"The Goodbye Novell Blues" (2009)

Summary: OpenSUSE responds to the news of being passed to AttachMSFT [sic] and other news reveals bleak outlook for Novell's Q4 results (weeks away)

WE are still trying to finish a special series of posts which looks at the effects of Novell being bought. The OpenSUSE community, led by Pascal Bleser in this case, has a message to pass (via blog and E-mail) about AttachMSFT's effect on OpenSUSE:

If you didn’t hear yet, Novell has agreed to be acquired by Attachmate Corporation. What does that mean for the openSUSE Project? We don’t know exactly yet because our crystal ball is currently in the shop and therefore fortune-telling is not our greatest talent ;-) However, we have other talents: we are a software developer community and we’re here to work on one of the greatest GNU/Linux distributions and other world class software distribution tools to advance Free and Open Source software together with the global FOSS community!

For now, we don’t know much about Attachmate, we have had no dealings with them yet and, as Novell is a publicly traded company, all of this is as new to us as to anyone else. But the openSUSE Project has had, since its beginning, a very vibrant cooperation with Novell, especially with Novell’s SUSE business, and we are looking forward to continuing this once Novell and SUSE become part of Attachmate! Our best wishes go out to the people of our community that are employed by Novell and SUSE, may this bring nothing but good things for you and your careers.

Many pundits have begun writing about this too, for example:

• Novell acquired by Attachmate, sells some patents to Microsoft



• Microsoft-organized consortium pays $450 million for Novell IP



• Is Microsoft Acquiring Novell? Conspiracy Theory

The last story says: "As this post indicates, Microsoft is acquiring technology assets aka Intellectual Properties developed by Novell, the leading Open Source vendor. Novell will sell its 'so-called' Intellectual Properties to Microsoft-owned CPTN Holdings LLC for mere $450 million in cash. [...] Another damage that Novell did to the Linux community though the agreement was in-directly admit that Linux violated Microsoft patents and that Novell would offer its customers needed patent-enforcement protection through this deal. Microsoft has till date not been able to name the patents that Linux violates. Linus Torvalds once told me in an interview that Microsoft is mudding the water."

Yes, it is important to acknowledge Novell's damage. We wrote about this for 4 years.

Over in the financial news, Novell takeover speculations have affected the stock since Thursday and Q4 results look "bleak". Prior to this report we also had the following about Novell:

• Is Novell's Stock a Bargain by the Numbers?
• Novell (NOVL) Crosses Pivot Point Resistance at $5.76
• NASDAQ Bullish Trends in Focus are NOVL, OCLR, ENER, WINN
• NASDAQ Stocks on the Move – NVDA, CYCC, NOVL, ENER, AEZS
• Bulls look past Novell weaknesses
• NOVELL SET TO POSSIBLY PULLBACK AFTER YESTERDAY'S RALLY OF 2.64% (NOVL)
• NASDAQ Stocks on the Move – NVDA, CYCC, NOVL, ENER, AEZS

Where it leaves us now is the junction where Novell gets sold and we will cover that another day. Sadly, Novell's poor state would be helpful to Microsoft and existing deployments will have excuses to move away from Novell. This new press release, for example, talks about Novell servers but doesn't say if it's SUSE or not. It doesn't matter so far as uncertainty goes; to many companies, Novell products will be something to avoid due to perceived risk. The press release says: "The heart of the laboratory is a 299-gigabyte database of environmental and agricultural project records running on six HP servers and two Novell servers storing the data and running the modeling software."

We are now seeing the end of Novell and many people are in denial. A former CIO for Novell (back when it was bigger) is now becoming a CTO in another company while Novell's existing managers continue to flee. That's not a good sign, is it?

Infogroup Appoints Gordon Jones As Chief Technology Officer

[...]

He has also worked as CIO for Novell (1990 – 1995), Franklin Templeton (1995 – 1999), Beyond.com (1999 – 2000), ToysRUs.com (2000 – 2001), eBay and formerly Wells Fargo subsidiary, BillPoint (2001 – 2003).

In all likelihood, AttachMSFT [sic] will make promises that it won't fulfill. As we said back in September, it's "Goodbye Novell".⬆