I may have faults, but being wrong ain't one of them - Jimmy Hoffa
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VMWare will buy Suse Linux
TROUBLED SOFTWARE OUTFIT Novell is about to flog off all its assets to two other firms, according to reports in the Wall Street Journal.
Virtualisation software maker VMware has plans to buy Novell's open source Suse Linux operating system business, while Attachmate wants to buy what is left.
Attachmate is a private equity-backed software company that is owned by buyout investors including Golden Gate Capital and Francisco Partners. It makes money by supporting legacy software products.
Novell had partnered with VMware to make Suse the preferred Linux operating system for VMware's virtualisation stack.
According to the WSJ, the sale is being delayed while both sides negotiate about how to divide Novell's sales force, as well as its patents and other intellectual property. µ
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Novell really was the "nice guy" of software companies:
- They got along with most everyone (even Microsoft in most instances, to many people's chagrin).
- They only reacted defensively to other companies aggressive tactics when pushed into a corner (most notably SCO, but also against Microsoft in the Wordperfect antitrust issue).
- Even when people were attacking them for cooperating with Microsoft, they still defended the entire open source community against SCO's Microsoft-funded attacks against software freedom.
- They gave the world excellent Linux distributions in SuSE and OpenSuse, the latter being one of the most full-featured and well-maintained free Linux distributions in the world.
My hope is that VMware will adopt these "nice guy" attitudes, use Novell's Linux technology to produce industry-leading cloud/thin client corporate IT systems, continue to support and benefit from the contributions of the OpenSuse community, and learn from Oracle's Java blunder: those that rock the open-source boat will pay the price in the long run. People do not want to be oppressed by greedy corporate giants (like MSFT, Oracle, and Apple). People prefer to be free and cooperate with others without living in the shadow of fear of egomaniacs like Ellison, Jobs and Ballmer.
what a sad day.