As Novell CTO Alan Nugent told ZDNews yesterday, notwithstanding a $50 million injection from IBM, his company’s decision to acquire Linux distributor SuSE was backed by a significant amount of market and technical rationale. But legally speaking the move may go down in history as pure chess brilliance on behalf of IBM and Novell in one of this industry’s most notorious power struggles.
Is Novell-SuSE deal a brilliant Big Blue power play?
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Novell has specific rights to UNIX, correct? By owning a major Linux distro, Novell then can give support and a legal support base for IBM *if* SCO’s claims are found valid (not saying they will be). It’s playing both sides of the tables, first claiming there is none, but if it is found to be so, no problem then either.
Not only that, but SuSE is also part of UnitedLinux, along with Caldera (now SCO). This consortium almost certainly has patent and copyright agreements amongst the various companies, by which SCO would be bound in their case against IBM. This could be the beginning of a close partnership between IBM and Novell that could make any verdict in the case irrelevant (aside from damages).
If you agree that Novell+SuSE has sufficient Unix rights to release a GPL’d distro, wouldn’t this make all the other distros legal based on the idea that they can incorporate the GPL’d code?
btw, I seem to recall that some part of Suse belonged to german government…what happened with this share?
I’m assuming you read Anandtech http://www.anandtech.com? They have the best technical articles for PCs I’ve come acrossed.
the German Government might own stock in Suse, but that is about all.
when Suse gets bought up, the stock will be traded for Novell stock in an amount given by a formula that SUSE and Novell agree upon.
“The other is a company that, dating back to its UnixWare days, is rumored to still have just enough Unix intellectual property rights to be immune to the wrath of SCO.”
I don’t know about the rest of you, but I CAN’T WAIT until this thing is over.
Novell’s purchase of SuSE is really part of a shared interest in protecting Linux against SCO. IBM and Novell already had an agreement to not let SCO damage Linux. Here is a url that proves this mutual agreement on Linux. The second from last paragraph on that article tells how Novell has pretty much destroyed SCO’s case.
http://www.alwayson-network.com/comments.php?id=1303_0_3_0_C
IBM’s $50 million investment is partly a thank you gift to Novell’s actions on the SCO matter. IBM’s investment is also a big endorsement and it immediately legitimizes SuSE as an enterprise grade Linux. This is definitely “I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine” move. Novell, IBM, and Linux wins in this deal and only big loser is SCO.
One company that has been hit hard by this purchease is Red Hat. If you look at the stock price of RHAT and NOVL on early November around the time when Novell announcement was made, you’ll see this sharp drop and sharp jump respectively. Obviously this is a big blow to Red Hat because now it has to contend with Novell’s experience in enterprise market and deep pockets.
There is another factor in the stock changes of red hat and Novell. REd hat just annouced that they were dropping their personal editions completely to focus on Enterprise. for good or ill Losing a large section of your customers is always reason for your stocks to drop.
With Novell, IBM, Hollywood, and the founding fathers of Gnu/Linux SCO rally has bitten off more than they can chew even if they are remotely correct.
I was referring to Ars Technica
http://www.arstechnica.com
“the German Government might own stock in Suse, but that is about all.”
Care to state proof? I couldn’t find this info. If the German government own stock in SuSE they either own a) 100% – which is highly unlikely or b) it isn’t what you claim ”that is about all”.
I’ve just mailed IKH Nürnberg (this is where SuSE resides) about this.
I believe debman didn’t use “that is about all” in literal meaning
he rather thought – they own something, but it doesn’t mean much