Novell has already been doing some interesting things with Suse and Ximian, and this (and other matters) have attracted Sun to the company, who are mulling over whether to buy it or not.

Novell has been a serious player in the computing era for many years and has recently embraced Linux as the future of UNIX. Sun may be about to embark on its own Linux program, perhaps, and if so then re-inventing the wheel is a waste of time that could be solved by Sun's acquisition of the company.

But with assets estimated to be worth some $2.64 billion as of July 30th, Novell will not be cheap.

I hope they bring back DR-DOS

Novell sucks, so why bother?

The reason they should bother is because Novell have bought Suse. If Sun combines with that, it can create a Sun Linux or something with the combined resources of Sun, Novell, Suse, Ximian and god knows what else to have a serious shot at fighting Microsoft.

Good luck to them :=). They'll need some good products if they want a shot at Microsoft, or IBM for that matter.

Well, you see, that's true as well.

The reason you might see a kind of alliance (takeover) like this is because folks are really afraid of how good longhorn might turn out to be. Microsoft have obvious looked at what's good about ALL contemporary operating systems and used them in its new design. There is a UNIX like shell called msh and everything.

As for IBM, they will be somewhere behind this whole SUSE/Novell/Sun thing somewhere. A lot of these companies might unite to try to come up with something that really can topple Microsoft somehow. At least, that's the idea.

There has been a lot of speculation over the past few months what's going to be Sun's next move in order to keep themselves afloat in today's market. The fact is they have had a lot of success in the past but their future outlook is not the best with a relatively reduced software market and its hardware business (which relies on extremely expensive workstations) being compromised by networks consisting of many, many mid-range machines (which is cheaper to build as far as I've heard).