IT Watchdog - News and Views on IT

Gates and Ballmer about Linux

Microsoft sings a new tune on Linux: in March 1999, Bill Gates described it as a competitor in the student and hobbyist market with no significance in the commercial market.

Novell taken over by Sun Microsystems, by IBM, or by a third party ?

Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's president, caused quite a stir when he mentioned that Sun could use its billions of cash to make a number of acquisitions to bolster its Linux strategy. Schwarz included the possibility of buying Novell, and this generated a lot of remarks by market analysts and competitors, actually anyone but Novell itself...

We think the acquisition of Novell would be bad for Linux in general, and for Suse in particular, as the strength of Suse lies in its hardware independence, and this would come to an end with such an acquisition.

However, something will happen in the currently overhyped Linux market: IBM is annoyed by Red Hat because it is now selling a Java application server that competes directly with IBM's WebSphere. As a result, IBM may now be more enthusiastic about Novell/Suse (in which it made a 50 million USD investment when Novell bought Suse) and this may force Red Hat to find a financial partner. Unfortunately for Red Hat, its stock is hugely overvalued, so it is not an attractive takeover target. On the other hand, the hardware vendors IBM, HP, Sun, Dell and others, who are now selling Red Hat-based servers may buy Red Hat to thwart each other's Linux strategy.

The Linux story continues (certainly in San Francisco at the annual LinuxWorld conference), but we think that there is a bigger chance of IBM buying Novell than Sun buying Novell...

A very good article about this is at http://zdnet.com.com/2102-1104_2-5297829.html?tag=printthis.