VMware Looks To Acquire Novell's SUSE Unit 161
minutetraders writes "According to the Wall Street Journal, VMware is attempting to acquire Novell's SUSE Linux operating system business. This move would give VMware a full stack of enterprise software and allow it to establish itself as a full-blown infrastructure and software vendor in direct competition with Red Hat."
The WSJ report is behind a paywall, but it's accessible in full through a Google search.
Re:Google Search of WSJ Articles (Score:3, Informative)
If you don't present google with the content they won't index it. If they index it, they cache it. I've noticed that some things can't be pulled from google's cache so I assume that they have agreements with some not to display caches. From this half-baked assumption I further assume that they have had the discussion with the newspapers, told them that news wants to be free, and that if they don't like it they can certainly deindex them.
Patents holding up the sale (Score:3, Informative)
Re:why not just acquire all of Novell (Score:3, Informative)
so... you throw away java, mono and .net, also kde, gnome,... what's left then?? I suppose you're a BSD guy, but I'm *very* curious (seriously! really!) what desktop are you using and what is your language of choice?
Who says he's using a desktop?
interesting move (Score:2, Informative)
Re:why not just acquire all of Novell (Score:3, Informative)
Real men use bits of wire and and a soldering iron.
Re:Novell can't afford it (Score:4, Informative)
I think you missed the news about Novell looking to break itself up into pieces.
Re:why not just acquire all of Novell (Score:3, Informative)
Mono is also a solid work. And Oracle has just shown that there are issues with Java as well w.r.t patents and stuff
Java is perfectly fine. It's when you want to mess with the bytecode and VM implementation that you can run into trouble. Mono, on the other hand, the main implementation already violates MS patents for which there is no patent protection (e.g. ASP.NET, ADO.NET, Windows Forms).
Re:interesting move (Score:4, Informative)
ESX is not "based" on Red Hat, even using a loose reading of the word "based".
When you log onto the console operating system in a ESX environment, you are not, in fact, logging onto ESX at all.
The console operating system is a privileged VM running on the ESX server that solely exists to let you run command lines and the like, to discover information about the hypervisor's state, tell it what to do, and so forth. That has turned out to be the source of numerous security holes, hence the moving away from it.
C//
Re:why not just acquire all of Novell (Score:4, Informative)
If I can jump in here: I use FVWM with a heavily customised config file. Languages of choice, depending on the task at hand, are C, C++, Perl, and (currently) Lua or Ruby. That's running Linux, rather than BSD. I do use some Gnome and KDE apps.
I've never used Java for anything significant. I did use Mono professionally for three to four years, a couple of years ago, I can safely say that I don't miss it in the least.
Gnome is all right, and I quite like KDE, but both of them consume a lot of resources to provide a set of integration features that I don't need and rarely use. And I've rather got used to having a desktop that does things my way, rather than whatever is current trendy in the relevant communities.
Re:why not just acquire all of Novell (Score:3, Informative)
He's probably assuming that the poster above wants to actually use his machine.
Well, that depends upon what you're using it to do. You don't need a fancy GUI for a lot of things. Take someone who's just doing the edit, compile, run routine for an embedded system, for instance. Or, maybe he's from some country where fast computers are hard to come by, and he's running on older hardware.
Re:Not SuSE (Score:4, Informative)
Mandriva has lost 30 million euros, unable even to win over its' home market despite the government helping push them in education. It's dead, Jim!
Re:why not just acquire all of Novell (Score:3, Informative)
> so... you throw away java, mono and .net, also kde, gnome,... what's left then??
What do you mean, "What's left?" How about - an entire universe less five apps?
Or let's talk about what we NEED and see where these bits fit in.
I need to type commands at a shell prompt. So I need a terminal. I need to be able to use more than one terminal at once, and don't have the desktop space for 100 computers. So I need some kind of multi terminal display thingy. X11 does that fairly well, when your terminal is an xterm. But straight X11 sucks when you have many windows overlapping and stuff -- so I need a window manager, too; I use fvwm 1.24 (and have for well over a decade). I also need to edit source code; I use emacs for that. Emacs will run in either a terminal window, or an X window.
# end of needs
See how I didn't say "KDE", "gnome", or ".net". I sure as hell don't need a program menu, a start button, or semi-transparent windows with spinning skulls and flames in the background.
My whole stack, end-to-end is written in C or C++, except emacs, which has a bunch of LISP in it. My day-to-day application development is done in C, or a CommonJS dialect when speed doesn't matter and I want a garbage collector, exceptions, and so on.
You forgot something (Score:3, Informative)
Re:why not just acquire all of Novell (Score:2, Informative)
Looks very interesting though, and would definitely give it a more serious look once it matures a little more.
Re:Then Microsoft acquires VMWare (Score:3, Informative)
Because many people abuse the mod system so your post wasn't modded for any reason for -1, disagree. Rather than focusing on modding up rather than down, jerks mod non-troll/non-flamebait posts as troll or flamebait to skew the discussion.
Re:why not just acquire all of Novell (Score:2, Informative)
Sure, but we're talking about web apps, there's a different standard of openness, accessibility and security we expect from those. Neither javascript in browsers nor actionscript in flash allow native code.
Novell is not just SUSE (Score:1, Informative)
There's been a lot of talk about Novell since initial offer to buy it and it seems people haven't checked Novell's site at least 10 years. There's a long list of products on their site http://www.novell.com/products/ beyond Netware, Groupwise and SUSE.
So beside Netware which has been long dead and used mostly by companies too lazy to migrate to Linux there are great products based off eDirectory and running on SUSE. Take there new Zenworks endpoint management, Identity manager, Platespin just start off. Anyone had a look at application virtualization? They bought a good number of good product companies and are integrating them with their other products. Groupwise is an excellent mail system, stable and flexible, and would be so much better if they'd finally finish the design of the client which is still stuck with one leg in nineties, feels like unfinished work. All of services that once were on Netware have been moved to linux years ago and work fine. SUSE is though a platform of choice for most of their products and I can't see how could they sell just SUSE, no way.
They do however need to fire their marketing department.