If VMware buys Novell Linux, they will be buying complementary technologies (eg like they did with Zimbra), ie, they are not buying a competitor to shut it down. It's all good for SLES / SUSE in my view. On 21/09/10 21:43, Stan Goodman wrote:
On Tuesday 21 September 2010 11:13:41 Simon Caseley wrote:
I think it's positive for SLES / SUSE if VMware buys Novell's Linux business.
http://www.thevarguy.com/2010/09/16/five-reasons-vmware-may-buy-novell- suse-linux/
But what does that mean for the MS - Novell licensing deal? Could get messy and nasty.
On the other hand, there's commentary that VMware is much more interested in Novell's Mono IP than SLES / SUSE - owning Mono is definitely one in the eye for Microsoft .NET!
Novell is also sitting on a large cash hoard, which makes it attractive to, especially, private equity companies.
Mergers and acquisitions are painful, but also positive for the target - if the deal is done for the 'right' reasons and executed properly. I worked for a small, privately owned Australian software company (250 employees worldwide) making and deploying records and document management software (used by an international energy company - not BP, but on that global scale - and parts of the US DoD amongst others, but also scaling down to single seat sites). We were acquired by HP in 2008. The merger was initially rocky (cultural differences, bureaucracy, etc), but once bedded down, fantastic for R&D resourcing and new market penetration and internationalisation opportunities. HP clearly wanted a vertically integrated stack (compliance software on top of HP's document capture and automation, archiving and storage).
If VMware buys Novell's Linux business, it's a compelling value proposition for VMware customers: my experience is that customers like integrated solutions from a single vendor.
On 21/09/10 20:57, David C. Rankin wrote:
On 09/21/2010 02:53 AM, C wrote:
Whoever buys openSUSE will be buying it for a reason, and they will not invest a substantial chunk of money into acquiring openSUSE from Novel only to kill it off and bury the remains.
C
You would need to qualify that slightly by saying the possibility, though rare, may depend on the source of the capital used for the purchase. There are those with adverse motives of course... ( hypothetically MS funds the vmware purchase using vmware as the front-man, kills suse, then sues Novell and the wayward users for infringement under the MS-Novell deal). Nah -- it would never happen :p
If anybody has mentioned the possibility of the prospective buyer of SuSE (which has been said here to be a financial burden to Novell) may be interested in acquiring it not for its commercial value, but simply as a tax loss, I haven't noticed it. But some acquisitions happen for that reason. Hopefully this is not the case here, because it would be very bad news. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org