Why Microsoft Can't Afford To Let Novell Die 215
geek4 sends in an analysis indicating that Microsoft may have the most to lose if hedge-fund operator Elliot buys Novell. (The eWeekEurope piece is based on a longer and geekier writeup by Andy Updegrove on how the mechanics of unsolicited tender offers can play out in the tech world.) To avoid meltdown or asset-stripping, Novell can try and find a preferred bidder — a company with some interest in running Novell as a business, and preferrably a tech company. Or another company may make a move independently. But who might that be? A couple of analysts have suggested IBM, Oracle, or SAP. These all have problems... Microsoft is in a similar category, with one added problem. ... Microsoft has staked any open source credibility that it has on Novell's SUSE distribution. If Novell falls to bits, then Microsoft's efforts to gain open source cred pretty much disappear with it. It's something that would have been impossible to imagine a few years back, but if we're looking for someone to prop Novell up, Microsoft would now be a prime candidate."
Microsoft the tar-baby (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Microsoft the tar-baby (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Microsoft the tar-baby (Score:5, Interesting)
I think SuSE understood what they had to do to make a business out of a Linux distribution. And Ubuntu/Canonical has, and they started later. I don't believe that Novell ever has. Like Caldera before them, they ended up alienating the very communities that would have pushed their own product in the enterprise, because they didn't understand that those communities were grass-roots engineering staff within their corporations - and were already connected to Open Source developers if they weren't themselves the developers - rather than the IT management that Novell focused upon.
So, Novell was doing poorly, and saw MS as a fast and easy source of some third of a Billion dollars if they'd just do what Microsoft wanted, which would also endear themselves to those same IT managers that Novell was after, while further alienating the engineers.
It was a short-term strategy.
Want to bet that Novell becomes a litigation factory eventually? We're starting to see the symptoms.
Bruce
That's what I always wondered. (Score:4, Interesting)
Instead of buying a distribution, how about hiring some of the coders and providing them with specs to get your money-making products ported to ALL Linux distributions?
Then pay bounties for improvements you need/want in other areas of Linux.
Your company and products end up distribution-agnostic and you have lots of good will from paying the coders who are furthering Linux. And you can do it for a LOT less than the price of buying a whole distribution.
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They had some decent products. (Score:3, Interesting)
I still prefer their file/directory rights system. And eDirectory was decent. And GroupWise was decent.
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Instead of buying a distribution, how about hiring some of the coders and providing them with specs to get your money-making products ported to ALL Linux distributions?
Then pay bounties for improvements you need/want in other areas of Linux.
Your company and products end up distribution-agnostic and you have lots of good will from paying the coders who are furthering Linux. And you can do it for a LOT less than the price of buying a whole distribution.
I'm all for that, As long as it reduces costs.
which costs more redhat support or microsoft licenses?
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Do MS licenses come with free support at the same level as red hat support?
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I think SuSE understood what they had to do to make a business out of a Linux distribution. And Ubuntu/Canonical has, and they started later.
Indeed, Canonical has made a business. Just not one that turns a profit.
As a former Caldera customer (Score:2)
...I predicted just days after Novell signed their patent deal with MS that Novell would eventually follow a similar path as Caldera/SCO.
But I don't want to be proven right.
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I once emailed RHovespain @ Novell because I saw a tremendous opportunity for Novell -- to be the SUSE/Ubuntu of the small business world. I was very excited about SLES / SLED and the possibilities for our small business customers (who typically use SBS2003 and now SBS2008). To have something like eBox/samba/ldap in one box with a well-maintained package repository.. seamless virtualization for legacy apps.. Their press releases were making me really excited with the possibilities. All the pieces exist inde
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Every time I've disagreed with you, I've been proven wrong. You've shaken my confidence in pursuing a future career in industry analysis. So, I think I've learned my lesson. I'll just parrot what you say with a few weasel words against and a few bolder predictions along your main line of thought, to protect me either way.
Its now clear that Microsoft, the true architect of the SCO IBM lawsuit may successfully removed the wrench that was thrown into its machiavellian machinations by subverting Novell into a l
Re:Microsoft the tar-baby (Score:5, Insightful)
You have bad memory.
I think SuSE understood what they had to do to make a business out of a Linux distribution. ... they ended up alienating the very communities that would have pushed their own product in the enterprise, because they didn't understand that those communities were grass-roots engineering staff within their corporations - and were already connected to Open Source developers if they weren't themselves the developers - rather than the IT management that Novell focused upon.
Back in the days, SuSE was in the red for $50 000 000 and survived because IBM injected them cash. They already were not very much in control any more. Later, IBM gave another $50M to Novell wich then bought SuSE. Is that the way to make a business out of a Linux distribution? To get in the red to get bought?
http://209.85.229.132/search?q=cache:jaPNE148pE0J:techupdate.zdnet.com/techupdate/stories/main/novell_suse.html+ibm+novell+deal+suse&cd=3&hl=fr&ct=clnk
I don't believe that Novell ever has.
Basically, SuSE was doing business around IBM big iron, they had (and have) a good relationship with IBM (frankfurt iirc) and work well.
Apart from that, they alienated every (popular) community gathering around them long before the novell buy out by not freeing YaST, their management tool. The thing is, they tried to get some money from the people using their distro before you could download it. Which didnt work either, which leds to the $50M loss. (Others tried to not get money from their users, and it did work).
Apart from that, as for the grass-roots engineering target, it is an entranched place where you find people either deeply tied to debian or to red hat. They don't give a damn about anything else, even if it's a nice piece of engineering as SuSE has always been. So is it really unwise to have aimed at another target? Maybe an already untouched area, like compagnies already doing microsoft that want to go linux too? I don't think so.
those same IT managers that Novell was after
AS FOR NOVELL, once it bought SuSE, they freed everything that wasnt already free in SuSE and then they freed some NOVELL software too. They hired people, they had for example 3 engineers on the ATI drivers, they have developed new distribution tools like the build system and the SuSE studio which are excellent and innovative.
So would they have done this if they werent really trying to do a very good distro (and it is) and build a business AND a community around it?
Also there is a text online from one of SuSE founder that says that after the buyout, the 5000 NOVELL people listened to the 500 SuSE people and got along with the program.
The only meat in what you say is of course the MS deal which infuriated many persons (and me too). But this problem arise from the existence of patents and of a broken patent system. That is the real problem that needs to be fixed. You need a new Jefferson.
Re:Microsoft the tar-baby (Score:5, Informative)
Not particularly accurate. It's not unusual for such companies to take some time to break even, and the same was true of Red Hat. The $50 million injection was purely as part of the Novell deal and no they weren't in the red to that figure. There wasn't a second payment that I'm aware of. Novell have also only just about, with some creative accounting, managed to make their Suse Linux business break-even. Would Suse have done better by themselves? It's a matter of some debate.
You're going to have to qualify that statement and set of assumptions with some facts I'm afraid. Trying not to make money from something to get money is a contradiction in itself. Many open source companies around Linux have tried it and they've burned their VC money and went to the wall. It's a stretch to assume that because Suse didn't open YaST it was in trouble, but it would have probably had to have happened eventually. They didn't open it purely because they had some competitive advantage at the time. It was hardly a reason for people not giving Suse money for the distro, which is ultimately what counts.
Additionally, Novell has done the very thing you accuse Suse of doing - and it has cost them. They haven't opened Groupwise or any of their other archaic pieces of software and as such no one was using them. That was the real problem at the time Novell bought Suse. That's sometimes even worse than people not paying for your software! They've also retro-fitted Novell on to effectively a proprietary Suse Linux in OES which has not only alienated Linux users but has also completely alienated and failed to attract existing Netware users - who've usually gone to Windows Server. They've handled that so badly it's unreal.
I'm not entirely sure what that means, but that sounds like a problem with Novell's management and leadership.
They freed some Suse and Novell software they didn't care about, and much of the Novell software they did free like Hula fell by the wayside very quickly. The important software that they should have open sourced and found a business model around like Red Hat's to get people really using it again they didn't, and it's all been left to rot and stagnate. Novell's revenue has steadily declined since just as it did before the Suse takeover.
What money have they made off that? Their much touted 'Enterprise Linux Desktop' is absolutely nowhere to be seen. Suse Studio is possibly the most different thing they've done, but again, they need to turn that into revenue. They just haven't made the money from Suse that they should have done.
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The Ubuntu phenomenon is just what happened when someone decided to take all that is good about Debian add in a little easy to installness and market the hell out of it.
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"Want to bet that Novell becomes a litigation factory eventually?"
SCO is dead. Long live SCOvell!
Re:Microsoft the tar-baby (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes. But they built market share really well. At the expense of at least one Free Software project that I know.
It is possible that they made a wrong turn with the new management. Matt Asay was not the most clued-in person in the Open Source world, judging by his columns and the frequent hostility he experssed in them toward the Free Software community. If they are smart they will keep him working exclusively on operations.
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Being signatory to a dodgy, borderline-illegal, patent protection racket which offended anyone who understood the GPL certainly was one way to differentiate their Linux product from all the rest, yes.
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Treason never prospers, what's the reason?
For if it prospers, none dare call it treason.
Re:Microsoft the tar-baby (Score:4, Informative)
Yes there is such a thing as bordering the illegal.
When something is per se illegal, but a team of lawyers with questionable ethics find a way to phrase it that somehow circumvents the law, that situation is certainly in the border of the illegal.
When something goes against the spirit of the law, but steps carefully over regulations, and is "technically" legal, that is bordering the illegal too.
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There's no such thing as "borderline-illegal". That's just stupid shit people say when they don't like something someone else is doing.
Sometimes, yes. Other times, please realize there are shades of grey.
Re:Microsoft the tar-baby (Score:5, Interesting)
Novell has a long, long history of making short-sighted decisions that eventually turn out badly.
It failed to see the shift from dedicated, limited network OS to distributed peer-to-peer networking.
It didn't react in time to dump IPX/SPX and got left out of the whole internet thing.
It bought Wordperfect about the time it tanked, then couldn't make a go of it.
Then it bought Suse, and screwed that up too.
Now it's got wads of cash. How much do you want to bet it will make a short-term decision that ends badly?
Novell has been disfunctional since Netware 3. (Score:2)
"It bought Wordperfect about the time it tanked, then couldn't make a go of it."
Novell buying WordPerfect for $885 million [faqs.org] was an amazing decision. What amazed me most was that apparently Novell top managers apparently had no serious intention of being in the business of selling word processing software.
In 1996, 2 years later, Novell sold WordPerfect to Corel.
Re:Microsoft the tar-baby (Score:4, Insightful)
I pretty much agree with every point you make here except this "Then it bought Suse, and screwed that up too." I don't understand why so many people repeat this. If I recall correctly SuSE was failing as a commercial Linux company when Novell acquired them. They were on their way to Mandrake-ville. Where I work we have hundreds of SLES servers in production today and they are rock solid. Fast, reliable, super easy to manage. I would put my SLES datacenters up against a Red Hat shop any day of the week. And Novell licensing is so much cheaper than Red Hat we basically have a site license for the cost it would take to license half our servers for support to Red Hat. Not to mention the fact that Red Hat basically abandoned the Desktop a while ago and SLED is a great windows replacement for a significant portion of our end users who don't require the few remaining windows client-servers apps we have left.
The stupid MS agreement and not ending support for these crap legacy apps is what is killing them. If you look at the numbers, the Linux division of Novell is profitable. The problem is the boat-anchor of closed source legacy BS they are still supporting is dragging down the whole company. Instead Novell has too many old timer bean counters at the helm who don't understand that the word Free does not mean free.
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Probably because it's true.
Well, Suse as part of Novell is still failing if you think it was before, and it's only recently that through some creative accounting they have allegedly broke even.
It's not unusual fo
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I was actually surprised to see that Novell's "Open Platform Solutions" account for about 21% of their positive operating income ("Identity and Security Management" and "Workgroup" are the other units that made money last year) for 2009 (2008 was about 10%, 2007 was about 6%). Novell still posted a $206M operating loss for the year (SuSE profit was $87.355M). The only time Novell has ever made a yearly profit in the last five years were in 2005 and 2006, thanks only to agreements with Microsoft and lawsui
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Let's be honest, it is ridiculously easy to redefine what the 'Open Platform Solutions' division is in order to make the figures look better.
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This was a really big part of it. The other aspect that people seem to ignore was the back-and-forth sales calls on big customers by both Novell and Microsoft.
Novell: "We've got this great OS now, and it is inexpensive, and if you later want to part ways, there's Red Hat and other companies who you can turn to for support. It's the new thing, and Microsoft is 'Legacy'. You want the newest and the best, don't you?"
Customer: "Well Microsoft does kind of suck, and is expensive."
Microsoft: "So Novell is tell
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Jeremy Allison shows that precisely the reverse is what happened. Novell lost a lot of open source credibility: any gains for Microsoft were extremely shortlived, and ruined by their OOXML manipulations, their support of SCO, their mysterious claims of Linux patent infringement for which they've refused to name a single example but keep claiming that such a list exists, etc.
Novell lost Jeremy due to their violations of the GPL in their collaborations with Samba, and Jeremy's work with Samba was one of the a
I smell a car analogy! (Score:3, Interesting)
You might ponder why Novell would associate itself with Microsoft--a business of the kind Novell most think would be best to stay far away from. I think that in this case we've seen the story play out in the automotive industry. Perhaps Novel should've heeded the lesson.
Novell is like Chrysler. At one time, not so long ago, both companies were "second bananas" in their respective industries that despite past troubles and having to face major crossroads were showing promise and were prosperous and improv
Re:Microsoft the tar-baby (Score:4, Insightful)
In Novell's case however, it's not like they were taking over the world before "closing paths" with MS, they were already in dire straits and had nothing like the growth rate of Redhat. It's all guesswork but their partnership extending Novell's life seems like a much more likely outcome than your assessment of what happened.
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I would agree. The Microsoft deal with Novell seemed to be a question of momentary face saving at a time when Microsoft seemed religiously opposed to open source. The Novell deal changed that perception to just being opposed to open source on financial grounds.
I'm not seeing, really, what Microsoft has to lose if Novell and SuSE fall down. "Saving Face" is not an underlinable financial statement, and nobody ever got rich saving face in front of the open source community. Microsoft could turn and partner
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Really bad idea (Score:2)
For enterprise level systems (think SAN storage), the two major distributions that are supported are RHEL and SLES. A
Re:Microsoft the tar-baby (Score:4, Insightful)
I agree. It is all gain for Microsoft when Novell burns.
No more competition in the user directory space: Active Directory for the ultimate win. (Local data center) Email is down to Exchange versus Domino. MS SMS no longer has to compete with ZENworks. (Note that Novell has ZENworks for Linux now, too). The Google Wave server that Novell is working on will go down in the flames too.
Most of the migrations will be from SuSE to Red Hat - but some will be from SuSE to Windows. And all those Red Hat users will have to authenticate to Active Directory. It won't be any surprise when the Windows clients get right in to Windows servers, but the Red Hat boxen have inexplicable delays, random timeouts, and "what we have here... is a failure to... authenticate".
It's all win for Microsoft when their potential (hold-out) customers lose an alternative.
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Re:Microsoft the tar-baby (Score:5, Insightful)
Once you start with MS your paths close up until the only remaining one is: they own you.
Apple did pretty well with that 'investment' by MS a decade or so ago.
Re:Microsoft "investment" (Score:3, Insightful)
That "investment" of $150Mill worth of non-voting shares was cashed in at a good profit a few years later.
Apple had a cash heap of over $15Billion at the time and no debt. The $150Mill was simply a confidence move.
If anybody did well out of it it was Microsoft. They got to keep using the Quicktime code they were illegally using in Windows and Apple's promise to keep putting IE for Mac as the preferred browser. In return Microsoft promised to keep pumping out MS Office for the Mac for several more years. Tha
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Apple had a cash heap of over $15Billion at the time and no debt.
Seems you are off by at least an order of magnitude.
http://news.cnet.com/2100-1001-202143.html [cnet.com]
I doubt that Apple was debt free either, I'm just too lazy to google it.
Re:Microsoft the tar-baby (Score:4, Informative)
They did. But then Microsoft owns them at least partially.
I'm too lazy to google it up, but I'm pretty sure they unwound that a couple of years ago.
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What "standard definition" of ownership excludes non-voting shares?
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Without Microsoft, Novell would have hit this crossroad many years ago. Novell could not have slowly and organically built a Linux business fast enough to replace lost revenue from the decline in things like NetWare. Microsoft gave them cash, marketshare, and mindshare (with paying enterprises, not the FOSS community of course).
Indeed, the Linux business of Novell has steadily increased and is one of the bright spots if they are allowed to continue. But it is doubtful that an investment firm is going to
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MS doesn't need Novell, not now, not ever. (Score:4, Insightful)
Why would MS even care?
In fact if Novell fails, along with what recently happened with MySQL and Open Solaris, MS can brag about how proprietary software is the way to go.
Call my cynical, but any inroads into open source software by MS have been either because they had to, or because they had a direct benefit from the public image attained by playing nice with open source software.
At the end of the day, the fact remains. MS would like everyone to use their proprietary software. MS would like everyone to forget about open source.
The only way this will ever change is if open source becomes more profitable to them than proprietary software.
Then MS would transform into the #1 proponent of open source.
Think of the shareholders!
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Why would MS even care? In fact if Novell fails, along with what recently happened with MySQL and Open Solaris, MS can brag about how proprietary software is the way to go.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if MS bought Novell for precisely that reason. They might even push WINE and Mono so that SUSE can be seen as "the cheap (connotation of rubbishy) system that you play with before buying Windows licenses when you want to do things for real." Turn your competitors into loss-leaders (as Oracle seems intent on doing with MySQL).
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In fact if Novell fails, along with what recently happened with MySQL and Open Solaris, MS can brag about how proprietary software is the way to go.
And, actually, Microsoft would have a good point. If I were a Sun admin right now, I'd be very, very worried. Similarly, if you built an enterprise around SuSE, you'd likely be facing some pretty steep transition costs to move over to Red Hat.
On the other hand, Windows will be around forever, and Microsoft (god bless/curse them) will ensure that binary compatibility is maintained until the apocalypse, and that upgrades are fairly trivial affairs. When we replace a server, we install whatever version of W
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Yes I know... its a shame MS isn't as bad as everyone would like.
However, look at the things they do do wrong, its mainly complexity and partly 'new stuff'. I'm looking to port one of my old apps to the new Visual Studio... and its all changed beyond recognition so I have to go learn a brand new framework (again) to do the same thing I did last time, which in itself required learning a new framework. Its like they can never quite get it right, so continually replace the old 'crap' with new shiny stuff.. unt
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Troll much? The GPL is the most open of "open source" because the licensing locks the code open for everyone to see and modify.
Funny you say "code" there...you might want to check out why he said what he said, before responding.
It wasn't code licensing that got the OSS annoyed at MySQL and how they were earning a bad rep and pissing off companies who would, and had, otherwise contributed. It was the gpl "protocol" stupidity, where they claimed anything that connected to a mysql database was also subject to
Rubbish article (Score:5, Insightful)
Trying to pretend this is some giant strategic cat-fight is a waste of time. I can only assume the author of the article is trying to gin up his importance and earn a few thou in consulting fees.
The big companies have already figured out that Linux works just fine in datacenters. Most managers don't know or care if they are running Redhat, Ubuntu, Suse, or a home-roll. They do know that Linux isn't going to vanish just cos some random firm gets bought out.
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If your manager doesn't care which Linux distribution you're running (especially if it's a difficult-to-maintain home roll) please don't be an ass: pick something sane and maintainable, with good version control and reporting.
If it "doesn't matter" then pick what works best; it'll allow you to concentrate on the important sysadmin tasks like reporting, performance metrics, and the like - not security exploits, difficult-to-patch source trees, and god knows what else mindrotfuck.
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Hmm, I've got 10K+ cpus running right now. I 'd bet at least three nodes are actually running Ubuntu: some of our SAs like it, and I'm guessing a few boxes got booted manually and left in some random mode. Me, I don't much care, as long as the node can fork and exec and return the right results.
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Most of the people I know at rackspace that work on the linux side(which is a pretty big employeer in San Antonio) run Ubuntu and OpenSuse at work.
IBM should buy them. (Score:5, Interesting)
Novell still has the copyrights to Unix.
If Microsoft were to buy them we could see a re-run of IBM vs. SCO, with Microsoft playing SCO but, having learned from SCO where the land mines are and having the REAL copyright ownership, going after any places where they might win and winning. They might be able to collect a "Microsoft Tax" on any remaining Unix vendors that are still running under ongoing licenses. They might find places where other vendors weren't covered by previous licenses. They might find some code leakage from Unix to open source projects and go after them, beating them into submission or bankruptcy, maybe winning on the merits, maybe winning by just having big pockets while open-sourcerers live on a shoestring. This could be a disaster for IBM, open source, any remaining proprietary Unix vendors, etc.
If IBM buys Novell they are protected from this sort of attack on their current business model from now on. They have the option of releasing the Unix code base under open-source licenses. I could go on.
IBM has the bux, the incentive, and the smarts. So I'm not just hoping, but betting, on them.
Re:IBM should buy them. (Score:5, Interesting)
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Forget about Unix copyrights. No litigation value remaining because of the time they were in the public domain, and the time they were released under the BSD license. Look how far it got SCO.
Yes, but having them is a heck of a lot better than NOT having them. Add in the Novell customer base and an active and popular (in Europe) linux distribution and it looks like a nice package.
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I hope you're right, Bruce. (Did the terms of the BSD deal ever come out publicly? If so I missed it.)
My concern is that SCO only had a license, while Novell has the actual copyrights, for whatever they're worth. IMHO that could make just enough of a difference that we could be in for another ride on the legal mill-of-the-gods merry-go-round - with Microsoft funding it openly and directly from their Marianas-Trench-deep pockets.
Or (worse!) that the perceived potential for such an action could be used to p
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Groklaw has the BSD settlement here [groklaw.net].
Re:IBM should buy them. (Score:5, Informative)
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proprietary unix vendors
Wait, does that include OSX?
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If Microsoft were to buy them we could see a re-run of IBM vs. SCO, with Microsoft playing SCO
Microsoft is trying to clean up its image, and avoid as much attention as possible from the EU and DoJ.
They won't do this. I'd put money on it.
PS. Mono/moonlight is safe. The absolute worst Microsoft could do would be to fork C#, which also hurt its image, attract regulators, and piss off windows-based .NET developers. A legally-binding promise not to sue is a legally-binding promise not...to...sue. Microsoft would have a tough time even finding a judge who would agree to bring such a case to trial.
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Why would any other Linux distributer want to purchase Novell after the deal they made with microsoft? That would make them part of that agreement as well.
You mean the deal that, if IBM bought Novell and ran it as a wholly-owned subsidiary, would give IBM access to all Microsoft's patents while Microsoft had access only to Novell's?
Naw. NO open-source company would want to be thrown into THAT brier patch, would they?
Re:IBM should buy them. (Score:4, Insightful)
Why would you want IBM, the largest patent troll in history, to buy them?
Because IBM has built a large business supporting open source solutions in large corporate customers. They're smart enough to feed the goose that lays their golden eggs - and have a track record of doing so.
IBM was ONCE a problem. But they've been through a mid-life crisis since then, and came out as one of the best "corporate citizens" the Open Source community could have for a neighbor. Past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior, but recent past behavior is a better predictor than distant past behavior.
MS and Apple seem to be best friends these days (Score:3, Interesting)
Apple has a fully licensed MS Exchange client on 50 million or so iphones and ipods
Snow Leapard has a fully licensed MS Exchange 2007 client
MS Office for Mac will have Outlook in the next version
Rumors are Bing is going to displace Google as the default search engine on the iphone
Apple is big in Open Source since OS X is based on some version of BSD. FreeBSD I think
Microsoft doesn't seem to want to compete in the mobile space or with MP3 players. the Zune was a total waste of great hardware
Apple doesn't seem to want to compete in the Enterprise Software market where MS likes to be these days
And Google with their vision of the cloud is the common enemy to Apple and Microsoft's fat client strategy
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Microsoft doesn't seem to want to compete in the mobile space or with MP3 players. the Zune was a total waste of great hardware
Apple doesn't seem to want to compete in the Enterprise Software market where MS likes to be these days
Microsoft just announced their revamped phone interface, which looks like they spent a lot of effort to go head-on with Apple. Their electronics division continues to pour money into the hole that is Zune: the Xbox 360 just got full Zune support.
Apple, on the other hand, by your c
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Apple has had a cloud strategy for years with MobileMe. It hasn't had the penetration of Google's offerings, since Apple sought to charge for the service and Google earns through ads. But they have been throwing not inconsiderable weight behind what is becoming more and more a compelling cloud-based feature set.
And Microsoft has Azure. So it's not about "burning the Web" in hope to bring Google down with it - it's a fight for whose turf it will end up being.
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A cloud is a "multiplicity", not a "singularity". MobileMe, and most of Apple's products, are as far from the cloud concept as they ever were.
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MS and Apple have always been the best of friends. It was MS who saved apple from bankruptcy in 1997, even Darth Jobs said that "People must get over the idea that in order for Apple to win Microsoft must lose". Apple's business tactics practically mirror that of a much smaller Microsoft with less ethics.
If Linux or Google makes any inroads into the desktop you can practically bet on a Microsoft/Apple merger, especially if Apple falls into financial trouble (not that h
News just in! (Score:3, Funny)
In news just to hand, it seems that Microsoft might have ever had any open source credibility whatsoever.
"Oh yeah, Microsoft are totally all over that open source shit," according to Richard M Stallman, the open source movement's supreme leader by virtue of prime beardiness and epic ninja skills. "If they let Novell die, then I'll have no choice but to see them as money-grubbing organisation who simply try to wring every last cent from their customers, rather than the benevolent and inspiring open source leaders that they are today."
Mr Stallman was later spotted sharpening his katana [xkcd.com].
Stay tuned for more updates, unfounded speculation and general craziness masquerading as 'analysis' as it comes to hand.
Same Story with Apple in the 90's (Score:2)
If Microsoft were the only kid on the block then you know the government is going to be looking closer at them.
No suprise, either, that Novell is going down the tubes. I've been hearing about them for several years in the data center. However, I can se
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Microsoft did the same thing with Apple in the '90s. They bought a huge stake in Apple, right when they were sinking down the toilet and then proclaimed that they were not a monopoly. Having competition - even propped up competition - is better for business.
No. Microsoft bought a small number of non-voting shares as part of a court settlement. There was nothing "huge" about it, and it had nothing to do with the appearance of competition or anything like that.
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P.S:
nevermind the fact that there were several opinion pieces relating how Microsoft used Apple to help leverage the DOJ to get off their backs.
If the aim of this settlement was to get the DOJ off their backs, then why did it include an agreement for Apple to make Internet Explorer the default browser on Mac OS? Surely, that would have the opposite effect - and the DOJ would see it as MS extending their monopoly to the Mac, which was the only commercially viable desktop OS aside from Windows.
I don't see how extending IE's presence to practically 100% of consumer personal computers would help Microsoft's case with the DOJ. Previously, the defaul
Who will own Unix? (Score:4, Interesting)
SCO lost because Novel owns Unix, the utilities, posix, and how it operates.
I am afraid of someone like Microsoft buying Unix only to cease and desist any Unix like product that looks similar. What better way to get back at Oracle and kill Linux then to own the unix standard?
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If AT&T couldn't do it to BSD, then what makes you think Microsoft will have a better chance with Linux? USL v. BSDi [wikipedia.org]
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... and where exactly is FreeBSD today?
Gnu/Linux totally creamed its marketshare as the result of that lawsuit.
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Don't know how appealing it is.. (Score:2, Informative)
IBM is in an interesting situation. They've avoided distributing Linux like the plague, yet they invest a lot of development into it. They base a lot of firmware and utilities around Novell-sourced linux, but simultaneously make every effort to not make that obvious. Novell I don't think is that appealing in and of itself, but IBM would be left having to rework their linux sourcing strategy, which is not a technical difficulty (switch to RH or just live without SuSE maintaining the codebase), but their l
Come again? (Score:2, Informative)
Microsoft has staked any open source credibility that it has on Novell's SUSE distribution.
I hate to break it to the author of TFA, but Microsoft does not have, never had, and never will have "any open source credibility". I'm sure there are people dumb enough to think that the Microsoft-Novell deal had any beneficial effects whatsoever for FOSS, but none of those people matter because they already bankrupted themselves in a series of repeat sales of the Brooklyn fucking Bridge.
Have we really reached the point where someone can wave around a huge wad of cash and say that night is day and everyone
Novell killed itself with its choices (Score:3, Interesting)
Open source cred? Important to whom? (Score:3, Insightful)
RedHat should step in (Score:4, Interesting)
I hate to see Novell die (I was a CNA way back in the day, and learned NetWare 3.x in high school), but I think it'd be for the best interest of FOSS due to their taintedness with Microsoft.
Here's what I think should occur:
RedHat should set up a third-party company that they own. That company should buy Novell. That company should sell all non-tainted assets to RedHat.
Then what is left are the tainted bits the third-party is holding. Let it just die or shut down or whatever it is that you can do with a corporation to put it out of its misery.
Interesting timing... (Score:2)
...considering that the SCO v. Novell trial is just around the corner.
are Novel problems caused by their "friendship"? (Score:2)
Is there any relation between Novel's problems and Novel's "friendship" with Microsoft?
Something like ... maybe ... "Novel is loosing customers because they are friendly towards Microsoft"?
Microsoft? IBM is morelikely... (Score:2)
And as business sense goes, the company that actually has any business interest in keeping SuSE alive is IBM. Last time I checked, SLES11 was the Linux that came from a non-competing company. RedHat does run on IBM's platforms, but face it, RedHat's JBoss is a competitor to IBM's WebSphere stuff.
Re:Microsoft Has Already Moved On To Ubuntu (Score:5, Interesting)
Except that it's not a patent minefield.
It's a blowhard's way of stanching competition with bogus citations. Ubuntu doesn't have the enterprise penetration of any of the community versions of SUSE or Red Hat. Novell's stupid, and hampered by the FOSS community's perception that they're a Microsoft sell-out because of their license agreement with Microsoft.
Still, the openSUSE community thrives. It's Novell's legacy problems (hello Eric Schmidt!) and their incapability of appealing to enterprise systems designers that they're in the undervalued column. Microsoft won't buy them. They'll get broken into pieces, and sold off that way. My guess: to Oracle, whose Linux version languishes. At least Oracle knows how to excite developers.
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Why would Oracle buy Novell for linux when Oracle now has Solaris?
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Maybe they're like Google? [slashdot.org]
Or maybe they won't, and will instead just try to hire some of the best developers, if the company does get broken up.
Re:Microsoft Has Already Moved On To Ubuntu (Score:5, Insightful)
All software is a patent minefield. You can't write any significant software without infringing upon a granted patent. If existing patents were enforced at all well, there would be no software industry.
MS continues to make gains in licensing its "Linux patents", and there's nothing that says they won't decide it's time to enforce them against you and me tomorrow.
The worst part is that we have no credibility in fighting this at the government level any longer. When Open Source was people doing good for other people, we had the credibility to kill a proposal for uniform enforcement of software patents across the EU. Today, Open Source is big business, and there is no such credibility if it's Microsoft vs. Red Hat rather than Microsoft vs. do-gooders and non-profits. So, this means that our commercial success is likely to kill us through software patents eventually.
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At least Oracle knows how to excite developers.
Star trek slash fiction and free coffee?
Re:Microsoft Has Already Moved On To Ubuntu (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft is perfectly happy to leave Novell's rotting corpse on the trash heap of computing. It served its purpose of getting the message out to the commercial world that Linux is a Patent Minefield.
Everyone's going to have a different take on this of course, depending on their personal views regarding Microsoft and Linux. Me, I think the main point is it's no longer the 1990's. Microsoft has very short coattails, and anyone planning to ride them to success nowadays is in for a rude awakening.
But I really don't get your "patent minefield" comment at all. That's what Microsoft was HOPING to accomplish, but frankly it seems obvious they failed miserably - that's why for the past couple years they've made significant moves towards coexistence and interoperability with Linux. It's not like they managed to even slow down Red Hat, let alone turn the corporate world against them.
Amazing How Easy It Has Been For Microsoft (Score:2, Interesting)
When Novell sold out to Microsoft you had open source kooks falling all over each other to proclaim that they would go right on using Novell products and projects so they could brag about how 'open minded' they were to the rest of the world(who didn't give a shit one way or another).
You have to imagine the execs up in Redmond were just shaking their heads in disgust that they had disrupted the open source/Linux world with so little effort.
I don't think Microsoft is really actively wasting time with Ubuntu.
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Yup, or fork it and take over administration of the fork.
I can't see how they could have been getting that much cred from SUSE anyway.
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Yes, they do all these friendly things, and then they try to scam through a bloated monster of an "open" document format which they haven't even been able to fully implement by basically buying it through the standard's phase.
If Microsoft wants to be trusted, they should start behaving like a good corporate citizen instead of behaving like some sort of Viking raiding party, raping and pillaging wherever they go.
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I think the word you're looking for is "systematic". In any event, what you characterize as an "attack" was just normal business competition. Microsoft had the better product and charged less for it. By the time Novell jumped on the Linux bandwagon the writing was already on the wall.