Elliott Associates made an offer for Novell today at almost US$2 billion ($5.75 per share). GigaOM reported on this, as did the Associated Press and the Wall Street Journal.
There is as yet no response from Novell; company officials are expected to announce their response on Wednesday, 3 March 2010.
Any takeover would affect a large number of things, including open source projects and current Linux offerings. Some of these include:
- Novell v. SCO. This court case is over the copyrights to the UNIX name and code; it remains open and active, in spite of SCO’s bankruptcy filing.
- SUSE. Novell’s acquisition of SUSE brought SUSE under the Novell umbrella, and there are several products available, including the open source OpenSUSE.
- Ximian. Ximian was acquired by Novell years ago, which brought Linux GNOME expertise in-house and led to the development of Mono for Linux.
- Groupwise. Groupwise is Novell’s competition to Microsoft’s Exchange.
This should be interesting; let’s see what Novell says tomorrow.
UNIX Administratosphere 