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.

I'm not hopeful

[Omnifarious]

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.

IP sold to MS-led consortium = UNIX?

[FrankNFurter]

Think about it: Novell hold the copyrights and trademarks to UNIX. They would make for a nice addition to Microsoft's portfolio, don't you think?

Cue The Queen

[marcello_dl]

Another one (that made a deal with MS) bites the dust.

Possibly SCO-related?

[dkleinsc]

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.

What a Waste!

[filesiteguy]

I am amazed at how - once again - Novell blundered and lost the opportunity to capitalize on something. Back in '05 I thought Novell and SUSE (SLED, SLES...) would have a viable future competing against Wintendo and Unix. However, I noticed way back in '08 that they were slipping and I eventually jumped ship myself (over to Ubuntu) and gave up trying to persuade my server room staff to switch to Novell.

Too bad.

Kind of reminds me of 1995...

Re:Mono?

[anshulajain]

I hope that Icaza and his Mono-ilk will be finally transferred to Microsoft (as they've always secretly wanted to)...

Re:Miguel finally gets his job with Microsoft?

[mark72005]

as an employee of one of the remaining groupwise customers I think this falls in the category of "anything would be an improvement"

Re:Mono?

[VGPowerlord]

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.

It's a shame.....

[cyberkahn]

I started my career in I.T. with Novell, but I left it behind when I saw the writing on the wall. I had been wishing for a miracle for the company like Google acquiring it, since IMHO a easy intuitive GUI driven directory service is lacking in the Non-Microsoft world. Especially one that plays well with other operating systems. Yes you can use other operating systems in an AD environment, but not as "out of the box" as Novell IMHO. Oh well... I guess we will see.

The billion dollar question...

[Just Brew It!]

...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.

Re:Unix Patents

[goombah99]

maybe google can switch to BSD. Isn't that one safe from the copyrights issue?

Re:Cue The Queen

[mcgrew]

Why is that truthful comment marked flamebait? What's the matter, mod, the truth hurts?

Stacker, FoxPro, many others. MS's buying of Foxpro especially annoyed me; Foxpro was a good DBMS before MS bought and killed it. It was head and shoulders above Access. MS couldn't compete, so they bought them out and pretty much ruined it.

Do a little Googling before you mark someone flamebait.

Re:Possibly SCO-related?

[Gbor]

I wonder... if the UNIX copyrights are of any good to damage Linux or Open Source, why would have other big companies involved in and benefiting from Linux and Open Source taken any risks by allowing for these assets to end up in unfriendly hands? On the other hand, if the UNIX copyrights can potentially be harmful when misused, what would a.o. IBM and Google have for an apology for letting it happen? This is of course under the assumption that the "certain intellectual property assets" did contain Novell's UNIX related IP...

Re:Antitrust

[Locutus]

What surprises me is that a company found to have illegally used its monopoly in operating systems is even allowed to be involved with a deal like because operating systems are involved. And the EU had lots of issues with MS middleware and this includes lots of middleware too.

To top it off, this deal involves a company with current antitrust legal efforts on going. I guess this is a form of settlement but without any open market considerations, this seems more like the bully won again.

We will once again see Microsoft's true colors regarding open source and they will not be friendly. If you've not seen recently, Microsoft had to pull revenue from losing divisions to prop up their Windows divisions so they look like there was growth. What that means is they have peaked and the wounded lion is going to come out pissing on everything. IMO

LoB

Re:IP sold to MS-led consortium = UNIX?

[Waffle Iron]

Think about it: Novell hold the copyrights and trademarks to UNIX. They would make for a nice addition to Microsoft's portfolio, don't you think?

It's hard to see how that wouldn't stir up a hornet's nest of antitrust issues.

Re:Attachmate

[harlows_monkeys]

No, that's not the reason. Consider that PlentyOfFish was able to do a 30 million hit a day all dynamic website using "2 load balanced web servers with 2 Quad Core Intel Xeon X5355 @ 2.66Ghz), 8 Gigs of RAM (using about 800 MBs), 2 hard drives, runs Windows x64 Server 2003" for the web servers. There's a detailed writeup of PlentyOfFish's architecture and hardware here [highscalability.com].

Re:Mono?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't understand. Suppose Novell owns some valid copyrights over Linux. They actively distributing Linux (the kernel) and its source code (by distributing suse), with GPL copyrights attached to it. Doesn't this mean that they have released all relevant copyrights under the GPL?

Re:Possibly SCO-related?

[Rogerborg]

Oops, yes. At the very least, I can see Novell's new owners settling with SCO. As soon as it's out of court, the remains of SCO can start the shakedown racket again.