Wall Street hammers for sale sign in Novell lawn

Commercial operating system distributor and software powerhouse wannabe Novell isn't doing the credibility of its long-term business plan any favors by talking about selling part or all of the company to potential suitors. Barron's, the Wall Street watching rag of the Dow Jones empire controlled Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, …

[David Perry 2]

Support in case of a sales

As you guys mentioned, if Novell was bought up by another company (in the way Oracle bought Virtual Iron) they'd probably end up keeping their support staff. Where I work, most of our core services run on netware (which for some reason runs like a slug on VMware, and we have a LOT of virtual servers) and we have some new stuff that is MS only and Identity Manager usually does a good job of keeping our eDIrectory synchronised to AD nicely - so as long as bug fixes were kept up and support contracts honoured by competent people, that's probably what most of us would worry about.

[Hayden Clark]

....bought by Microsoft! Aaaagh!

cuz then MS would own the UNIX source code.

Game over.

[Anonymous Coward]

@Hayden

GNU's Not Unix!

[Ian Michael Gumby]

This is a warning sign...

Open Source is not a sustainable model to build a business on.

Unless of course your business model is to buidl a company up to a certain size on hype and then sell it.

Yes there are companies that are surviving around the open source model. And there are companies that built their business around open source products. However, how many and how successful?

Stallman's view was a bit myopic and short sighted. I don't think he thought about the longer term ramifications.

The blue headed boffin because you're getting into the discussion on the economics of the software industry along with some of the global economics of software development....

[Anonymous Coward]

@I.M.Gumby

If you looked at RedHat you would see their results bucking the general downward trend for closed source software companies. Is that a sign that Open Source is a more sustainable model to build a business on?

Novell may have a big chunk of cash from the MS coupons, but it isn't clear how much business they lost by making their deal with MS.

[g e]

Now if only

SCO had any money left

At all.

Hmmm.. better unthink that quickly...