were offered 120 million.

Why didn't they accept?

Novell's next choice - Mandrake!

[capn_buzzcut]

Why not?

Re:Conflict of interest?

[Ami Ganguli]

If you feel that government should represent the interests of the people, and you feel that SuSe is a good thing for the people of Germany, then this situation makes perfect sense. It's only a conflict if the interests of SuSe don't align with the interests of German citizens (which I'm sure is a case that MS would want to make).

You could, however, say that it's anti free-market. I would reply "so what?", since I think the government needs to intervene in the market from time to time to correct problems.

Change is bad...

[drywater]

SuSE Puts out the best distro of Linux (IMHO) and my kneejerk reaction is sheer horror. I know that's not logical, but anything that might change the direction of the company scares me. I just installed SuSE 9 over the weekend and it's a wonderful product. My selfish desire is for SuSE to be left alone and to continue to produce and improve SuSE Linux. I don't want to have to change distros again!

Pronounciation?

[bucketoftruth]

Is it "soos" or "soo see"? I've always wondered

Re:No vell, no thanks

[FatherOfONe]

Because Novell support had me do it. As a matter of fact we had to get down to ONE FREAKING server with a read/write replica on it. Then pray that we could get it back. They were on the verge of dialing in to fix NDS with tools that we don't have. This was also with Novell on site! The core problem is that NDS could have a multitude of problems and appear to be running well. Then you see one server that still holds a reference to something... I got so use to running DsRepair (again per Novell) that I could see the screens in my sleep.

Ahh an administrative education problem.... nice way of saying "you don't know what the hell you are doing". That may or may not be true. I consider myself smarter than some and dumber than others. I did pass their 7 CNE test and I am a CNE (not that that means much, but just a point of reference). I was also one of the people who sent Novell designs how to layout a tree design for a large company. Novell's initial design didn't work well, and they ended up publishing a standard that is like mine. (I am sure that other people were saying the same thing to them, about tree design, so again this doesn't prove too much. Not that any of this means I am smart or dumb, just data points. I still remember arguing with them that we needed the ability to have help desk people reset passwords without being an admin of context (and possibly admin of a server, if there was one in that context).

Again, I have spent many many many weekends and nights repairing NDS issues. When it works, it works well, when things go wrong, it can suck. It has come a LONG way since 4.0 and 4.1 however the NetWare kernel hasn't. This was the jist of the original users post and he is correct.

I guess I will turn the question around. Do you honestly believe that Novell will continue to develop the NetWare kernel for the next 5 years? If Novell dumped the NetWare kernel but provided the same services on top of Linux would you switch off of NetWare to Windows or another Linux? I bet that the Novell faithful would move in a hartbeat to a Linux provided by Novell.

Lastly, and perhaps my biggest gripe. The Novell Client for Windows 95-XP!!! I know that you don't need it now, but they should have jumped on the SAMBA bandwagon out of the gate. They had a version that kinda worked with NetWare 4.x made by the consulting group (awesome group of people), but they never developed it. That freaking client made it impossible to put in a NetWare box in a Windows NT environment and have the two work well together. Yes I know about the GateWay product from Microsoft, but that acted as one user account and was unacceptable. So people in a "pure NT" environment couldn't access NetWare volumes. Oh yeah, I almost forgot... the client SUCKED! It crashed a ton, it tried to replace the NDIS ethernet drivers with their own, and was generally horrible....

All this makes me sound like some Novell hater. I assure you that I am not. I am a fan of Novell, and hope that they turn it around, but being a fan of Novell since the 2.x days, it is kinda like being a Cubs fan; you just become kinda jaded over time.

If Novell partnered with SUSE and relased a version of SUSE with Groupwise, NDS, Zenworks and other stuff, while LAYERING their stuff on SUSE (not changing the core product), I would buy it. Oh yeah, one more thing. Get the licencing right! Charge per processor.

Netware & GNU/Linux: yes, please

[GoneGaryT]

My place of work is a Novell shop; I think we'd all love at least a Netware client for GNU/Linux. I imagine that goes for a lot of people. It would make 'Linux on the Desktop' a much closer reality for us.

Also, we have a rolling hardware upgrade program here and too many viable PCs just end up in the skip. The 300MHz PIIs w/64Mb RAM are next for the chop, but they'd be totally acceptable general office-use machines if they ran GNU/Linux. Tending to the luxurious, in fact. My home PC, for example, is a 133MHz Cyrix w/64Mb and I can't be arsed to upgrade, the point being that the economy of Slackware 9 (or whatever the distro of the minute) let's me get away with not being arsed.

You can see the appeal of it, really. Free at last etc.

Novell: "what has changed?"

[eGuy]

Here is what has changed.

- The Executive Commitee for Novell looks entirely different than it did when it put MS as enemy #1.

- More than half of management underneath the executive committe has changed since then.

In other words 'These people' who where 'scarily clueless' are gone. I guess these 'suits' went to SCO for employment.