Summary: Sales of products from Novell/SUSE are depressed by expectations of a takeover

NOVELL was recently seen slamming Oracle Linux. Oracle just wants a lot of control, which is why OpenOffice.org gets forked for example.

Left out from Novell's blog post, however, was a statement about Novell's relatively low share in the GNU/Linux market. As The VAR Guy put it in his post "Memo From Novell to Oracle: No Oracle Linux Needed":

Applebaum certainly has a point: When it comes to business-centric Linux, Red Hat and Novell seem to dominate the market. But Applebaum doesn’t take the time to disclose individual market share numbers for Red Hat and Novell. Hmmm…

While Red Hat continues to grow organically, some Novell customers are delaying purchases because of Novell’s unclear ownership status. Novell’s board reportedly has been trying to sell the company off — perhaps in two parts — but the potential deals apparently hit a snag amid unclear valuations for Novell’s legacy businesses.

It may seem amusing that Novell was trying to limit choice, but either way, the interesting part to be taken from the above is that "some Novell customers are delaying purchases because of Novell’s unclear ownership status." That's just to be expected. In the next post we are going to address this subject. Novell was down 7% after acquisition worries/hesitation. ⬆