Guest post by In 2011 Novell sold the SUSE franchise to Attachmate, who has run it since, and a portfolio of patents to a Microsoft consortium. But now Novell shareholders are alleging the deal was cooked, and Novell’s board withheld information from another potential bidder to ensure Attachmate would win. From Groklaw: “Party C actually bid a bit higher than Attachmate. But the allegation is that Attachmate was favored with information that Party C was not given”. The news doesn’t affect Attachmate, who won the bid. But Novell’s Board of Directors is going to have some explaining to do.
Is it lame to post a response to the article you submitted yourself?
Who knows how these courts actually work (someone does, just not me). I just hope they don’t reverse the deal. As a SUSE fan, I think Attachmate has done better work on SUSE recently than Novell ever did.
Novell’s fascination with Gnome/Miguel de Icaza led to a lot of lost time switching interfaces and being indecisive, and losing a lot of the energy and head-start SUSE had from the early days when it was run by some clever Germans.
I’m not expecting revolutionary progress from Attachmate, but I still like the distro and hope the court decision doesn’t mean the distro goes back to Novell.
When Novell took over SUSE it was another year of the Linux desktop event. A professional organization that could offer support. Somehow it seems nothing happened or changed with regards to SUSE.
SUSE was the first Linux distribution I bought. I used to buy every edition and place the (rather huge) boxes on a shelve at work as a kind of advertising.
I have a fluffy Geeko too!
I also thought the purchase by Novell was going to be a good thing. But it seems these “big” corporations all seem to lack the spark for innovation and the spirit of determination that makes these projects awesome when they start. In the early days SUSE was pretty darned innovative. Not so much under Novell, who spent most of its time and energy retrofitting its Netware stuff to SUSE instead of developing SUSE. That’s what made Attachmate’s deal special – they are going to focus on SUSE as a distro (hopefully) instead of using SUSE to benefit some other problem they’re facing.
I started with SUSE 7.1 and have liked it since then, but it consistently leaves me just a little disappointed (KDE gets some of the blame too).
Back then Red Hat and SuSE could be bought in a number of shops and they did a good job on the product, both the distribution itself as well as the documentation. SuSE did, IMHO, the best job on at least the manual.
Ubuntu hands out install media, but I’ve never seen a boxed set with a paper manual. Well, these days I don’t see a boxed set of any Linux distribution anymore. Funny enough also almost no computer books, people of read those apparently prefer to buy them on-line.
There used to be this book store I used to visit that had 3 walls filled with computer books (and boxed Linux distro’s). That turned in to a very slim bookshelf with books mostly aimed at senior citizens and these rather dubious iPod Tips ‘n’ Tricks kind of books i.e. popular and shallow topics.
It’s worth noting that the Groklaw article doesn’t mention SUSE at all, so I’m not sure where you got the impression that this really has anything to do with SUSE. The article also says that if this trial results in anything, it wouldn’t result in the reversal of the sale, just some money moving between hands.
Edited 2013-01-09 00:16 UTC