Novell Announces Agreement to Acquire SUSE 672
Mickey Hill writes "Novell today announced it has entered into an agreement to acquire SUSE LINUX, one of the world's leading enterprise Linux companies, expanding Novell's ability to provide enterprise-class services and support on the Linux platform. Novell expects the transaction to close by the end of its first fiscal quarter (January 2004). This latest move follows Novell's August purchase of Ximian."
FIRST POST. (Score:0, Insightful)
Holy shit! (Score:0, Insightful)
Hmm (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Novell stuffs this up, and I'm left with no real "Free" solution for buisnesses (I dont care about support, I just want a brand name and is recognizable and usable).
2. Novell doesnt stuff it up, and SUSE takes over Redhat's market share here in north america.
Either way, linux growth is going to stop dead for a good chunk of time while these issues with Redhat and Suse settle down.
After yesterdays' article regarding Redhat's changes, I started looking at SUSE more carefully. Now we've got such serious flux in the two most important linux distributions that it'll take six months to a year before I feel comfortable pitching either of these to buisnesses.
Crazy talk. (Score:2, Insightful)
Since when did we rely on SUSE and RHat for our linux development?? Last I checked, Linux and the associated environment were Open Source/Free Software. That's what's so special about it: companies can come and go and thrive and fail, but they can only help GNU/Linux, and never hurt it.
This is why I was cheering for AOL to buy RHat last year or whenever that rumor was going around. Not because it would be good for RHat, but because AOL would probably contribute alot of development coders, and being GPL work it would benefit the entire community.
Another try at the desktop (Score:2, Insightful)
I hope they succeed, NDS is a great back end platform, so they can offer a end-to-end solution for business on Linux. They just need to learn to market it!
Re:Holy shit! (Score:5, Insightful)
Novell is perceived by most of my customers as a (fairly kick ass) file-print-directory services server only system. but file-print-directory services are only part of what companies need these days. they need groupware/email (groupwise is a joke), they need SQL servers, and they need "Micro Vertical App Server" for Their Tiny Industry that somebody in a garage is addressing. And they want it all on the same platform, with integrated authentication.
small vertical apps is a big one, but it seems to be too much of a bitch to write these VBesque vertical apps on novell, so nobody does. "Small Dentist Office Accounting Pro" gets cooked up on windows by a small software company and not on novell. (incidentally this is a bit of a problem for linux on the desktop front: the crazy apps like "BeeKeeper Ranching and Honey Tracking" are what keep most businesses from switching on the desktop).
looks like Novell is trying to do what they failed to do with the original Unix license they pissed away: create a Novell branded viable app server platform. they screwed up the first time with proprietary unix. maybe a more open system will succeed, but knowing Novell, probably not.
Is Novell the new CA (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Hmm (Score:5, Insightful)
Puhhleeze. Please stop the
I'm running short on time, so I'm going to let the moderators mark me as Troll as I don't have 30 links to back up these statements. But, I'm pretty sure that:
1. Linux, the kernel, will see continuing development without care towards Suse or Redhat.
2. GNU is still going to develop their wonderful tools.
3. The important projects on sf.net are still moving forward.
4. There are other distros.
5. There are many independent parties packaging for Redhat and Suse; nice updates can be obtained from them.
Re:The pressing issue: (Score:5, Insightful)
IBM learned from that set of mistakes. The question is: has Novell learned? Or is this the same bunch of guys who think it is still 1993 with Netware holding 85% market share?
sPh
Re:Great timing with respect to Red Hat moves (Score:5, Insightful)
So, Novell I think has almost no interest in desktop, other than to use them as their "clients" to their servers. So I am sceptical how much novell will do for the desktop especially the GUI
And If my guess is right, they bought Ximian for their connector,so that they can use their mail server software to better integrate with exchange (maybe for migration, i dont know), in the process unintentionally acquiring one of the best desktops and a
What they now have is some stuff they can make money on immediatly and some which maybe they can use later. The future of desktop linux depends on what novell does with the latter.
Novell basically acquired Suse for free... (Score:4, Insightful)
Pre-Market: 7.499 +1.449 (23.95%)
NOVL Market Cap: 2.26B
Let's do the math.
Novell will pay $210 million for Suse, but Novell's market cap goes up by $500 million upon announcing the deal.
So basically, the acquisition of Suse is FREE. Actually, Novell made an extra $300 million in stock value by announcing the deal - so it's better than free.
Gotta love the free market system.
Novell Makes Linux Mainstream... Instantly! :-) (Score:2, Insightful)
Novell clients are usually pretty slow to move into new products and spaces because of their current Novell comfort level.
Bring that comfort level along with the stability of the Linux platform and NetWare's reliability and you've got a pretty solid and very competitive platform. PERIOD.
Proven File and Print Services
Proven Directory Services
Solid Groupware/Email Services
Solid out-of-the-box web server/services solution
and now built on top of a rock solid Linux foundation... this is going to get very interesting... very fast!
Both KDE and GNOME are safe (Score:1, Insightful)
What they are probably going to provide tight integration between Evo and KDE. A lot of enterprise environments have already adopted SuSE Enterprise, which means it would take a large amount of work to switch to GNOME. It might even mean the gradual phase out of XD2 Desktop, since it runs on Novell's new arch rival: RedHat (note that Ximian and RedHat weren't rivals, but SuSE and RedHat definatly are). If I was Novell, I would almost certainly kill any support of XD2 Desktop on RedHat NOW, and gradually phase it off for SuSE (improving it will help RedHat's push on the entrprise, something Novell must not let happen)
At the same time, I don't see Ximian completely ditching GNOME. Porting Evolution to KDE would make it an entirely new app, and thus break current installations.
So, basically, the GNOME developers employed by Ximian are safe as long as they can sell Evolution, and the KDE developers employed by SuSE are safe as long as they can sell SuSE Enterprise.
DejaVu all over again and No need to switch (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm reminded of my reaction to Novell buying Unix System Labs in 92/93 and the sale to SCO in 1995 and the SCO rename to Caldera later. It all seemed to Rosey.
Unix appeared to be in reliable hands and was being freed into Linux, Caldera even said as much.
Then came per seat, and all the rest to the point where we are now with SCO attempting to steal Linux and claim far more in Unix than the law ever intended for.
It keeps me from getting any warm fuzzies over Novell aquireing Suse.
On the Redhat front. I find it odd being a registered adoptee of Redhat (can you really be the owner of OS software?) and a shareholder in the company that I have yet to recieve the email about the end of Redhat Linux.
Redhat's site backed up the stories.
BUT it's being misunderstood.
Yes RH9 appears to be the last in it's line BUT RH Enterprise Linux WS is actually it's repacement.
The License for RHEL WS is the same as for RH9. The only real change is that to get support from Redhat, you are going to HAVE TO PAY for the support.
Your free to get support elsewhere free or otherwise.
Reasonable and overdue, it's a sign of the maturity of commercial Linux.
I'll probably step up to RH Enterprise, and now that Suse is under Novell I'll give it another cautious try, but there really isn't a reason to leave RH.
Re:Will the EU let it happen? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Great timing with respect to Red Hat moves (Score:4, Insightful)
Novell acquisition press releases are epitaphs.
Re:The pressing issue: (Score:5, Insightful)
Err, not quite. While I am not a devotee of RedHat as a distro, I think it's a bit unfair to dub them "evil" when they have actually put a lot of manpower into products that have been released into the public domain free of charge.
While it's not precisely altruism, they have contributed a lot to the Linux user community, and to deny that is churlish.
Save the epithets for the real baddies in Redmond.
Re:The pressing issue: (Score:2, Insightful)
It's funny to see the Slashdot community holding SuSE up as some sort of beacon of light compared to the evil Red Hat, when SuSE is just a guilty of sketchy decisions (closed-source YaST, closed ISO images) as Red Hat is.
Guess what? All of you people who are railing against Red Hat for charging big money for their enterprise release, SuSE has $100 "user licences" for their desktop release and charges $800 for their "Enterprise Server". Sound familiar?
But because the groupthink has decided Red Hat == bad, and ! Red Hat == good, it's a cause for celebration.
Re:Great timing with respect to Red Hat moves (Score:5, Insightful)
RedHat are not abandoning their base!
The are opening up development to the community, this is leading to lots of excitings happening, as I said yesterday [slashdot.org].
What RedHat are doing means that anyone can duplicate and sell Fedora CDs and stuff like that, Fedora is becoming more like debian in terms of community involvement -- and this is great!
I dunno much about SuSE, but I do know that the nature of the mode of production of free software is such that it is best done in an open way -- doing it in a closed way is too expensive.
Personally I'd rather be working for RedHat than SuSE right now...
I see three scenarios: (Score:4, Insightful)
All in all that would stall Linux brand recognition but probably be good news for Mandrake, the last one left.
2.) Novell has actually seen the light and plans way ahead into the future, were software won't make a buck anymore, but free software will reign and the business is in services.
3.) Novell/SuSE twitches here and there, barely surviving, taking shares from Mandrake, they all die eventually, Mickeysoft prevails and there is a 5 year setback for OSS, with only Gentoo and Debian to the rescue in the far future, when the OSS model has consumed everything.
Bottom line:
I don't like this news. Sound bad. Chances are to high that this once o-so big company Novell is gonna screw up. And SuSE is my first recomendation to n00bs right now. It would be a real shame for them to go down the drain.
Healthy Skeptisism (Score:4, Insightful)
Also, SuSE is doing remarkably well in Europe, where the German government has been giving it a lot of support. Once it's seen as "tainted" by US corporate interests (trust me, Europeans are not happy with the US), it might impact how well SuSE is received by Governments in Europe.
(Especially as SuSE is perceived as being a safe way to avoid backdoors imposed by foreign Governments.)
On the flip-side, development work costs money, and Novell probably has more of that than SuSE. If Novell gets this right, and puts in some serious cash, Linux could get some badly-needed investment in the ease-of-use arena. IBM and SGI have done wonders for filesystems, high-end architectures, etc, but they're not known for producing software for Joe Average. Novell's networking products were popular in schools, at one point, precicely because they were easy for idiots to use.
Since that fits in nicely with SuSE's reputation of easy-to-use, easy-to-install distros, that offers some excellent opportunities.
That's where the skeptisism must come in, unfortunately. An opportunity is not the same thing as a reality. Unless Novell makes use of this, and brings Linux to the masses, this move will do nothing for anyone, SuSE included.
If Novell do bring Linux to the masses... well, that's a different kettle of fish. Then this will be the greatest move imaginable, and everyone will benefit signigicantly.
Welcome to 'Open Systems' (Score:1, Insightful)
I now have to pay for licenses for my test and development servers (where before I could get away with RedHat 9) and I have to stick close to something that will certify with Oracle. It's not a terrible thing by any means, but I think that the golden age of Linux is over.
Re:The pressing issue: Mod this moron down. (Score:2, Insightful)
Um, yeah, how has Redhat pissed off all the developers again? By giving control of their distro back to the community with Fedora? By letting developers submit their packages for inclusion in Fedora, and giving them more control over maintaining said packages? By releasing under the GPL the source code to every single piece of software they've ever made, so that developers can add to and modify it as they like? Oh, maybe it was by hiring developers that have been working on projects such as GNOME and Mozilla, so they can get paid for doing what they love.
Moron.
Re:Novell basically acquired Suse for free... (Score:2, Insightful)
That's not real money. They don't even own the stock and tomorrow it will be back down some. Novell paid in cash, if it had been a stock trade, you might say they made money on the deal.
Re:Except that (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, Novell stands to gain nothing by suing SCO now.
However:
1) Wait for SCO vs. IBM to work itself out
2) If SCO wins, sue SCO
3) PROFIT!
If SCO loses, Novell then hasn't paid large fees to lawyers and has lost nothing.
Re:I wander... (Score:5, Insightful)
Lots of people will want to deny this because they know that it would be a huge blow to the KDE project. I really can't blame them. But Sun and RedHat are both using GNOME now, and Novell seems to be apt to move in that direction, too. Desktop consolidation arrives in the corporate market. We'll see if this changes anything...
-Erwos
Re: I'm not sure why they'd buy SuSE then... (Score:3, Insightful)
Continuation of Novell's pattern (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Buying the AT&T source, then announcing plans to merge NetWare and UNIX into a hybrid called "SuperNOS"
2. Buying Wordperfect, Quattro Pro and creating WordPerfect Office.
3. Java-on-NetWare. Anyone remember "the world's fastest Java execution environment"?
Every one of these failed, and was quietly abandoned. Now it's Linux. Hopefully they actually stick with this initiative long enough for it to bear some fruit.
Re:The pressing issue: (Score:2, Insightful)
Bad news for Europe? Bad news for everyone? (Score:5, Insightful)
This makes Mandrake the only even moderately high profile commercial Linux distribution left in European hands, and as is well known Mandrake's finances are seriously wobbly. And this matters for everyone just now, because the future of Linux in the US is being played out in just that same murky Salt Lake City slime-pool. Fall out from the SCO case will affect all US-owned Linux distributions.
Re:The pressing issue: (Score:2, Insightful)
It's a downward spiral and hopefully Novell has learned from its past. I believe they have with their new open inititatives and pledge to give back to OSS. I think they realize they aren't the big gun in town anymore and better not make people mad. It's time for them to ride the OSS wave, release code back to the community, put some money were their mouth is (already have with the acquisition of Ximian and Suse), and finally give the fat companies that need it a run for their money.
Things are set to heat up, and I for one can't wait. It's going to get interesting here real soon.
Re:The pressing issue: (Score:3, Insightful)
I'll take your word for it. The last time I used SuSE (which has been several years, I'll admit), YaST was closed-source. In the interest of fairness, the Red Hat up2date server is still closed-source, which I'm not a big fan of.
Also, you're confusing the releases. SuSE has no runtime licenses for their desktop release. You're thinking of a previous product that bundled Crossover and some disk partitioning software and they've since pulled that one.
As I linked elsewhere in this thread, that product is still available in their online store for a per-seat license. Not that it's a bad thing or a good thing, my point was that both companies (Red Hat and SuSE) have a combination of free releases and commercial releases, but you don't have story after story posted about "SuSE only provides support for their expensive commercial distributions, so they're EEEEEEVIL"
As for offering ISOs, you can easily mirror the RPMs from their ftp site, burn to a CD, and you're done.
Certainly true, though when compared with Red Hat, where you can download a Fedora ISO, burn it to CD, and be ready to install in 10 minutes, it doesn't seem like this is a mark in the column of "Why SuSE is better than Red Hat".
Kiss of Death (Score:4, Insightful)
Why? Because Novell Aquired it. If there's anything that has been proven over the last couple of years is that Novell buying a company out is basicially the Kiss of Death.
Look at Wordperfect (pratcially dead), Quattro Pro (dead) and Caldara (Now SCO. - Suing anything that Produces code for money)
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe their aquiring it in order to expand their networking capability beyond Netware futher, or do away with the netware OS altogether and replace it with a Linux based network server.
Strategic Vision? (Score:3, Insightful)
wisely.
To crack MS's lock on the desktops I can see them doing a couple of things
1. Offering SUSE ISO's for DL
2. Offering SUSE to Dell, gateway etc with a minimal or no license fee.
They now have the option of an end to end software solution, tied to a global directory
that works and is easy to admin. They will need to push the desktop to gain acceptance, which is why I think we'll see SUSE ISOs. Now if only they'd start spamming those CD's like AOL does....
Re:The pressing issue: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The pressing issue: (Score:4, Insightful)
They need to get their act together and communicate or they are going to loose lots of people because of it.
I don't care what they intended or what they are doing if I can't figure it out.
Re:The end of "Free" Linux? (Score:1, Insightful)
And.....Fedora, Slackware, and on and on and on.......
What is everyone so worried about? There are so many choices out there when it comes to Linux. Actually, maybe Novell will release ISO's???????
Re:Directory Services? (Score:3, Insightful)
Irony: Novell, UNIX, SCO, GNU/Linux (Score:2, Insightful)
Novell acquires AT&T UNIX source code.
Novell rewrites NetWare.
Novell sells UNIX source code to SCO.
NetWare customer base shrinks to increasing Windows NT marketshare.
Novell changes CEO's (Schmidt, etc.) like new parents change diapers.
Novell acquires Ximian and SuSE Linux.
SCO announces intentions to sue everyone with derivative UNIX technologies.
Oh if only we knew then what we know now.....
Hopefully Novell will be more forward thinking than it has demonstrated in the past, one notable indcident being it's slow process to adopt TCP/IP as a 'core' protocol over the inefficient IPX/SPX suite. Other incidences like the acquisition of the Word Perfect office suite (around 1994) and the subsequent lack of execution for this acquisition have often been the downfall of Novell. I would really like to think that Jack Messman (he whom called GNU/Linux immature) is going to change all that but alas only time will tell. Novell has had more than their share of talent that failed to materialize profit, Peter Schmidt (Java kingpin) among others have made contributions but never brought the cash cow home to graze.
C'mon Novell don't fail us this time....
But I have the IQ (and spelling ability) of an emtpy shoebox so what the hell do I know.
Re:DejaVu all over again and No need to switch (Score:4, Insightful)
How many times is this going to come up? It seems to be standard FUD towards RH.
What you are talking about applies to the RHN SERVICE, not the software.
Check out Appendix 1 of that document, specifically:
1. The Software. Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Applications (the "Software") are either a modular operating system or application consisting of hundreds of software components. The end user license agreement for each component is located in the component's source code. With the exception of certain image files identified in Section 2 below, the license terms for the components permit Customer to copy, modify, and redistribute the component, in both source code and binary code forms. This agreement does not limit Customer's rights under, or grant Customer rights that supersede, the license terms of any particular component.
The image files they're talking about are the Shadoman logo and Red Hat logo.
Charles
Re:Kiss of Death (Score:3, Insightful)
Back in the early 90's when Novell thought they were the shit with the only major file/print server for LANs, they went and spent like $6 billion acquiring Wordperfect, Quattro Pro and I think Dbase or Paradox... anyway a whole suite of applications.
They were going to take on Microsoft, defeat the behemoth using their mighty Utah wisdom!
A few years later, they sold the lot of 'em to Corel for about $20 in canadian currency.
Then in the mid 90's, SCO bought the Unix trademark and started promoting Unixware, the alternative to SCO. That failed too. So then they worked out a deal with SCO.
Meanwhile Ray Noorda, the genius behind the $6 billion loss on Wordperfect went off to found Caldera, promoting Linux to the masses.
All these things are interconnected.
Microsoft won't be happy. (Score:2, Insightful)
The change to linux is going to be gradual where there will come a point where microsoft can't grab the balls of major computer providers and force them to use microsoft products.