Novell sees lower profit and revenue

[Bill Campbell]

On Sun, Aug 28, 2005, Roger Oberholtzer wrote:
>On Sat, 2005-08-27 at 17:02 -0500, Lonni J Friedman wrote:
>> On Sat, 27 Aug 2005, Collins Richey wrote:
>> > < rant>
>> > This is not good news at all. I've never been extremely fond of the
>> > SuSE offering, but there needs to be a competitor for Red Hat,
>> > otherwise the future of Linux may well be controlled by one entity
>> > which has already demonstrated that it has the needs of mega
>> > commercial users and its own bottom line firmly in sight.
>> > </rant>
>> 
>> While i agree that RH needs competition, i don't see anything wrong with
>> RH focusing on 'mega commercial users' and its own bottom line.  Clearly
>> that is a business plan that works.  SuSE doesn't seem to have such a
>> plan.  And Fedora Core focuses on the non-mega commerical user quite
>> nicely, in my opinion.
>
>I have not read the announcement (I know...), but Novell is a big
>company. Is the decreased earnings and all due to the Linux unit, or the
>other parts of Novell? Of course, it effects the whole company no
>matter. 

Tt would be nice if Novell collects the 95% of SCO's revenue for Unix
licenses that Novell claims they are owed under their licensing agreement
with the original Santa Cruz Operation.  Of particular interest are the
millions of dollars Microsoft paid, under the guise of Unix licenses, to
SCOG to finance their legal actions against IBM and Linux users.

Novell also appears to be making serious efforts to encourage ISVs,
appliance systems developers, etc. to work with SuSE Linux.  A significant
aspect of this is aggressive pricing for SLES (Suse Linux Enterprise
System) which has much longer support cycles than the standard SuSE Linux
retail packages.  The longer support period makes it feasible to install
commercial systems without having to deal with the Release-of-the-Month
issues.

Bill
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