Bonum Certa Men Certa

Goodbye, Novell



"The Goodbye Novell Blues" (2009)



Summary: Coverage of the developments which spell the end of Novell

THIS post collects a lot of coverage about the imminent VMware-SUSE sale, which is not a done deal yet. A deal has not been formally signed, but seems like an inevitability given that other sources say that Novell is being split and sold [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. It is now pretty safe to say that Novell (as a public company or as a whole) is over.



Some of the Microsoft boosters are jubilant, as headlines like "At Long Last, NetWare Drops Dead" ought to show:

It looks like Novell (Nasdaq: NOVL) has settled on an exit strategy. According to sources spilling a bit of beans to New York Post, the enterprise software specialist will split in two parts, with the Linux-centric segment going to one unnamed buyer and the old-line NetWare and GroupWise portions headed for another destination.


Another known Microsoft booster wrote no less than two articles about it (in less than a day), suggesting that it's a threat to Red Hat:



Other news coverage which we've found so far (about the VMware part emerging from the WSJ report Reuters too covered):



In an interesting new post, Matt Asay argues that "Novell’s Patents Are Complicating Its Sale" and here are some other parts of his argument:

After months on the auction block, Novell will be put out of its misery and sold within the next three weeks, according to credible sources. The only question is, why it has taken so long? The answer, according to a source close to the company, is patents. Big, juicy patents.

After all, there’s no real mystery to Novell’s business (see disclosure below). Most of its legacy product portfolio is just that: a legacy of a bygone era when Novell was king of the networking hill, with a suite of services built up to sustain and advance that leadership. Products like GroupWise and Zenworks, renamed and reorganized constantly to make them appear fresh and new, have mainly sat on the shelf, as financial results demonstrate, quarter after quarter.

[...]

Novell has a rich and varied patent portfolio that touches on everything from core networking technology to office productivity suites and beyond. Novell has patents that cut to the heart of Microsoft’s Office business. Indeed, it has patents that cut to the heart of many different businesses.


There is also a discussion about this fascinating take over at LWN (interesting LWN discussion that continues to develop is about the prior rumour). Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, who some weeks ago said that VMware should buy Novell, also has an interesting take:

I'm not the least bit surprised that the Wall Street Journal is reporting that VMware will be buying Novell's Linux business. After all, I suggested that VMware could really use Novell's SUSE Linux for its future, and I also knew that Novell was in hot and heavy merger and acquisition talks earlier this week. My own sources have also now confirmed that VMware is Novell's suitor.


One of the Novell-oriented Web sites, abend.org, gives a sample of "Novell buy-out rumors galore!" It includes more than just that stuff about an acquisition, e.g.:



There is a subsequent post titled "Even more Novell buy-out rumors galore!" This contains links mostly to articles we linked to before and also:



Going further back a little, many articles covered the news from the New York Post, including Bloomberg:

Novell Inc. rallied after the New York Post reported that the maker of Linux software has reached an agreement to sell itself in two parts.


This rumour from the New York Post also led to stock activity which got mentioned in financial news, e.g. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29]. From that last item we learn that:

Shares of company closed at $5.57 in the previous trading session and opened today at $5.85. NOVL is currently trading at $5.90, up $0.33 (+5.92%) in today's trading session. The shares of the stock are trading between the range of $5.85 - $5.92. Today's price change was accompanied by a volume of 17,164,112 shares which is greater than the average volume of 2,961,590 shares.


Some short articles are very focused on Novell [1, 2, 3] not just because of the rumour but also the response:

So far investors are enjoying the story and pushing the stock up on the basis it could go much higher if a deal is to be reached.


Associated Press says that "Novell shares surge on sale rumor" (also here) and OStatic has a discussion about it. The press near Red Hat thought that Red Hat too might be bidding, maybe even IBM:

Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) shares hit a 52-week high of $39.17 in afterhours trading Wednesday night after news broke that Novell may be selling its SuSE Linux business. Is Red Hat going to buy one of its biggest competitors in the Linux open source business?

After so many rumors that Red Hat itself is a takeover target in these frenzied days of high-tech M&A, now the Street talk is the Hatters may be a buyer.

But also think about this: is Red Hat stock moving up since a buyer of SuSE would set a target price for a Red Hat buyer? Hatters' stock sells at five times Novell's value already.


More commentary about the rumour can be found in [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7].

Having gone though all the above (the former part about VMware's confirmation and the latter about rumours preceding it), Techrights firmly believes that there is no going back for Novell; a sale of SUSE seems assured, but the prices are still being negotiated and VMware is not guaranteed to be the buyer. In November of 2006 the site "Boycott Novell" was launched and less than 4 years later it seems as though we're seeing the end of Novell. It's not surprising that Novell employees are bugging us today, almost as though they look for some kind of revenge or a punch bag. Some of these employees will get absorbed by other GNU/Linux players as the loss of one company is the gain of another. Demand for GNU/Linux is as high as ever, if not much greater. Novell is over, but Novell was never a GNU/Linux company.

Comments

Recent Techrights' Posts

Rewriting Things in Rust
How far would you go?
What Microsoft Reputation Laundering (With a Weaponised Law Degree) Looks Like in a Foreign Continent
You would expect this in uncivilised and primitive countries
Slopwatch: LLMs 'Write' Fake or Distorted 'News' About "Linux"
LLM slop disguised as news
Weeks After Microsoft Bankruptcy in Russia the Company Shuts Down in Pakistan, Too
Last month Windows' share in Pakistan fell to an all-time low
 
Even The Right Wing is Rejecting Bryan Lunduke
no wonder he became so irrelevant and marginal
Microsoft's MSN Helps Microsoft Spread Lies About the Layoffs' Scale (Well Over 25,000 People Laid Off This Year)
There seem to be monopolies on lies and on truth
The Death of X Has Been Greatly Exaggerated (by Compromised Media)
X.Org Server is alive and well
In 2025 Everything is "AI". Remember Blockchains?
Talk about what companies and things (services, products, software) actually do, not the labels they use
Julian Assange Has Been Free for a Year
Julian Assange and I disagreed on some things
Monopolies and Scalping
Monopolies gravitate towards price hikes
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, July 04, 2025
IRC logs for Friday, July 04, 2025
Microsoft's August Layoffs Wave: "August is Confirmed for Additional Performance Based Cuts"
"August is confirmed for additional performance based cuts from the recent connects along with additional organizational cuts."
Links 04/07/2025: Google Replaces the Web With Slop, "AI Might Kill Us All"
Links for the day
Gemini Links 04/07/2025: Mindfulness and F1
Links for the day
Rob Musial's June 2025 Additions of Malware in Proprietary Software
Via the GNU Web site this week
Links 04/07/2025: Microsoft's H-1B Visa Applications Show Another Crisis Unfolding, Many More Deep Cuts and Shutdowns Revealed, Complete Microsoft Exits
Links for the day
Gemini Links 04/07/2025: A Day To Remember and "Stop Killing Games"
Links for the day
Crime and Corruption at Microsoft GitHub Cannot be Covered Up by SLAPPs in Another Continent
We'll write about this for a long time to come
Slop Videos Are Disappointing Garbage, Nothing New, Just Brute Force up on Display or a Pedestal of Slop
Slop videos aren't a new thing
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, July 03, 2025
IRC logs for Thursday, July 03, 2025
The War on Local Storage (People Hosting Their Files Locally and Privately)
There's nothing wrong with controlling one's computing
What Digital Independence Means
Independence in the digital realms means abandoning platforms like GitHub, not just rejecting proprietary software
NVidia is a Bubble
they temporarily see fortunes and wrongly assume perpetuity thereof
Fedora Does Not Care About Diversity and Inclusion, It's About Optics (Corporate Image)
any notion of inclusion is superficial and misleading
Don't Buy the Excuses for Microsoft's Mass Layoffs
Back in the 90s, Microsoft bought a lot of companies to get and stay ahead
Happy Independence Day to Our American Readers
Maybe tomorrow will be a good opportunity to explain to American people - in terms of concepts, not brands - which tools respect their independence
Slopwatch: Linux Journal, Linuxsecurity, and Google News Getting Even Worse (More Slopfarms Added Which Attack Linux With Bruce-Force SPAM)
Google News is part of the same problem
Links 03/07/2025: More Cuts and Cancellations at Microsoft Revealed
Links for the day
Gemini Links 03/07/2025: Favourite Child and Launching WikiGem
Links for the day
GNU/Linux is Replacing Microsoft Windows. But We Need to Eradicate Microsoft, It's a Hub of Crime.
I have been writing about Microsoft since the 1990s when I was in school
Mystery Surrounding the PCLinuxOS Sites and PCLinuxOS Magazine
Let's hope this isn't something major
People and Companies Do Learn Some Lessons From Their Mistakes (Stubborn Ones Don't)
Brett Wilson LLP is an example of one that would rather drown in mistakes
Links 03/07/2025: 'Hey Hi' Slop Ridiculed Some More and Microsoft's Layoffs Tally for 2025 Reaches About 29,000 in Just 6 Months (Almost 5,000 Per Month)
Links for the day
Microsoft Staff Harassing Women, Strangling Women, Telling Women to Kill Themselves and Worse? Not a Problem!
Two women have left Brett Wilson LLP
The Slopfarms Are Losing the Plot (and Google is Propping Up Rogue Sites)
Google is part of the attack on the Web, on information, and on technology
New BetaNews Realises There's No Potential or Future in Slopfarms, Prior Editor Wayne Williams is Back
They realise that slop (so-called "AI") cannot replace humans
Claims That Microsoft Looks for Staff That Works More and Gets Paid Less (or Can Only Code by Grabbing Other People's Code, Under the Guise of "AI")
People can form their own opinion
Richard Stallman Was Right About Reasons Not to Use Microsoft
last updated 2017
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, July 02, 2025
IRC logs for Wednesday, July 02, 2025
Gemini Links 03/07/2025: No to Cloudflare and Small Web July
Links for the day