11.22.10

Gemini version available ♊︎

SUSE, OpenSUSE, and Why AttachMSFT Won’t Care

Posted in Finance, GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Mono, Novell, OpenSUSE, SLES/SLED at 4:19 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: A rushed analysis of where AttachMSFT [sic] will stand when it comes to Novell assets and what this means to the OpenSUSE community

WE have about 10 more posts that we hope to publish today about Novell. In this post, we quickly say that OpenSUSE should prepare for exit from Novell. AttachMSFT [sic] (AttachMSFT was suggested as an Identi.ca Hashtag for the Novell/Attachmate/CPTN/MSFT deal), which is the buyer of Novell assets, is funded by what’s known as a “vulture fund”, which means that it buys companies only to sell whatever it has inside it that’s of value. The rest is just left to rot in the carcass. To quote it from someone else:

Glyn Moody’s tweet said it best. “Attachmate got the carcass after Microsoft’s mates ripped out the juicy stuff.

In our previous posts about the sale [1, 2] including this one about UNIX we have already covered most of the important points, but for those who do not know yet, Elliot’s Singer, the person who is responsible for Novell going on sale in the first place, is the one providing funds to AttachMSFT, which nobody really heard of before. Some background about Singer and his “vulture fund” can be found in:

To quote some readers of ours, Oiaohm speaks about a situation where “Attachmate would be likely to just discontinue mono. No mono no hope for MS of .NET being a golden egg long term.”

ThistleWeb says: “I do note the “consortium led by MS” part, aka the PR chaff they can use to deflect any criticism in legal cases”

Jan says: “More strangeness in #AttachMSFT “But as part of the deal [...] Elliott is to become an equity shareholder in Attachmate” http://is.gd/hAOV2 ”

Qu1j0t3 says: “evidently another successful hack of the legal system. #antitrust #microsoft #novell #attachmsft”

Oiaohm adds “CPTN Holdings is another name for Microsoft. [...] CPTN Holdings, a Microsoft (MSFT) led consortium”

Yes, antitrust is a major factor here and a bigger discussion about it can be found in our IRC logs (to be published after midnight GMT). Antitrust scrutiny might not have the ability to take proxies into account.

Back in 2006, Microsoft paid Novell over $300 million to put it under a lot of Microsoft control. Today it finds a way to pay a mere $450 million (small money to technology giants) and takes everything which is needs from Novell, notably software patents.

Jan asks: “What will happen with Mono after AttachMSFT?”

He also tells Jono Bacon (Canonical): “#AttachMSFT has Elliott (that hedgefund that bidded for NOVL in february) as investor. Makes sense now? ;-)”

Rob Myers explains to Jono Bacon: “And certain “intellectual property” goes to a Microsoft consortium…”

Alan Lord tells to Jono Bacon: “And I bet that that information (which #swpats etc.) will remain locked down until they decide to use them…”

“Boycott Novell” warns about Novell because it recognises it as a danger, especially a long-term danger. I personally received messages today (or messages to “Boycott Novell”) which give us credit for foresight.

OMG!Ubuntu! has covered this too, but then again, who has not? Novell is over and “it will be a bummer to see it go,” writes abeNd.org, “i know a bunch of my customers will probably scramble to want to migrate to microsoft asap”

Here is another corporate press article about it (similar to the press release, so no real exploration here).

Novell Inc. said Monday morning that it will be acquired in a private-equity-led deal valued at $6.10 a share, or about $2.2 billion.

Carlo Piana writes: “Now I’m in #paranoid mode WRT Novell sale. Going to read what the well informed @maryjofoley can tell us”

Is he serious when calling Mary Jo Foley well informed? She repeats what Microsoft says and Microsoft misinforms more than almost anyone. Here is what she wrote:

So far, Microsoft is saying little about its role in the deal.

“We are pleased to be a part of the acquisition of certain intellectual property assets of Novell. Microsoft looks forward to continuing our collaboration with Novell into the future, to bring mixed source IT solutions to customers,” said the company via a statement from Horacio Gutierrez, Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President and Deputy General Counsel of Intellectual Property and Licensing.

[...]

Attachmate officials have said they plan to operate Novell as two business units, Novell and SUSE, and join them with their Attachmate and NetIQ businesses.

Update: It sounds like Mono development will continue under the new Attachmate owners, as well.

No word about OpenSUSE. AttachMSFT just want to suck what’s left of SLE* (contracts) and have Microsoft paid for patents that nobody knows anything about. VMB_ware with Microsoft’s Maritz at the top would not have been much better as a takeover, but at least it’s one of those real companies with known products and brands. Our reader rpgdude writes: “OIN should buy the patents” (well, it’s too late now, isn’t it?).

cubezzz remarks: “Novell continues to grant IBM’s license of Unix”

It will get quite complicated if Microsoft indeed gets UNIX. But again, what about OpenSUSE? Nobody appears to be talking about it. Unless a way is found to make a lot of money from it, what will possibly keep Novell/AttachMSFT funding which the project requires? Novell was already a bad steward of OpenSUSE, for example whenever servers fell.

We have plenty of catching up to do with OpenSUSE news (although there is little going on there nowadays) and one thing that caught our eyes the other night is this post about OpenSUSE and KDE, which ends with:

Finally, users can make visual contact with their virtual desktops by hovering the bottom of the screen to make these arrows appear and go to a different virtual desktop. Additionally, there could be a window list much like Mac OSX’s or Windows 7 but sitting comfortably on the right edge of the screen which accumulates in similar fashion to what AfterStep did borrowing from NeXTStep.

OpenSUSE is technically just as good if not better than the proprietary competition, but it does not have marketing.

Here is Novell promoting SLE* in a recently-uploaded video. Why not OpenSUSE?

They are trying to get people to defect from Red Hat to Novell/SLE* (with more promotional videos), which Novell pays Microsoft for. Novell claims to have the most supported applications (watch the video above) — a claim previously disputed by others. Even Novell’s PR agents use the same tactics, having just pulled other talking points like number of appliances built by the fruits of Friedman, who was behind the project before he left the company. IBM is also among these talking points from Novell’s PR (we covered part I earlier this month), which tries to elevate morale as the best staff is leaving.

“Novell claims to have the most supported applications (watch the video above) — a claim previously disputed by others.”Most of the other news we found is just about SLES, so there is almost nothing to say about OpenSUSE. Timothy Prickett Morgan mentioned SLES in some of his good articles, the latter of which states: “At the moment, ScaleMP’s vSMP Foundation shared memory clustering software works with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and 5 and Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 and 11.”

Novell servers also get a mention in other places (similar here), with the most major story being announced in a press release to generate some news like:

i. Novell announces The Hong Kong Jockey Club

ii. One of the World*s Largest Racing Organizations Standardizes on SUSE Linux Enterprise

To summarise the point of this quick post, Novell will no longer be Novell; it is going to be a bunch of assets in a shell, with its patents stripped away and sold to a Microsoft shell. OpenSUSE is unlikely to be part of this plan and since Novell too appears to have lost interest, the talented OpenSUSE people should try to fork OpenSUSE (trademark owned by Novell) or contribute to a different distribution. Novell authorised the death knell of OpenSUSE 4 years ago when it agreed with Microsoft that OpenSUSE should not be used in businesses which make money, not without being sued or extorted by Microsoft anyway. It’s there in the deal — the agreement both companies signed without consultation from OpenSUSE members.

Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
  • Reddit
  • email

Decor ᶃ Gemini Space

Below is a Web proxy. We recommend getting a Gemini client/browser.

Black/white/grey bullet button This post is also available in Gemini over at this address (requires a Gemini client/browser to open).

Decor ✐ Cross-references

Black/white/grey bullet button Pages that cross-reference this one, if any exist, are listed below or will be listed below over time.

Decor ▢ Respond and Discuss

Black/white/grey bullet button If you liked this post, consider subscribing to the RSS feed or join us now at the IRC channels.

DecorWhat Else is New


  1. IRC Proceedings: Sunday, June 04, 2023

    IRC logs for Sunday, June 04, 2023



  2. Links 04/06/2023: Unifont 15.0.05 and PCLinuxOS Stuff

    Links for the day



  3. Gemini Links 04/06/2023: Wayland and the Old Computer Challenge

    Links for the day



  4. StatCounter: GNU/Linux (Including ChromeOS) Grows to 8% Market Share Worldwide

    This month’s numbers from StatCounter are good for GNU/Linux (including ChromeOS, which technically has both GNU and Linux); the firm assesses logs from 3 million sites and shows Windows down to 66% in desktops/laptops (a decade ago it was above 90%) with modest growth for GNU/Linux, which is at an all-time high, even if one does not count ChromeOS that isn’t freedom- or privacy-respecting



  5. Journalism Cannot and Quite Likely Won't Survive on the World Wide Web

    We’re reaching the point where the overwhelming majority of new pages on the Web (the World Wide Web) are basically junk, sometimes crafted not by humans; how to cope with this rapid deterioration is still an unknown — an enigma that demands hard answers or technical workarounds



  6. Do Not Assume Pensions Are Safe, Especially When Managed by Mr. EPOTIF Benoît Battistelli and António Campinos

    With the "hoax" that is the financial assessment by António Campinos (who is deliriously celebrating the inauguration of illegal and unconstitutional kangaroo courts) we urge EPO workers to check carefully the integrity of their pensions, seeing that pension promises have been broken for years already



  7. Links 04/06/2023: Why Flatpak and Wealth of Devices With GNU/Linux

    Links for the day



  8. Gemini Links 04/06/2023: Rosy Crow 1.1.3 and NearlyFreeSpeech.NET

    Links for the day



  9. IRC Proceedings: Saturday, June 03, 2023

    IRC logs for Saturday, June 03, 2023



  10. Links 04/06/2023: Azure Outage Again (So Many!) and Tiananmen Massacre Censored

    Links for the day



  11. Links 03/06/2023: Qubes OS 4.2.0 RC1 and elementaryOS Updates for May

    Links for the day



  12. Gemini Links 03/06/2023: Hidden Communities and Exam Prep is Not Education

    Links for the day



  13. Links 03/06/2023: IBM Betraying LibreOffice Some More (After Laying off LibreOffice Developers)

    Links for the day



  14. Gemini Links 03/06/2023: Bubble Woes and Zond Updates

    Links for the day



  15. Links 03/06/2023: Apache NetBeans 18 and ArcaOS 5.0.8

    Links for the day



  16. IRC Proceedings: Friday, June 02, 2023

    IRC logs for Friday, June 02, 2023



  17. The Developing World Abandons Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux at All-Time Highs on Desktops/Laptops

    Microsoft, with 80 billion dollars in longterm debt and endless layoffs, is losing the monopolies; the media doesn’t mention this, but some publicly-accessible data helps demonstrate that



  18. Links 02/06/2023: Elive ‘Retrowave’ Stable and Microsoft's Half a Billion Dollar Fine for LinkeIn Surveillance in Europe

    Links for the day



  19. Linux Foundation 'Research' Has a New Report and Of Course It Uses Only Proprietary Software

    The Linux Foundation has a new report, promoted by Clickfraud Spamnil and others; of course they’re rejecting Free software, they’re just riding the “Linux” brand and speak of “Open Source” (which they reject themselves)



  20. Links 02/06/2023: Arti 1.1.5 and SQL:2023

    Links for the day



  21. Gemini Links 02/06/2023: Vimwiki Revisited, SGGS Revisited

    Links for the day



  22. Geminispace/GemText/Gemini Protocol Turn 4 on June 20th

    Gemini is turning 4 this month (on the 20th, according to the founder) and I thought I’d do a spontaneous video about how I use Gemini, why it's so good, and why it’s still growing (Stéphane Bortzmeyer fixed the broken cron job — or equivalent of it — a day or two after I had mentioned the issue)



  23. HMRC Does Not Care About Tax Fraud Committed by UK Government Contractor, Sirius 'Open Source'

    The tax crimes of Sirius ‘Open Source’ were reported to HMRC two weeks ago; HMRC did not bother getting back to the reporters (victims of the crime) and it’s worth noting that the reporters worked on UK government systems for many years, so maybe there’s a hidden incentive to bury this under the rug



  24. Our IRC at 15th Anniversary

    So our IRC community turns 15 today (sort of) and I’ve decided to do a video reflecting on the fact that some of the same people are still there after 15 years



  25. IRC Proceedings: Thursday, June 01, 2023

    IRC logs for Thursday, June 01, 2023



  26. Links 02/06/2023: NixOS 23.05 and Rust 1.70.0

    Links for the day



  27. Gemini Links 02/06/2023: Flying High With Gemini and Gogios Released

    Links for the day



  28. Links 01/06/2023: KStars 3.6.5 and VEGA ET1031 RISC-V Microprocessor in Use

    Links for the day



  29. Gemini Links 01/06/2023: Scam Call and Flying High With Gemini

    Links for the day



  30. Links 01/06/2023: Spleen 2.0.0 Released and Team UPC Celebrates Its Own Corruption

    Links for the day


RSS 64x64RSS Feed: subscribe to the RSS feed for regular updates

Home iconSite Wiki: You can improve this site by helping the extension of the site's content

Home iconSite Home: Background about the site and some key features in the front page

Chat iconIRC Channel: Come and chat with us in real time

Recent Posts