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IBM Uses Novell to Take Market Share From Rivals Like Oracle

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Summary: A look at the 10-year anniversary IBM and Novell are celebrating; Novell is trying to poach Solaris users

It is hard to tell what Novell is negotiating behind the scenes right now, but bids to acquire the company sure prove distracting and new analyses of Novell as a publicly-traded company must take into account that this is probably Novell's final year. Existing and former Novell employees such as this guy, Justin Steinman who is quoted in this article, or even Dale Olds might not have a future in Novell. Where might they go next? We'll have to wait and find out. Novell's CTO, for example, ended up in the W3C (as CEO). Who is Novell's existing CTO? Has it found a replacement for Jeff Jaffe yet? Will it bother at all at this stage?



Jeff Jaffe -- just like Ron Hovsepian -- came from IBM, which has a special relationship with Novell on the mainframe and now celebrates with Novell the tenth anniversary of "Market Leadership With SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for IBM System z" [1, 2, 3]. Some articles mix/blur the role of SUSE and the role of Novell. Well, nothing is perfect. There is another emphasis on AMD and Novell.

As tribute to this major milestone, a Saturday outage is planned by OpenSUSE (joke) -- an outage which was planned about a week ahead.

The outage planned for this Saturday (June 5th) has been rescheduled.


OpenSUSE has too many of those scheduled OpenSUSE outages. They happen once in several months.

The OpenSUSE Conference 2010 is coming soon [1, 2] and OpenSUSE will also attend LinuxTag 2010, which has been 'infiltrated' by Microsoft [1, 2]. The "OpenSUSE Boosters" will be brought in for reinforcement. Here is a glimpse at what SUSE had to show in BrainShare Amsterdam (video).There is also this SUSE (Ballnux) advert which was uploaded days ago.

“The “OpenSUSE Boosters” will be brought in for reinforcement.”Getting back to server news, see the press release about Novell's latest poaching programme (also here). This received some press coverage [1, 2] and lots of it is in the Indian press for some reason [1, 2]. They sometimes make it sound like Novell is helping rather than preying, but here is a better headline with lengthy article that does more than repeat portions of the press release.

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