Novell Announces Agreement to Acquire Leading Enterprise Linux Technology Company SUSE LINUX
When Novell bought Ximian a few months ago, I felt it was at least a good move from Ximian. I felt some extra financial backing would help them out. I also saw that Novell could possibly make this a good investment by making themselves some extra cash.
Also, I think that if Novell did things well, they would put out an amazing version of Netware on Linux with some kickass GUI tools (from the Ximian folks). A strong directory service that was cross platform to Windows and Linux would be a plus for both, plus it does damage to Microsoft by pushing away things like Active Directory, which is Windows specific (well, unless you include a Samba and Kerberos hack).
So, Novell buying SUSE could be a good thing. It means deeper integration of Ximian, SUSE and Novell. It means the same system across the whole enterprise. The problem, it means deeper integration and the same system across the whole enterprise. Does this mean both Ximian's and Novell's products are now going to cater to ONLY the new Novell Linux? That worries me.
The biggest reason it worries me? If I can't get Ximian Desktop working on my linux dist, I am going to be very annoyed. I really dig Ximian, have used Evolution forever (I started using Evolution in late 2000) and would be really unhappy if I was forced to use Novell Linux to run it.
The second reason it worries me is Novell almost seems to be making the Netware mistake again. If they pigeonhole their customers and potential customers in to a single system (like Netware is these days) it would be a very bad thing and they would lose potential customers. If an enterprise is already standardized on something like Red Hat, they aren't going to want to run different system just for their directory services.
So, we'll see what happens. Hopefully they will be smart about all this and it will help propel Novell and Linux forward.
