SUSE is Ballnux, not GNU/Linux

Summary: Increasing consensus that Novell's SUSE is being bought and VMware is a likely buyer

Novell is said to be selling SUSE and The Wall Street Journal names VMware as the likely buyer. But what are others saying?

Well, Zonker is seemingly concerned about the OpenSUSE project (as opposed to SLE*) he contributed a lot to as a Novell employee. He writes:

A quick disclaimer: Novell is my former employer. I left the company at the end of January, and as far as I know the $2 billion offer from Elliott Associates wasn't even in discussions then. At any rate, I don't have any inside knowledge (call me, Ian...) so what you're reading here is pure (if educated) speculation. I don't have any vested interest in the buyer, except a hope that my former colleagues will land with a company that will treat them well and respect the openSUSE Project.

[...]

This brings me to the final choice I'm tossing in the hat: VMware. VMware has been buying other open source solutions lately (Zimbra, SpringSource) so it doesn't seem like a stretch to say that the company might want to add SUSE Linux to its collection. VMware might also want to have a Linux distribution to help its customers and partners build more appliances that will run on VMware's virtualization products.

[...]

And a quick mention, since it's sure to come up — what about Microsoft? This seems terribly unlikely. It's hard to imagine how Microsoft would get past the antitrust issues, to begin with.

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols (SJVN), a longtime proponent of SUSE, is making some guesses too, e.g.:

I don't see either Dell or Oracle being in the mix. Dell's strongest Linux partnerships are with Ubuntu and Red Hat. Oracle already has its own Unbreakable Linux, which is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

So, what do you think? VMware? HP? Dell? Oracle? None of the above?

A few weeks ago (end of August) SJVN mentioned VMware as a logical buyer. That's what The Wall Street Journal says too. ⬆