JOURNALIST/COLUMNIST Eric Doyle has a couple of interesting posts about Novell, and about SUSE in particular. Now that AttachMSFT separates SUSE from itself, Doyle's well-researched commentary suggests that "Novell’s bright hopes for SuSE failed to shine, but a chance encounter in a London bar may explain how the downhill run started..."

Be sure to read the part after the encounter is described. "Not quite an “apres-ski binge” but, nonetheless, an alcohol-fuelled encounter around 10pm in a London hotel bar during an Infosecurity conference" he explains. "I fell into conversation with a fellow delegate who claimed to be a pig farmer involved in RFID tests. Given my agricultural background, he had picked the wrong journalist to con and I soon blew his cover. After around four hours of elusive badinage about his real identity, he eventually cracked and confessed to being a former Novell employee."

“After around four hours of elusive badinage about his real identity, he eventually cracked and confessed to being a former Novell employee.”
      --Eric DoyleNotice how he uses our picture of Steve Ballmer riding SUSE's mascot. We made this picture for "Boycott Novell" and what he says about the conspiracy to unseat competition only further validates our suspicions. There is also an accompanying article from Doyle. Excellent work and a case of real journalism. It says that "Four divisions will house Attachmate’s products and those gained through its purchase of Novell" (Novell sliced down and reorganised itself about a year and a half ago).

So anyway, where does this whole mess leave the GNU/Linux component of Novell? It turns out that Teradata's use of SUSE (more in [1, 2]) is likely to persist along with Fujitsu's (it also runs SUSE), whereas SAP seems to be getting back into Red Hat and it's not alone. Companies just don't trust SUSE after Novell's collapse. Even OpenSUSE is hardly active anymore. Susan Linton -- as we originally noted in our daily links -- shows that OpenSUSE becomes a Ubuntu me-too and older releases of the distribution reach end of life quite quickly. If someone wants to buy the SUSE division, then it probably won't cost much. It is quite likely to happen. ⬆