I didn’t know where else to put this,so I put it here.
The bid put the world’s No. 2 maker of the open source Linux operating system into play. Analysts said several large software makers may consider bidding as they could sell their business programs alongside Novell’s version of Linux, widely used by financial institutions and telecommunications carriers.
The article here:
Elliott offers to take Novell private for $2 bln | Reuters
This may be of importance to us, what do you guys think?
My initial thought would be “not much” since openSUSE is a community project but that would also be ignoring the truth.
On the one side, it could be scary because you never know what somebody buying Novell would do to the Linux division or the Mono division.
It could strangle openSUSE if there are people paid by Novell to work on openSUSE or in taking moves in SLED/SLES to openSUSE. I think it goes the other way (SLED/SLES taking advances from openSUSE) but I just don’t know. Either way, if this intellectual supply line exists, it could be disrupted.
If Microsoft or Oracle were to buy Novell then that would outright suck, and I would fear for the future of Linux unless the key components are released in the wild somehow.
On the other hand, it may also lead to pushing further advances in Linux which benefits the community/Linux marketshare overall!
the scary thing is, that its a hedgefond. this may lead to unbearable work-conditions, suspension of staff and, whats also common for hedefonds, having the company bear the investment cost.
There’s no doubt there would be layoffs in some divisions, but Linux is Novell’s only money maker these days, and I doubt they would shed that. They might even give it an infusion and make it their flagship product, if it isn’t already.
There is the possibility of a bidding war to go on, the question is who will win?
This could be good, and may even the the opportunity to shed off some dead weight and focus even more on the Linux side of things.
Elliott Associates? A private investment company? 
What it will gonna do with Novell? Sell it? 
Starting a bidding war then walking away if nobody else bids is a likely scenario 
If someone does buy Novell I hope its a company that understands the importance of the open source community and wants to help improve things(if something does happen I’m hoping for IBM they have been involved with the development of open source software for quite some time.) but I would really like to see Novell make it through this!
Without any reliance or sell-out to Microsoft. 
No, I am not saying anything negative about the previous Novell-Microsoft deal.
If novell became private it could be a good thing, I mean look at Canonical it does pretty well for a private company.
The thing is these days being a public company is a dangerous game, with the economy being uncertain maybe in the future more companies will go private to protect the company from being dragged down by a shaky stock market.
This blog piece nicely illustrates what has/is/could happen.
http://www.consortiuminfo.org/standardsblog/article.php?story=20100304051547830
The last part, about people coming in and buying up pieces they want as part-and-parcell with the Elliott acquisition is an interesting twist.
Somebody could offer to buy SuSE as part of Elliott’s purchase so it immediately gets passed on at sale. What about the other technologies?
Could Microsoft turn around and purchase the Mono team? Use them to extend .NET and Silverlight and leave Mono and Moonlight in a hitch? Or use the Mono team to take the official .NET and Silverlight cross-platform so they have full control of it all?
Hang on to your suspenders guys, this is going to be a rough year I suspect!
interesting read, thanks…but he missed entirely the info on Unix
patents…
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palladium
I too thought it was interesting, but then I realized I had misread the thread title as “Novell is on the game” :O. lol! Oops.