The-Source.com

With apologies to Dave Mustaine.

Right, so, Novell is up for sale and there’s a couple dozen potential buyers.

First, let me tell you what is not going to happen:

Microsoft is not going to buy Novell.

Novell has served their purpose to Microsoft, which is basically acting as a lap-dog and providing Microsoft with good PR while simultaneously dividing and hurting the FLOSS community.

Microsoft could not have hoped for a better partner in the Open Source space, but Novell is of ever-diminishing use to their Redmond masters: anyone naïve enough to accept Microsoft’s “golly-gee-we’ve-changed” overtures has done so and Microsoft is now backing off “interoperability” talk and going back to the “customers just want one solution from one provider” strategy in public (which they never changed in private, mind you.)

Furthermore, Microsoft wants nothing to do directly with selling Linux. Novell served as a DMZ between the GPL and Microsoft, and staring across a DMZ is about as close to Linux as Microsoft wants to get. Microsoft is not about to get into the business of directly distributing/selling/supporting Linux.

What I suspect will happen

Novell will be bought up by some investment fund with the sole purpose of dismantling it. This “first buyer” won’t be a name anyone in the tech community is familiar with, and won’t really matter. The only thing this first buyer wants to do is get the cash reserve Novell has and then sell off the rest.

The first buyer in turn will consult with potential secondary buyers – buyers who, if they don’t already have an agreement with are very close to one – on exactly how to divide up Novell. Whoever is going to buy Novell isn’t doing so hoping they will make money – they are going in knowing they are going to make money, because they have the secondary buyers already lined up.

This is the more interesting  part, since Novell holds patents (and possibly copyrights and trademarks) that impact the wider community.

I fully expect a front company or two funded by Microsoft to poke around and pick up bits that they feel will be useful in the future against Linux. Less likely is Microsoft directly buying the same bits out in the open under their own name – expect a Baystar-like beard instead. There will be no big announcements of these sells, by the way.

OpenSUSE is greatly diminished under this scenario: as a community-only distro and without corporate backing, it’s looking at the bottom end of the Top 10 List. With Novell’s stained name out of the picture, OpenSUSE may become acceptable to people who actually care about FLOSS, so I won’t count it out of the picture.

Team Apologista takes a major hit, but sadly probably not a finishing blow. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a Mono-based spinoff. There’s money to be made there and Lord knows Team Apologista has some players with personal, professional and emotional investment in Mono that guarantees they won’t be giving up that fight.

And there’s an interesting issue there too – say you are a Team Apologista Superstar and now Novell is gone. You’ve spent the last 5 to 8 years focusing on nothing but C# and .NET. I’m not sure what Linux-centered companies are looking to hire that particular skill set? Oh well, the world always needs more Windows developers.

What might happen

A big buyer that is FLOSS-friendly (say IBM, though I don’t think they will) comes in and scoops everything up. The good in this scenario is that:

Almost anyone who takes over will be a better Novell than Novell was. A chimp could manage Novell better by throwing darts at a craps table, so it would be hard for a more incompetent hand to get behind the wheel there.

The FLOSS community dodges a bullet. Again, Novell was just about as anti-FLOSS and damaging to the community as possible while still pretending to be a member. To do more damage, you’d have to come right out and say that was your intention.

I’m hoping for this outcome, but I’m expecting the vulture funds.

From a FLOSS-friendly corporate standpoint, Novell has 2 major products of interest: OpenSUSE and Mono. So the hypothetical FLOSS-friendly buyer has to meet two important criteria:

1. They want an existing distro (which has plusses and minuses). 
2. They don’t mind taking on the whole Mono controversy.

I can tell you that if I had money to match my stunning good looks and devastating wit and was in charge of a FLOSS-Friendly company, I wouldn’t be buying Novell.

For one thing, I’d rather start up my own distro so I can manage expectations, shape the community and make sure I’m in control of those fanboys (Hello, Mark!).

For another thing, I wouldn’t want to enter the Mono stink – it’s one think to keep fighting a fight and a whole ‘nother thing to enter a fight you can avoid.

We Will See What We Will See

Novell’s done for no matter what happens, and I think that’s a long-term positive for the community.  

The fallout will be very interesting, but I can’t speculate farther ahead until the buying’s done.