El Reg reports
Attachmate, the software shop that headhunted Novell and SUSE Linux, is itself being bought out by Micro Focus International.
The mainframe and COBOL specialist is acquiring Attachmate Group from its parent company Wizard in a deal calculated at $2.3bn before costs.
[...]
Attachmate gives MicroFocus access to SUSE and Novell, business units bought by the company in 2010 for $2.2bn. Novell owned SUSE Linux, which it had bought in 2003 for $210m. Under Attachmate, the two were broken apart.
putting 882 patents in its Linux portfolio up for sale to a consortium backed by Microsoft.
SUSE is chief steward of the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server while Novell has been re-shaped to sell end-point management and collaboration software.
Related Stories
SUSE Linux Sold for $2.5 Billion
British software company Micro Focus International has agreed to sell SUSE Linux and its associated software business to Swedish private equity group EQT Partners for $2.535 billion.
Also at The Register, Linux Journal, MarketWatch, and Reuters.
Previously: SuSE Linux has a New Owner
HPE Wraps Up $8.8bn Micro Focus Software Dump Spin-Off
Related: SUSE Pledges Endless Love for btrfs; Says Red Hat's Dumping Irrelevant
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Wednesday September 17 2014, @01:40PM
This is like watching dinosaur pr0n. Watch this near extinct brontosaurus doing it doggie style with that near extinct triceratops.
My troll meter is twitching, you can't seriously post about cobol and novell and suse and retro obsolete stuff like that without someone beginning to think its a practical joke. I suppose adding a dead cellphone OS or a punch card manufacturer would be going to far for anyones troll meter.
The financial numbers are insane for a pile of walking dead companies. Like announcing Roasanne Barr just signed a multimillion dollar modeling contract with the sports illustrated swimsuit issue.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by opinionated_science on Wednesday September 17 2014, @01:44PM
I love opensuse. Just works.
The coolest tool (if you like to write/build your own software) is the Suse build studio. It is an online tools to build software for many platforms with many package configurations. V. cool.
I just hope this new company doesn't screw it up.
(Score: 1) by Tanuki64 on Wednesday September 17 2014, @01:46PM
Suse dead? Since when? In at least Germany it is very alive. For some of the commercial users it's probably important news. Though I really doubt even one of them reads SN.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday September 17 2014, @02:05PM
My opinion is probably tainted by sites like
http://w3techs.com/technologies/details/os-suse/all/all [w3techs.com]
"SuSE is used by 0.4% of all the websites whose operating system we know."
I guess on the bright side, if 0.4% is worth $2B or so, then the 23% ubuntu has implies the sales price of ubuntu would be $115B, or even slowly dying redhat would be worth $24B at this valuation.
0.4% of the world market is so small, that even with the amplification factor of (size of germany) vs (size of world) that even in Germany even if only Germans use SUES, that would still imply practically no one uses SUSE even in Germany.
Not being in Germany I had the impression Debian pretty much owns Germany, like everywhere else.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 17 2014, @02:11PM
Not being in Germany I had the impression Debian pretty much owns Germany, like everywhere else.
Debian is developers. Debian is geeks. But in a commercial environment? If by some miracle it is not Microsoft? Good chance it is Suse.
So, this was it for me with SN. This is a showstopper. Good bye.
SoylentNews only allows a user with your karma to post 25 times per day (more or less, depending on moderation). You've already shared your thoughts with us that many times. Take a breather, and come back and see us in 24 hours or so. If you think this is unfair, please email admin@soylentnews.org with your username "Tanuki64". Let us know how many comments you think you've posted in the last 24 hours.
(Score: 2) by zafiro17 on Wednesday September 17 2014, @02:26PM
SUSE has been my go-to distro since 2001, when I uninstalled Win98 and never looked back. I don't have any insight into SUSE's popularity, but I suspect it's not being primarily used for websurfing, so it's potentially not going to be showing up well in systems that try to guess distro's popularity by that measure. It's always been in the top 5 of Distrowatch's statistics, and it seems to be one of the "big guns" of Linux distros, so that must count for something.
My only gripe with SUSE is RPM and related tools instead of APT-GET, which is so phenomenally awesome. But other than that, it's got some tools that make things damned easy, and you can get huge amounts of configuration done - even over a SSH connection - using YaST - without touching the command line. That's useful.
I used it on a VPS server for a while before getting burned by an end-of-life that meant I couldn't get up-to-date packages. I turned to FreeBSD for my servers and have never regretted it. But on my desktop, even though I occasionally run PC-BSD and Bodhi Linux, SUSE is my first choice. Takes a while to install but it doesn't give me any hassle whatsoever with things like printers, runlevels, network settings and resettings and reconfigs, and has a huge repository of packages, plus a build service that makes it easy to get other software compiled and running on openSUSE.
Attachmate has done good things to the distro and they're poised to do some more innovation, especially around YaST, which has been an essentially underutilized resource ever since the original, German SUSE company was bought out by Novell. Novell, for their part, wasted a lot of time dicking around under Miguel deIcaza's "supervision" porting a bunch of KDE stuff to Gnome, and then back.
If you want a good KDE distro, SUSE is one of the best. And they're clearly making money off it, so good for Attachmate and good for Micro.
Dad always thought laughter was the best medicine, which I guess is why several of us died of tuberculosis - Jack Handey
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Wednesday September 17 2014, @05:04PM
I miss Corel linux... thanks Microsoft for killing it. You bastards.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by Blackmoore on Wednesday September 17 2014, @08:44PM
that is odd. but we're looking into it. afterall is it counting you- or AC in general? I have no clue. was it 25 from your IP in 24 hours?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by cykros on Wednesday September 17 2014, @10:16PM
Heh, just a timely reminder that just because we got Slashcode functioning over here doesn't mean all of the kinks are worked out, or even that the admins have had a chance to comb through everything.
Sounds like a policy the old site had, at least back when it was on Slashcode. With our userbase though, it'd definitely be nice to see the minimums inflated a bit, as chasing away reasonable traffic isn't something we should be engaged in quite yet if you ask me. Sounds like it just had to do with anti-flood measures that came up at one point or another in the old site's long and varied history.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Thexalon on Wednesday September 17 2014, @02:19PM
More to the point, that suggests the value of Linux itself as a server platform is at a minimum something like $200B. I'd actually guess that's undervalued, because of organizations like Debian that are quite clearly not for sale. That's about half the market cap of Microsoft. And it also doesn't include all the other uses of Linux, including embedded systems, Android phones, and even desktops.
A basic rule in the tech industry: Nerds beat suits, given sufficient time.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by ticho on Wednesday September 17 2014, @02:50PM
Are you really judging real use by something as miniscule as web servers usage? There is more than web to computing. Suse is being deployed by the hundreds around Europe to run SAP with many terabytes large databases. SAP even has some sort of "alliance" with Suse, where they prefer them over Red Hat. All the new SAP HANA solutions run on Suse. I know, I have to support and deploy these systems, even though I would prefer Red Hat.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday September 17 2014, @03:24PM
"Are you really judging real use by something as miniscule as web servers usage?"
Yes, and making a boolean judgement based on the ratios being utterly ridiculous like being over 50 times smaller than each of the major competitors.
I agree with you completely in that the error bars are way too high to make a useful judgment of close competitors like Ubuntu vs Debian.
Based on one sig fig engineering data I wouldn't make predictions about the ranking of size of very similar compact cars, at least without a better yardstick. But the ratios here are comparing the tiniest smartcar to the largest open pit mining dump truck ever made. Actually that ratio isn't big enough. Its like comparing a barbie doll to the statue of liberty. No matter how far off your yardstick calibration, one is obviously really big and the other is obviously really small.
I don't think SAP really matters outside the very largest megacorps. Everyone other than multinational megacorps run when they hear it. Google searches give really weird results like there's only 101000 total installed SAP servers (probably many at the same site) yet 254000 "customers".
SAP is very strange in that nobody likes it but every big company sends them absolutely enormous sums of money. Its very expensive and hard to use and lowers productivity quite a bit, but its very popular. Generally companies in deep decline flock to it as a silver bullet which doesn't help with the rep.
Its a strange, but fundamentally irrelevant software company. I wouldn't read very much into it.
Its kind of the Lotus Notes of the 2010s.
I'm sure a tiny little smart car is very personally important to the person who owns/admins it, etc etc, yes yes very important that the owner commutes to work, at least to that one owner. Just don't pretend its the same size as a 150 ton open pit mining dump truck.
(Score: 1) by ticho on Thursday September 18 2014, @01:48PM
"Generally companies in deep decline flock to it as a silver bullet which doesn't help with the rep."
Well, I can tell you that SAP is being used internally by many more medium to big companies than you would think, very few of them being "in decline".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 17 2014, @03:10PM
Probably not too surprising for a distribution that focuses on the desktop.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 17 2014, @01:49PM
IIRC Novell held part of the rights to AT&T Unix that The SCO Group asserted during its patent trolling run of the mid 00's. I presume those went to Attachmate and now, to MicroFocus.
If Groklaw were still around we'd have a nice little read about that this morning. Too bad.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Wednesday September 17 2014, @02:14PM
MicroFocus was originally the vendor of a non-mainframe COBOL implementation that competed with Fujitsu and maybe a few others. The selling point was to do development offline, to not use expensive mainframe computing cycles for syntax checks and stuff that could be done on PCs. The problem was, if you didn't have a mainframe, you didn't have DB2, CICS, VSAM etc. Compiling COBOL wasn't easy without these dependencies. So MF lashed together some technologies to allow you to simulate those dependencies. Most of this stuff was obviated by falling mainframe prices - no one really cared about doing development offline any longer, after a point.
Because DB2 was a dependency, a vendor called XDC wrote an API-compatible (DSNHLI, if you know what that is) clone of DB2. It was supposed to let you run COBOL programs with embedded SQL, and do any DDL you needed to create objects. So, MicroFocus buys XDC right when IBM releases DB2 UDB for Linux and Windows. Oops. Not a smart move. The "U" in UDB was for the Universal API, so this real DB2 (which IBM began giving away) rendered XDC obsolete. Development started moving to Java in Big Blue land, leaving COBOL as a legacy mainframe language for back-end processing.
MicroFocus became a hot potato in the late 90s/early 00s as it was sold from company to company. At one time, an ODBC driver vendor owned it if I remember right. Eventually, having almost zero value, MicroFocus was spun off into its own company again. Now they seem to be acquiring also-ran companies.
I will say the MF compiler was decent. I used it on Linux for a while to test a product that could be called from COBOL and had to be mixed-language compatible. (Including fun surprises like MF COBOL storing binary words in big-endian format on little-endian architectures like x86 - I have no idea how they did math with those words, but it had to be slow.) The most bizarre thing I ever did with MF was compile a COBOL routine on Windows as a DLL and call it from a Delphi GUI program. I can't remember how all that worked, which means the shock treatments were worth every penny.
MicroFocus is basically a really expensive solution to a problem no one has. COBOL is a back-end language for mainframe business logic, mainly in CICS transactions, but new development is in Java with WebSphere. Your front-end Java crud calls MQ Series (now WebSphere MQ, since IBM needs to rename products every few years) to post a message, and your batch CICS back-end does the business logic processing. No one needs to compile and run COBOL anywhere but the mainframe.
Every few years, I see an article about some company migrating something off the mainframe, and I know before reading it that it's a MicroFocus placed article. I guess they have enough business to survive, which is something to give them credit for.
And, remember, IBM has their own COBOL compiler with a full ANS COBOL parser. They call it "Enterprise COBOL" now. They also have code generators for x64/x86. IBM could very easily put MF out of business overnight by releasing an open-source COBOL compiler. Remember, they had Visual Age COBOL running on OS/2 in the 90s, so they have the technology. Probably wouldn't take them more than a few months to create a clang/LLVM or GCC front-end COBOL compiler. But there's zero demand for it, and not worth the effort. People just don't use COBOL enough off of the mainframe to be worth doing.
Attachmate sells a PC-based mainframe terminal emulator, so I guess MF is covering its bases - if you don't want to move COBOL compilation off your mainframe, they'll sell you a terminal emulator.
IBM supports SUSE with their non-mainframe enterprise stuff (WebSphere, DB2, MQ, etc) so there's a sort of synergy here. Makes sense for MF to have SUSE and support customers who rely on it for their WebSphere. I want to say SUSE is one of the distros that have been compiled to run in IBM VM/CMS as a virtual machine image, but I just can't remember and the shock treatments have erased my memory of where to look it up.
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 17 2014, @02:34PM
Mod parent up. I have passing familiarity with some of those pieces and he's got some good stuff there
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday September 17 2014, @03:49PM
" Most of this stuff was obviated by falling mainframe prices - no one really cared about doing development offline any longer, after a point."
HERCULES to the rescue! Pizza almost certainly knows the software I'm talking about, others can google.
Sure its illegal to run licensed software products on an unlicensed hardware emulator, but with little more than a wink and a nod everyone does it anyway.
Speaking as a guy who suffered thru MF cobol classes around the turn of the century and worked at a mainframe shop in the early 90s there is no avoiding the fact that java is the new cobol. Hyper verbose, NIH to the max, complicated business logic, nobody but fortune 50 companies wants it that way. Everyone else sees it as a liability. Java is like SAP in that way.
I screwed around a lot with hercules and mvs360 and the turnkey system maybe a decade ago. If it was good enough to run a multinational megacorp in 1965, I'm going to fool around with it in 2005 and see what I can learn from retrocomputing and expanding my brain into new (new to me) architectures and thought patterns. Strange stuff.
I wish in 2014 linux had good free batch queuing as good as we had in the 60s with MVS. Someone will likely implement that someday. Hopefully not into systemd. Torque/PBS/Maui just aren't quite up to that level. Close, though.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Wednesday September 17 2014, @04:17PM
Hercules has always been a raw nerve for me. If there's a "skills shortage" and qualified mainframe programmers and systems programmers are in short supply, why wouldn't IBM release an educational version of its turnkey MVS system (what do they call it? ADCD?) for people to use with Hercules? I mean, it's not like I could do real data processing on a laptop. But I could learn how to use JCL to compile COBOL programs. You'd have a whole generation of college students getting into mainframes for the first time. What better way to learn systems programming that setting up Hercules? They'd have a whole generation getting excited about the mainframe for the first time, and ease their "skills shortage".
Oh, no. What did I just type? Use JCL to compile COBOL programs?
There's a magic potion that makes you forget about that stuff.
Bleach.
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday September 17 2014, @06:10PM
Well the turnkey is 3rd party uncopyrighted all the way. Yeah the ADCD or whatever its call is a full system from ibm but it's all locked down illegal although in theory you can run it. One minor problem is if you think the MVS turnkey is mysterious and huge and complicated, modern zos is like 1000x bigger so its almost hopeless.
This might be some of their fear, you can release it, but nobody being able to figure it out other than the experts might be more bad press than good. Unlike unix / bsd / linux I don't believe you can self teach on MVS, but thats just my personal belief.
I could figure out how to use fortran on the pdp8 all myself with the manuals, but I had to get help to run cobol on mvs.
(Score: 2) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Wednesday September 17 2014, @06:36PM
The MVS 3.8 turnkey system is so obsolete that if you learned it you wouldn't learn anything you could use on modern z/OS. I know 3.8 doesn't have ISPF (the full-screen stuff - have fun using TSO commands without it), and I can't remember if it has JES2 or the older HASP. Even recently, z/OS is getting so heavily dependent on OMVS (the POSIX subsystem) that you basically have to know UNIX, too. But I said goodbye to all that and never looked back, especially after the shock treatments. It is getting hopeless. No one can grasp it all any longer, so IBM is releasing pre-built systems. (That's one reason I wouldn't get into mainframes if I was young - there's just less work to do these days, causing high unemployment, and you're competing with people who have decades of experience. Will be a long time before that works its way out of the pipeline.)
One thing that UNIX/Linux/FreeBSD/etc can't really teach you is file allocation. On MVS/zOS you have to know ahead of time how big your file will be, and what record format it will use. DEC VMS had a little of that, but almost all modern operating systems have abandoned this concept. Rightfully so. (You can, of course, code your own file formats that use fixed-length records. But you have to code your own utilities, too.) But you haven't used a real operating system until you've had to calculate blocking sizes, record lengths, extents, and so on. That stuff is a whole different world.
And the most important thing ... wait, what's that sound? Oh, a drone just landed. With my same-day delivery package! Let me open it... yes! A 64-ounce bottle of bleach!
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 2) by choose another one on Wednesday September 17 2014, @11:20PM
They are better than surviving, look at their share price over past few years (and note that there have also been some very big special dividends to return even more money to shareholders). For a solution to a problem no one has, they are sure selling a lot of it.
More background: the current top management team are the same guys who turned Morse around before selling it to debt-laden monstrosity 2e2 (who destroyed it and themselves). They moved to MF and executed the same kind of turnaround. I made good money on the Morse turnaround and some more since on MF by watching that management team, but I wish I had bet the house on Morse and re-invested all of it in MF at the times I did - be retired by now, more than comfortably.
(Score: 2) by Blackmoore on Wednesday September 17 2014, @03:26PM
<b>putting 882 patents in its Linux portfolio up for sale to a consortium backed by Microsoft.</b>
When Attachmate bought Novell originally they had wanted to sell those patents to a group consisting of Microsoft, Apple, and Oracle. who in turn were going to license those patents - which previously were being held by Novell, who allowed the free use of those previously.
What Patents? well, quite a lot of what you would consider important to the existence of the internet and networking in general.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 17 2014, @03:46PM
I don't like the sound of that... M$ already makes more money off Android than windoze phoney. http://www.zdnet.com/microsofts-most-profitable-mobile-operating-system-android-7000015094/ [zdnet.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 17 2014, @06:44PM
This has been covered here before.
China Reveals Microsoft's Secret List of Android-killer Patents [soylentnews.org]
The AC's comment there gets very close to the mark: It's all about filesystems.
Specifically, M$ got exFAT written into the SD Card spec, so everyone who uses those pays an M$ Tax.
(All the other "Android" patents claimed by M$ to apply have been shown to be generic and bogus.)
The comment by physicsmajor [soylentnews.org] and the one by me [soylentnews.org] are highly applicable.
...and if M$'s OS supported filesystems other than their own 4th-rate stuff and did so out of the box, this wouldn't be an issue at all.
-- gewg_
(Score: 2) by cykros on Wednesday September 17 2014, @10:22PM
You don't like that Microsoft is seeing direct financial incentive to put more resources into free software than their proprietary software?
What exactly isn't to like? If only it happened more often that free software showed direct financial incentives like this, perhaps we'd have moved out of the proprietary dark ages long ago...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 17 2014, @06:51PM
That somehow got truncated in the summary.
The original reads:
Attachmate once earned the ire of the open source community for taking on Novell and then putting 882 patents in its Linux portfolio up for sale to a consortium backed by Microsoft.
-- gewg_
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Wednesday September 17 2014, @11:35PM
"The mainframe and COBOL specialist"...
compiling...