Attachmate acquisition stalls Novell's Q1 Novell is in the process of being eaten by Attachmate and having some juicy patents sold off to a holding company controlled by Microsoft, Apple EMC, and Oracle. And the company's top brass took a zero for the day and didn't face Wall Street when Novell announced its financial results for the first quarter of fiscal 2011 ended …
No, you're not alone.
I remember doing some training on RH to SuSE migrations, and an open source fanatic in the room was quite vocal about how we should be concentrating on Windows to any Linux distro.
After working on RH for a few hours he declared that getting people from RH to SuSE was actually doing them a bigger favour than getting them off of Windows.
I'm keen on SUSE, YaST is a great sysadmin tool. Unfortunately with lack of competition Red Hat don't have any pressure on them to do something similar. Anyhow, I digress....
Shame about SUSE, been wanting it to be solo for a while now and the quicker it can be spun off as its own entity by these Attachmate chaps, the better. SUSE has been pulled slowly downwards, like a little rubber dingy tied to a leaky ship.
Attachmate can get rid of the dead wood on the Novell board and start making waves again with their software stack. It's never been about the technology, but the fact that Novell are classed as "legacy". Let me tell you they're not, many of their solutions are as good as, and in many cases, better than the opposition in that field.
I have a little insider knowledge as a Novell partner, and I have a good feeling about the Attachmate deal. Still, couldn't be too much worse now, could it?
Humour me here, how can any of the SUSE folks be happy about this arrangement? Microsoft in one fell swoop has evaded the anti-trust brigade and has managed to get a major grip via it's participation in the patent troll group purchasing the patent portfolio of Novell / SUSE.
Once completed it can sue any other OSS company at will, even if it doesn't win all it can slowly bleed others dry under the weight of massive court costs and time. None of the other troll group members will complain as it's their investment being protected.
With Linux penetration eating into the traditional M$ space in the SMB area how long does it take M$ folks to start suing startups like Ubuntu and so forth, then going for the bigger fish like Redhat? How much resistance will SUSE offer when a cease and desist on some tenous patents arrives on the desk from M$?
The whole affair stinks and in reality I hope people desert SUSE and the sooner the patent portfolio expires the better.
Cue the flames but that's what it feels like watching M$ getting their grubby corporate claws on Novells & SUSE's patent portfolio.
Obviously deserting OpenSuSE will have zero effect, so let's assume you're talking about SLES. Abandoning SLES in favor of RHEL/OL will do exactly what again? The patents are already gone, they're not coming back. What do you think this will accomplish?
Anyways, I'm not worried about whatever patents SuSE themselves had. I'm worried about the UNIX patents that Novell had. *THAT* is where the problem lies.
NEVER rest easy.
Right now everybody is watching closely. When the hoopla dies down and the fanbois will be happy because the evil M$ didn't get the Unix patents, they stayed safely with Attachmate. Who holds onto them quietly for a few years, then quietly disposes of them to some other holding company, which transfers them to another holding company, and then when people have lost track of who has the patents, MS buys them.
Groklaw has written about what SHOULD be the outcome of any cases involving the Unix patents. Unfortunately, the courts sidestepped that issue by deciding Sco didn't have the right to sue. Which means the roulette wheel spins when it finally does make it to court the next time.
Perhaps to provide a bit more cash to a company (like Redhat) who are actually making enough to pass some into the FSF, who do undertake court battles against patent trolls.
Seems a reasonable approach to dealing with things like this newly funded M$ patent group who have everything to gain by suing and closing down all they can, in order to protect their own interests & monopolies.
Hey ho, it's only a market domination tactic.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
