Practical Technology

Let’s play a game. Who do you think Red Hat’s biggest enemy will be in a few years? Will it be Microsoft, Linux’s traditional enemy? Could SUSE, the number two business Linux distributor, make a try for the top? Might Ubuntu’s Canonical make its big break into corporate Linux? All good guesses, but Red Hat [...]

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Who really bought Novell? Of course, I know that Attachmate is the company that’s on record as purchasing Novell for $2.2-billion, while Microsoft shelled out $450 million for some Novell intellectual property. But tell me, where did Attachmate get $2.2-billion? Could it have been Microsoft? I think so. I’ve covered Attachmate over the years, so [...]

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VMware wanted to buy Novell, but the virtualization company didn’t want to buy everything that Novell’s board wanted to sell. At the same time, Microsoft had made it clear that it hated the idea of VMware, a Microsoft rival, ending up as Novell’s owner. The result was that Attachmate bought Novell for $2.2 billion while [...]

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I’m not the least bit surprised that the Wall Street Journal is reporting that VMware will be buying Novell’s Linux business. After all, I suggested that VMware could really use Novell’s SUSE Linux for its future, and I also knew that Novell was in hot and heavy merger and acquisition talks earlier this week. My [...]

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A friend recently asked me if I really wanted VMware, a company with a former Microsoft guy in charge, VMware, to buy Novell? His unspoken message was “Wouldn’t that be horrible for Novell’s Linux?” Bless his heart, clearly he hasn’t been paying attention to the relationship between VMware and Microsoft. VMware, a semi-independent fiefdom of [...]

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