Attachmate To Acquire Novell For $2.2B Cash 221
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.
Mono? (Score:4, Informative)
My guess will be the items that were relevant to the MSNovell patent deal, to remove that need for MS to provide protection for those that have used SuSE..
Time will tell I suppose.
Re:Mono? (Score:5, Informative)
"Novell is the owner of the UNIX and UnixWare copyrights" [wikipedia.org]
Not this shit again ...
Re:Attachmate (Score:5, Informative)
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
CEO (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Attachmate (Score:5, Informative)
Attachmate [wikipedia.org]
Attachmate is a software company owned by an investment group led by Francisco Partners, Golden Gate Capital, and Thoma Cressey Bravo. Attachmate focuses on terminal emulation, legacy modernization, managed file transfer, and enterprise fraud management software. It is the largest privately owned software company in Washington, USA.[citation needed]
Products
The Attachmate logo on older software products.As a result of the mergers and acquisitions detailed below, Attachmate has broadened its solution set to include several brands:
[edit] Terminal Emulation
Attachmate develops a variety of Terminal emulators:
Reflection (IBM, HP, UNIX, OpenVMS, X)
EXTRA! (IBM, UNIX, OpenVMS)
INFOConnect (Unisys)
[edit] Systems and Security Management
The NetIQ business unit delivers systems and security management software.
Among the NetIQ product offerings is AppManager, a suite that provides network, applications and systems monitoring. The product includes monitoring support Microsoft operating systems, Microsoft SQL Server databases, a variety of messaging environments, UNIX and Linux operating systems, Oracle systems, and Voice-over-IP for Cisco, Nortel, and Avaya.
[edit] Secure Communications
Reflection for Secure IT, formerly F-Secure SSH, is an SSH (secure shell) client and server for Windows and UNIX.
[edit] Application Integration
Attachmate Verastream provides application integration tools that quickly and noninvasively service-enable mainframe and enterprise host data and logic.
Attachmate DATABridge is an extract, transform, load (ETL) solution for securely integrating Unisys DMSII and non-DMSII data to a secondary database such as Oracle or Microsoft SQL Server.
[edit] PC X Server
Reflection X allows Windows users to use graphical and command-line based applications on remote UNIX, Linux, and OpenVMS hosts.
Re:Attachmate (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Miguel's opinion on the matter at the moment... (Score:5, Informative)
@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...
Re:Attachmate (Score:4, Informative)
I spent years working a job where we used Attachmate Reflection software to connect to the mainframes where we did our work. It is a terminal emulator for Windows machines. Wrote quite a few macros for it.
MS, via CPTN, gets "certain [Novell] IP assets" (Score:3, Informative)
From the first paragraph of the press release:
With Novell owning Mono, the free software community will have to watch this.
What patents did Novell have in that area?
It's unlikely that MS will have acquired the copyrights for Mono. It serves them better to have a "third-party" implementation which they can show to the competition authorities and standards groups.
Re:What a Waste! (Score:5, Informative)
Back in '95, we were lamenting this problem of defending NetWare in the face of an overwhelming Windows assault. The consensus then was that when the suits read a back cover ad declaring this the 'year of Windows', and the t-shirts get free development tools and the promise of write-once-run-everywhere, even though running your server tools on the client was never a requirement, then NetWare was doomed. This actually started with NTAS and picked up unstoppable momentum with Windows Server 2000. Nevermind that Exchange took a little while longer to come of age, for many shops NetWare was what they clung to GroupWise for. Once GW was hammered, it was over. The interesting GW exploits didn't help.
ZenWorks was, back then and up to at least 2004, really clever and actually made Windows administration tolerable if not cool. Schools used that a lot for various clever reasons. But Even Microsoft saw that ADS administration needed to improve, and it pretty much did. Add in some licensing spiffs, a continuing campaign to destroy NetWare compatibility, and Novell ran out of time and market. Last I checked, they had solid revenue form licensing, but the end was in sight. SUSE is a whole other story. Novell should have acquired OpenOffice. SCO didn't help.
I'm not hopeful for Novell. This looks like the carving of the turkey. All this time, and they will die the death of a thousand divestments. Arghh...
I truly miss my NAMP server. But not enough to build it again.
Novell sold all of their patents to Microsoft? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:IP sold to MS-led consortium = UNIX? (Score:2, Informative)
From your link:
I just found a Novell press release dated November 26, 1996, which makes it *after* the October 16th, 1996 Amendment 2 was signed. Guess what it says Novell sold off to Santa Cruz? "The UnixWare product lines". I'm pretty excited about digging this up.
SCO is arguing in its Reply Brief in its appeal that Amendment 2 changed the excluded assets language of the APA so that it gave SCO the copyrights and everything:
The exclusion of all copyrights was subsequently amended in Amendment No. 2 so that copyrights "required for SCO to exercise its rights with respect to the acquisition of UNIX and UnixWare technologies" were not excluded from the sale, and thus remained within the encompassing reach of all "right, title and interest," including all "ownership" rights in UNIX and UnixWare that was sold to SCO. This appeal focuses on whether these contractual agreements, and the evidence surrounding them, properly allow a finding that none of the UNIX and UnixWare copyrights were required by SCO to exercise its rights in the UNIX and UnixWare technologies it acquired.
But here in this press release, we see what Novell told the world it sold, and once again, it was just the UnixWare business, the UnixWare product lines. No mention of UNIX at all, by the way. Let me show you the press release, because I think this knocks SCO's arguments out.
Re:Miguel's opinion on the matter at the moment... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Novell sold ALL of their patents YES.. 882 MS (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Attachmate (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Mono? (Score:1, Informative)
ZenWorks Desktop Management - To my knowledge, this is like nothing MS currently has. Used for centrally managing the software installed on networked computers.
System Center Configuration Manager
System Center Operations Manager
System Center Service Manager
I could continue but you can read it yourself at http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/en/us/products.aspx
Re:Attachmate (Score:5, Informative)
2 Load balanced web servers, 3 database servers, and, drum roll, AKAMAI CDN.
Some of Novell's shareholders are pissed (Score:3, Informative)
(came across that link in a Groklaw comment)
Re:Mono? (Score:3, Informative)