Sun Microsystems is toying with the idea of buying Linux seller Novell, saying that springing for the $2.64 billion company would hurt rival IBM.
Sun mulls buying Novell
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The LAST thing we need is more consolidation.
If SUN wants to know what to do with it’s excess cash…
It can:
– Develop Star Office for MacOS X
– Develop a version of Solaris x86 with WINE integrated as a REAL Windows Killer.
– Bring back the Cobalt Cube at a good price and market it to people with Broadband as a way to host cheap Web sites and have Firewalled Email.
– Buy BeOS from Palm, Inc. and update it to current standards, add current drivers, add a new browser, add Java support, port Open Office/Star Office to it, but DON’T junk it up and make it slower.
But I’ve NEVER seen one of these acquistions benefit US the end-users.
HP buying Compaq… Phooey!
Microsft buying EVERYBODY (Especially Connectix)… Phooey!
How about hurting IBM the old fashioned way… By bringing out a better product?
I can’t help but think this was blown a bit out of proportion. First off, IBM is not the only company that uses SuSE Linux, Sun used SuSE for JDS also.
Second, it would be pointless to spend that much money on Novel just to try to kill off SuSE Linux since the remaining parts like YaST are now OSS.
It would take billions to kill Novel and in a few weeks time a small company could rebrand, recompile, and re-distribute SuSE distro under a new name.
Linux is nearly immune to this type of attack.
Where do you get the idea they would try to “kill linux” through this acquisition? More likely, they would adopt suse/ximian as the next JDS, kill of mono (which really deserves to die anyway), and so forth.<P>
Can’t see it as being likely though, Novell’s actual money making products (ie not linux or mono) are all java-based app servers etc, similar products to what Sun already has, and just as under the cosh from IBM, BEA, Oracle et al.
If they just want a real linux distribution, why not Mandrake? They are very good.
Mandrake doesn’t have all these contracts, engineers and resources Novell has. Mandrake is a very small player compared to Novell or even SuSE alone.
This shows just how much Money Microsoft handed over for the whole Java thing. It seems like Microsoft is the Don, and the rest of us don’t matter.
Don’t get me wrong, I think Apple makes great products (regardless of Steve Jobs (idiotic) political ideals), and that Microsoft makes, well crap. Novell seems to be the third lesser of two, or three, evils. If Sun bought them out, well they’d be killed off, bloated and no one would want to buy Linux from Sun (in turn taking care of Sun soon enough); leaving IBM to head up all things good.
Ironic I think.
“IBM (in)famously relied on Microsoft for an operating system for its personal computers.”
Yes, IBM made Microsoft rich but without involving Microsoft, IBM would’ve been just another totalitarian Apple at that time. The IBM PC and lookalikes would’ve never reached their popularity today.
in how it would benefit Sun. They could replace or suppliment JDS with SuSe and Ximian’s updated desktops (and does JDS need it). Also, Sun is trying to role enterprise management systems into their JDS desktop to make it truely attractive for large corporations…well, Novell already HAS that and is indeed planning on bundling those as well.
The only thing I couldn’t see Sun using is Mono, it just would go against their Java roots. Maybe they could further position it against Microsoft’s .NET iniatives and have more marketing power to boot.
if novell will be aquired by sun,then we can say goodbye
to all mono team
Again a perfect example of SUN trying to come up with ideas to remain profitable. They are flailing about like a dieing fish. SUN doesn’t have any clear business plan, they are desperate and it shows.
“SUN doesn’t have any clear business plan, they are desperate and it shows.”
I agree 100%.
This is just some junk J. Schwartz posted up on his blog.
Nothing about acquisition, just the latest in a series of insane anti-Red Hat rants from Sun.
The PC became a open standard because IBM allowed the hardware to be made by any vendor who could make it and they allowed for open standards. It had nothing to do with Microsoft and their software.
I know that this author is probably wrong or at the very least misunderstood it’s meaning but this could hurt mono too:
http://blogs.aspadvice.com/pmurphy/archive/2004/08/01/1426.aspx
No, Sun, let’s not spend that money on fortifying Java and creating superior frameworks to contrast Longhorn. Oh, no, let’s buy another Linux distribution.
Brilliant, man, brilliant.
It was the hardware and the software. If Microsoft had sold exclusively to IBM, the software wouldn’t be there and none of the clones could be made.
Sun is the biggest fence sitter in oss. They say they’ve contributed the most, which may be true in terms of code, but sitting so long on the fence the picket is up their ass. I agree w/ above posts on them wanting to kill linux. I think sun has made it clear they’re sticking w/ solaris, even on x86(-64), and despite of their claims of supporting linux. They may on the surface pretend to like linux, but I believe they will continue sitting the fence and not taking a side as the seem to be pro-solaris and linux generates precious software and devs that solaris can still take advantage of.
Also I interpret the microsoft cash handover in fact to be sun’s greatest defeat, nail down that coffin, baby! Sun is a suicidal company. I think even Apple, a company I’ve always disliked is totally putting sun to shame. I continually read that most sun engineers use Mac as their prefered platform. what does that say?? I think those engineers would be better off working for Jobs, not only would they get more interesting work but I believe their carreers would be much more secure as I see it Apple has nowhere to go but up (being nearly at the bottom) and sun nowhere but straight down (as a company of stagnant fence-sitters, who repeatedly continue to sit the fence turning face on linux [as i explain above]). btw, i’m ignoring java, which has amazing penetration.
As I posted earlier on the technology-site-which-is-not-to-be-named:
Okay, so the Register has already demolished any idea that this is real-world stuff rather than more empty talk from J. Schwartz. And it’s clear that even if Sun were somehow to acquire Novell, the self-destructive corporate culture of the McNealy cultus would destroy any value toute suite.
Nevertheless: this would be a good idea, if Sun had a proper management team.
First, Sun’s channel sucks, especially in the small-to-medium business range. Novell, despite its decline in recent years, has a quite good SMB channel and a decent consulting network. For a long time it owned the SMB (and much of the gov’t) space, and it still has deep roots there.
Second, with the Java Enterprise System, Sun is trying to break into the LAN administration, groupware, and identity management rackets. Novell knows these spaces better than almost everyone.
Third, between Sun’s HIG team and the Ximian monkeys, they’d have an unstoppable Gnome desktop squadron.
Fourth, Novell’s managers, in contrast to Sun’s, seem to know what they’re doing and how to keep their mouths shut. Shanghaing a few of them into the parent company would be nothing but helpful.
Fifth, both companies have struggled to break into the J2EE game for a while; they could combine their heretofore ineffectual efforts and have a fighting chance at making it.
A well-run Sun-Novell teamup would be a very good thing for both companies concerned. It would extend Novell’s reach up-market and Sun’s down-market; it would combine a rock-solid engineering backbone with an effective distribution channel. Of course, it wouldn’t be well-run, and it won’t happen.
Once you hear companies making threats against something they can’t counteract, they try to frighten people by pretending they are bigger than they are by feigning to buy out their rivals.
I think everyone knows that Sun doesn’t have the cash to do that, and considering the culture of Novell and the relationships it has in place with Suse and IBM – not a chance. It would be a milestone around the neck of Sun if by some miracle this did happen, because they’d have to honour them.
“With our balance sheet, we’re considering all our options,”
Jesus Jonathan! I should hope you are.
I just get the impression that this is a Sun/Microsoft pact to try to desperately get IBM to move away from Linux, and create doubt in IBM’s mind over the past. Unfortunately, it isn’t like that with Linux:
It’s a wonderful movement. But the bad news for IBM is that the vast majority of enterprise datacenter deployments are now occurring on Red Hat’s linux.
Oh, so it’s not Sun then?
100 to 1, depending up on where you look. And with Red Hat increasing price, while adding in an application server that competes with WebSphere, IBM’s finding itself in the uncomfortable position of having lost control of the social movement they were hoping to monetize. They’re beginning to look like the IBM of Mr. Akers’s era – having missed the forest for a tree, and finding themselves without an operating system.
Sorry Jon, but you have much bigger problems at your door than to worry about the past and what IBM is doing. I fail to see how IBM are without an operating system, because you just use someone else or create a new one. This is a crucial bit of understanding he just can’t get past.
Moving from Red Hat Enterprise Server to SuSe’s Enterprise Linux is very complicated (eg, which application server do you pick?)
Application server? Sorry Jon, it doesn’t wash.
Whoever owns Novell controls the OS on which IBM’s future depends. Now that’s an interesting thought, isn’t it?
No, because Red Hat has a large installed base – as you’ve said.
And Sun’s ability to leverage our open Solaris platform (on industry standard AMD, Intel or SPARC)
Nice try. I take it that we’ve seen all the open sourcing of Solaris we’re going to see – calling it open.
Me, I’d keep a close eye on the Novell/SuSe conversation. If IBM acquires them, the community outrage and customer disaffection is going to be epic… but where else does IBM go?
IBM has had a profitable relationship with IBM for decades without having to buy them, nor do they have to buy Red Hat. Sorry, but this is going nowhere.
A company that was serious about purchasing another company would not speculate publicly in advance that it might be considering it. This is Sun doing its usual blowing of smoke. It’s a shame, since it reflects a lack of coherence and strategy. They badly need to figure out what they are good at, and focus on that.
I’ll toss in this link from the ever jaded The Register:
http://www.theregister.com/2004/08/02/sun_notbuying_novell/
Novell just got their act together and is really going somewhere. Now there is talk of selling out to Sun??
Sun would screw up a good thing like Novell. Thats just what we need.
“It was the hardware and the software. If Microsoft had sold exclusively to IBM, the software wouldn’t be there and none of the clones could be made.”
Ever heard of DRDOS sonny ?
If that 2Billion’s burning a hole in Sun’s pocket, perhaps they should consider buying up Lynnsoft, Xig and 4Front – these are the guys making drivers for Solaris – good ones IMHO. I use the Xig graphics drivers and the 4Front Open sound drivers on my Solaris desktop with ATI Radeons and my SBLive they rock pretty hard. With these two things, I can match my Linux box feature for feature. There’s nothing on my Linux box that doesn’t run on my Solaris box – Mplayer, XMMS, Xpdf, Realplayer8 (afaik the Unixware version), Mozilla, OO.org, Gnumeric, Java, etc, etc.
Sun should just drop the Linux charade and be like Apple and stick to Solaris. You don’t see Apple trying to buy Yellow Dog Linux because Apple doesn’t need a Linux strategy. If you need open source apps, you’ll get them regardless of the Linux kernel. Sun can buy a lot of developers to make drivers missing from Solaris. The rest of the stuff in any Linux distro is re-compilable. Lack of drivers is the main thing holding up Solaris (or FreeBSD) from effectively competing against SuSE or Redhat Linux.
Maybe Sun should buy Codeweavers or Transgaming if they really want to compete with IBM. Having Solaris become a better Desktop than Linux would make IBM still be beholden to MS for their desktop strategy and that’s the way Sun can beat IBM.
As many of you have rightly said, buying SuSE or Novell isn’t going to hurt IBM. They’ll just move to Mandrake or Debian or finally come out with IBM Linux. Linux OS is not for sale. What is to prevent SuSE’s engineers from cashing in their stocks and setting up shop?. Linux customers are more loyal to developers rather than companies.
It would just hurt Novell. Sun doesn’t know how to manage itself, let alone a successful Linux venture like Novell. Leave ’em alone and let ’em compete, you big meany.
Here’s good ol’ capitalism at work for ya:
Sun: “Well, if we can’t beat ’em, BUY ‘EM!!!”
Whatever happened to competition and workin hard for your money, the American way? Are they not creative enough to outperform Novell? I mean they have Solaris, the best hardware available, Open Office and all the free software it takes to build a Linux distro, and MONEY, lots of it. What more do they need?
IMO, their anti-Linux comments from the past show Sun’s lack of creativity or insight with this technology. I wish they would learn, but somehow I feel like money has clogged their cognitive process.
Oh well, good luck to all those employees and OSS projects. I hope noone gets a pink slip or treated badly by the man. Maybe Sun really does have some interest in Linux after all. Maybe they didn’t really believe it was just another toy OS to be taken for granted. Only time will tell.
But do you see now what I was saying a few years back about capitalism and how it can affect technology?
I’m not exactly communist these days. I just believe we’d get more accomplished if currency and the concept of value were suddenly made illegal. Well, and a lot of other regulations, but unregulated capitalism is just as bad as communism, so whatever. I’m not an economics developer. I write Perl.
You make some great points. Sun could really put the money to better use, you would think.
And, it seems to me that Novell has really gotten focus and a means. Who said they were interested in selling? Of course, everyone has their price. But, if I were in charge of Novell, I’d keep heading down the path that I was heading.
As for Sun, I guess I understand their problem. They have been selling a well respected and highly profitable turnkey product in recent past. They have been marketing it as though there was no decent alternative. All of a sudden, they find themselves at crossroads. As other posters have mentioned, they’ve been trying to have their cake and eat it, too (sitting the fence). But, it doesn’t seem to be working for them. If they stay with Solaris and Sun hardware, they will continue to lose business. If they make a real committment to Linux, they are admitting you don’t need Sun hardware and/or Solaris. That’s a tough position. Abandoning your bread and butter has got to be tough.
Here Sun is doing exactly what I said they’d do — crazy acts against enemies of Microsoft.
Jonathon Schwartz is a paid agent of Microsoft and Sun is just another Microsoft puppet.
This latest ‘strategy’ is going to be one of many anti-Linux and anti-IBM moves that Sun makes.
It doesn’t matter to Microsoft that Sun will suffer and die. They are only there to do the bidding of their Overlord.
“IBM allowed the hardware to be made by any vendor who could make it and they allowed for open standards”
IBM did not allow this they were forced… when the monopoly lawers came knocking IBM had to move parts of the business away from themselves or else… and dont forget IBM was more interested in big iron (mainframes) before putting a pc together as thats where the money had been..
They rushed with off the shelf parts the bios was meant to glue it together.. ibm was not interested in open standards back then.. the whole point of isa eisa hdd fdd, and token ring was to hold onto their hardware standards …
even ps2 keyboard an mouse plus a large part of USB is down to ibm…
ibm desktops had usb during 95, 96 before the rest of the market…
This one is a stinky.
McNealy is talking to Mc Gowan (Sun’s CFO) when Schwartz walks into his office.
– Steve, how much more can we save if we fire the entire SPARC engineering team? How do you mean we can’t fire them all? Huh-huh.Huh-huh. Legal costs? Huh-huh. Right, but will you check into this? How much have we got in the bank now? 7 billion? Huh-huh. OK, good.
McNealy hangs up and looks at Schwartz:
– What’s up?
Schwartz just smiles and produces a not-so-neat flowchart. It has three “start” boxes and at least a dozen “end” boxes. Three of the end boxes are outlined in red and have a “Sun 0wnz RedHat” sticker pasted over them. Six end boxes are outlined in Black and have a bad drawing of a little penguin getting roasted by a shining sun with an evil smile. Another three end boxes are outlined in blue and have a “Sun 0wnz IBM” sticker on them.
McNealy examines the chart carefully, but suddenly begins to sweat. He points his finger at a small scribbling on the side and shouts at Schwartz: “What the f… is that?”
Schwartz takes a close look and reads “Call Gates lawyers today 3h30”. He takes out a pencil from his shirt pocket, licks the rubber slightly and carefully erases the scribbling from the chart. “Personal notes”, he replies, with an even bigger smile. “So, what do you think?”
Mc Nealy replies, while going out: “It makes as much sense as us buying Novell and telling the whole world we are going to do it beforehand. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to be on the cours… important appointment at three.”
Schwartz stays behind, mulling over the flowchart. Then he gets the pencil out again from his pocket, and insert a new box just after each one of the the “start” boxes. These new boxes read: “Announce Sun may buy Novell”.
Looks like Sun has been expanding thier SunRay product line with Linux. So maybe there really is some interest in Linux afterall.
But personally I feel like Sun prefers to compete via politics than technology.
We’ll see..
@Chris, I would also fear for the success of mono in this case. Lets hope something this does not happen.
To be honest they should buy BOTH Mandrake AND Novell, pool all those resources together, and make a kickass-Mandrake/Sun version of Linux, maybe even integrate their own Solaris into it. (If possible.)
@Chris :- IBM’s hardware was reverse engineered by Compaq. IBM did not want others to make the hardware. They tried to change course with the PS2
In those days when DEC was free falling the news at one point said that the company had accumulated a loss of $5 billion. That’s a lot money to get nothing for.
We never hear about crossroads issues with SUN’s peers – IBM, HP and Dell. One difference is that they have a PC business – server as well as desktop. SUN doesn’t – enemy territory.
I’d like to see this planet with an alternate desktop. JDS in its current state is a quick throw-together – to catch headlines – SUNs favorite pastime. But a billion dollars would go a long way in producing both quantity and quality. Besides, isn’t that in the ballpark of what MS is raking in on their desktop every year – and not in revenue but profits?
It is excellent idea!!
I think schwartz’s comment is a pure PR move… Not so long ago, sun was bashing linux and promoting their own solaris. They went through the trouble of porting solaris to several rival’s platforms and now they are buying a linux vendor?
Sun is trying to transform itself into more of a software company, but its product line is so complex that I fail to see the focus and direction of the company.
why doesnt sun jsut make solaris the bast damn OS out there and make all the linux people go wow look at that thats a great piece of software and all the windows people go wow what a good alternative to windows and all the mac people go…cool…mabey i will get me one of those….and why not put all this money into further developing SPARC processors witch are great and keep up their dual core research…
The Novell aquisition could be nothing todo with GNU/Linux but the UNIX rights that Novell holds? If Sun & SCO have agreements together then maybe Sun may not contest matters with SCO the way Novell have?
More likely it is just an attempt to make the world notice that Sun still exists by getting them some publicity and little will come of it just like the stories bout Solaris & Jave becoming open source.
The best idea for Sun is to buy Slackware. Then Dropline, together with build in OpenPKG, ports like BSD and that s it!
All LinDistros can not compare with Slackware in scripts built.
The best idea for Sun is to buy Slackware. Then Dropline, together with build in OpenPKG, ports like BSD and that s it!
All LinDistros can not compare with Slackware in scripts built.
The very day this will happen I will switch to Longhorn or whatever Microsoft has in stores.
It’s all GPLed assets which Sun simply can just download and use without spending a dime on it…
I don’t really see why Sun (or any other company) would really wanna buy a company which produces GPLed software. Only reason would be to get their hands on the developers and customer base….. but that should mean that the value of the company must be down like 60%…
The assets are the developers who have novell.
miguel nat dave and others….. the true value it’s not the gpl’d programs or at least they are the minor thing (i think).
I didn’t see this coming! I thought Sun and Novell are just about the same in size. Anyway I guess I was wrong. Novell is still pretty big. I believe it would be wiser if Novell is bought by IBM.
Only then you will see Microsoft’s alarm bells going offfffff like crazy lol
To expand on earlier, if SUN bought out Novell (and the rights to UNIX) and then discontinued the UNIX copyright claim against SCO this would make SCO’s life easier. Then if SCO were to somehow win the case against IBM would they be legally eligable to charge for Linux licenses?
If they did this would kill off Linux usage in corporate circles and as SUN have a contract with SCO and would be immune to Linux licensing fees. This way they get the SUSE linux distro and killoff all other commercial linux distros, i.e. Red Hat (although what another $700 ontop of their licensing fees!).
I shall stop consipiring now.
Sun is not buying Novell ppl. The press got this one way off base. All this talk from Sun was just posturing and s–t talking to IBM. They are worried IBM may consider buying Novell and started blogging to try and drive NOVL share price up. The only thing of interest to Sun in Novell is SuSE. Its seriously ridiculous to think they will cough up nearly 3 billion for Novell just for SuSE. Novell isn’t worth halving their 7 billion warchest. Think about it.
If I buy into what you just said, then we must congratulate Mandrake for doing an equal or better job (better in my opinion, but regardless) than Suse at putting together a very good product.
But since I don’t buy into what you just said, I must state that Suse was developed in house and is a close-source way. Sure, there were external beta-testers, but all the real developer’s were Suse’s. Mandrake, on the other hand, learned very early to leverage the Free Software community to great advantage and in the process created by cooker one of the most transparent and effective development communities.
So I believe Mandrake stands as one of the true champions of open source with a great unencumbered product. It’s all GPL. It wouldn’t surprise me to see a big company try to gain access to Mandrake developers and its brand name.
Sun would screw up a good thing like Novell. Thats just what we need.
I wouldn’t characterize Novell as a “Good thing” remember this is the company that dominated file and print serving for a long time and rather then competing with microsoft by providing a cheaper better product decided to stay with the antiquated overpriced software business model. It would be be more apt to say Novell will screw up a good thing like Suse.
As for SUN here is a free business plan.
1. Get rid of Mcnealy or demote him and get someone to head the company that has some decent business sense.
2. Get a public relations department and filter everything through it(in other words SHUT UP!).
3. Abandon half-hearted Open Source support(you are not winning any friends by being wishy washy)
4. Take that nugget of cash you so often brag about to either bring the Sparc architecture on line with your current competetion or work with partners to develop a new processor acrchitecture(AMD or VIA would both be good choices).
5. Polish off Solaris by adding things like LVM and better setup tools.
6. Come up with end to end solutions for your customers;i.e. servers+storage+software+service package deals(IBM and HP are kicking your butt in this arena)
7. Improve customer service so as to maintain the excellent customer base you have now.
8. Work closer with Microsoft to get Java to interact better with windows. Face the facts Windows is a huge money making market and it is the prefered business desktop OS. Trying to displace them there is a huge waste of resources. Be smart make SUN software products work better on the platform win win for everyone.
“5. Polish off Solaris by adding things like LVM and better setup tools”
I am not one to defend Sun or Solaris, but Solaris does have very a good volume manager that allows you to do everything LVM does and more.
“I am not one to defend Sun or Solaris, but Solaris does have very a good volume manager that allows you to do everything LVM does and more.
Are you talking about Solstice? or 3rd party Veritas? LVM is a nice clean basic volume manager present in both HP-UX and AIX standard. I feel i should not have to install seperate software (3rd party or otherwise) to do simple mirroring or striping on my Unix servers.
solaris is a great os, it is stable and feature packed, especialy 10 (not as stable as it could be now but it is being worked on) what bothers me about solaris is the damn ugle CDE (comon desktop environment) it is ugly and gooks old and unpleseant…
CDE is ugly. Why not just use FVWM-II? Or Windowmaker or Afterstep or blackbox or…
Or how about doing a little work, it isn’t a whole lot of work, just a little, like hiring 1 developer/sys admin to build up a default GNOME config that blows away the competition’s default. This is something I could do with about a month of effort @ 8 hours a day, so I know a big multi-billion dollar corp like Sun could do this hella fast with their army of devs.
Or just use KDE. Its nice and seems to work fine for most things. Not much work needed there.
i think they should do there own thing not gnome or kde but have it gnome and kde compiant
what bothers me about solaris is the damn ugle CDE (comon desktop environment) it is ugly and gooks old and unpleseant…
I find nothing wrong with CDE it does everything I need as an SA. Its relativily fast and very stable. Perhaps you are talking about sucess of Solaris as a desktop OS? Personally i think that is a market where SUN should stay out of. They make their money in the server arena and that is the playground where they should stay.
Does Sun have leadership?
Is Sun a hardware company?
a ‘solutions’ company?
a ‘java’ company?
What is Sun’s core business?
Personally, I like the colour of purple they use for their logo. I like their Sunrays. I even like how they design their tower and server cases. … That’s about it.
solaris would make a good desktop os it has the potential…why not make it a great server os (witch it is) and have it also be good for the desktop….
I’m impressed with where Novell is going and with SuSE and Ximian and Mono. If Sun took it over they would either kill these projects out right, or more probably they would just screw up the management and destroy the porjects inadvertatly. I’m not saying Sun has malice in this, but I don’t see them doing anything as benificial to the computing world as Novell is now – I really am looking forward to the SuSE version that brings all this together – 9.1 is still a little scattered for my taste.