back to article Uncertain future hits Novell's Q3

What a surprise. A company rejects an unsolicited takeover bid and its board of directors announces that the struggling company is looking at all alternatives, including selling itself or breaking itself up. And then sales unexpectedly go south. It should have been no surprise to commercial operating system supplier Novell …

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  1. E 2

    Novell should sell off it's shoes.

    It must have acres of quality leather enclosing it's plainly huge feet, and all that leather ought to bring a pretty penny.

    Despite the bullet holes.

  2. gerryg
    Thumb Up

    Novell deserve better than this

    SCO = amazing

    openSUSE = wonderful

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Linux

    Good news

    Novell and SCO will die in the same time, like they deserve for their deeds.

    Where will Novell's grave be? I feel like pissing.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Do they?

    SCO = Ancient

    openSUSE = a drain on Novell's commercial activities

    Time to marry or sell up.

    1. gerryg

      oh anonymous cowards how I admire your bravery

      Though at least it means one of you will be pissing in private,

      If it had not been for Novell stepping up to the plate on SCO, in what state would Linux adoption be now?

      I think you'll also find that is SLED (y'know the one derived from openSUSE) that is generating the cash.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        RE

        What cash is SuSE generating? They have broken even just few months ago, and they are probably below BEP again now, due to uncertainty over this sellout. They are making money from proprietary crap, nobody is going to buy SuSE when they slapped "Microsoft approved" label on it.

        And they didn't do anything about SCO, they needed 7 years to get it done even though SCO didn't have a case at all. Novell is less than useless. The sooner they get dismantled, the faster we can forget they ever existed. Like SCO, an ancient history.

  5. stanrbt

    I doubt SLED ever made money

    I heavily doubt SLED ever made money. Just remember the SLED fiasco with Peugeot - I doubt anyone big touched SLED after that, so where did the revenue inflow come from? There is one market where SUSE still has a good percentage - POS, where the SLE platform is bundled with IBM IRES. According to market figures the IBM IRES still has a good market share - I guess this is what is labeled as SLED revenue. The ones who had ever had anything to do with POS know, that the images there are custom-built so in reality its a kernel with some apps on it - in no way a whole distribution (SLED). Still marketing and accounting people are creative enough to represent those as "SLED revenue".

    And SLES is doing so bad lately they had to start supporting Red Hat with all those pathetic PRs - RH support @ 50% price. Did not these people notice the Oracle debacle when they tried to do that several years ago ?

    A sad story - time for it to end.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Novell has no SLED users

    Novell may claim it has SLED (Linux Desktop) subscribers but no customer has actually deployed SLED in a real environment. SLES (Linux Server) makes some money, though mostly breaking even and no where near the successful competition, Red Hat.

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