Posted on 04/27/2011 11:25:21 AM PDT by ShadowAce
Today is the last day that Novell (NASDAQ:NOVL) will exist as a publicly traded company. Trading in Novell's stock will cease at the close of business, as the company is taken private.
Novell is being acquired by privately held Attachmate in a deal that closes today. The $2.2 billion acquisition was first announced in November of 2010.
Attachmate is paying $6.10 per Novell share and will keep Novell as a wholly owned subsidiary. Novell shareholders approved the deal back in February. The final step that was required for the deal to move forward was the completion of a patent deal.
As part of the Attachmate acquisition, Novell is selling 882 patents to a group called CTPN Holdings for $450 million. CPTN is a group that includes Microsoft, Apple and EMC. The patent sales was contested by open source advocates as well as authorities in Europe. The fear was that Novell's open source patents could be used to attack open source vendors.
The other concern was about what would happen to Novell's UNIX copyrights, which were the subject of a court battle with SCO. Novell has publicly stated that Attachmate would be holding onto the UNIX copyrights.
Thanks to the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ), Attachmate will be holding onto a lot more than just UNIX. The DoJ adjusted the CPTN patent sale in a move designed to prevent attacks against the open source ecosystem.
As part of the adjusted deal, Microsoft will be selling back to Attachmate all of the Novell patents that Microsoft would have otherwise acquired. Attachmate in turn will continue to receive a license for the use of the Novell patents.
"Novell has had many chapters in its 28-year history and today marks the start of a new, exciting chapter," John Dragoon, the Chief Marketing Office at Novell blogged. "As Novell joins forces with The Attachmate Group, the result will be a powerful portfolio of companies united by a common purpose and dedicated team."
What happens to SUSE?
Good question. I hope it continues on.
My knowledge of Netware from version 2.x on made my career.
It’s sad that it’s now gone.
I’ve never used Suse but I’ve heard good things about it.
...blah...blah...blah. One of the most egregious examples of merger-speak I've heard in a while.
“My knowledge of Netware from version 2.x on made my career.”
And I’ve been on every version since, and now I’m doing migrations involving Novell products.
Novell had great products and a very loyal following in the techie community. That is the only explanation one can have as Novell survived a ton of really bad corporate decisions.
For instance — did you know that Microsoft tried to buy rights to eDirectory back in 2000?
I feel the same way... I started out with NetWare 2.0a, got my CNE during the 2.15 days, became a Master CNE and Master CNI, and worked with it through NetWare 6.5. While the company I now work for doesn't have any NetWare servers anymore, we've brought in a bunch of SLED systems to replace Windows desktops, and we're in the process of migrating off of Exchange to Zimbra, running on SLES.
I miss much of Novell's technology, like the file system security and "salvage" features (MS Shadow Copy doesn't work with our volume sizes), and a REAL directory, like eDir, as opposed to AD which is just a bunch of domains cobbled together.
Mark
I agree. When 4.11 came out, the volume mounts were in 45 seconds instead of 10 minutes in ver 2.x. And NDS worked well. Unfortunately, I didn’t realize that on my first install of it, I used the entire companies’ name so guess what the context was like? I guess I wasn’t the only one to do that. Much better to keep it short.
NSS really kicked butt as its mount was less than 10 seconds for enormous volumes and didn’t require as much memory.
They were late to have a decent IP stack as well as multiple CPU support. I don’t miss abends though. They always came back but my boss would always ask why it went down and I ended up saying, it’s just Netware. Every once in a while you’d get something in the abend.log but tech support always said apply the latest patches before they’d worry about it.
I like 6.5, it seemed stable. Groupwise was decent enough except for the DST patch. I cheated and only updated gwia and it seemed to work.
I loved Netware. MS’s directory service still hasn’t come anywhere near what Netware could do. And don’t get me started about the salvage utilities, which someone else has already mentioned.
We stopped using Novell products when Netware 6.5 came out, and Novell didn’t even make an attempt to keep us. We went from Netware to samba running on freebsd to MS AD. So it’s been a slow steady downhill slide for us. :-)
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