Comment Articles

Why IBM wanted a piece of Novell's SuSE action

Tags:
Licence,
License,
Novell,
Copyright

David Berlind CNET News

Published: 06 Nov 2003 16:20 GMT

As Novell chief technical officer Alan Nugent told me yesterday, notwithstanding a $50m (£29.72m) injection from IBM, his company's decision to acquire Linux distributor SuSE was backed by a significant amount of market and technical rationale. But legally speaking -- an area into which Nugent offered me only a peek -- the move may go down in history as pure chess brilliance on behalf of IBM and Novell, in one of this industry's most notorious power struggles.

Although no official from Novell or IBM would come out and say it, a reading between the various official lines reveals how IBM may have cleverly dodged the Linux indemnification issue while ripping the legal rug right out from under SCO.

The first clue appeared in a prepared statement from IBM spokesperson Michael Darcy: "IBM's investment in Novell is consistent with the company's history related to Linux. We've invested in a number of Linux distributors, including Red Hat, SuSE, and TurboLinux, in the past as a way to ensure customer choice in the market. Today's investment also helps assure IBM's customers that there will be strong, continued support for SuSE Linux across our family of eServers and suite of middleware offerings."

"Helps assure?" Customers usually start needing assurance when someone notices that confidence may be lacking. Until SCO started rattling its intellectual property sabre, few were questioning the viability of SuSE or any other distribution provider. In my discussions with various IBM officials about Linux on its mainframe and midrange systems, SuSE was invariably mentioned as the distribution provider around which the Linux-big iron strategies were designed. We may never know whether or not some of IBM's prospective big-iron Linux customers were getting cold feet over the SCO lawsuit. But my hunch is that some were demanding the assurances of which Darcy spoke.

Then, in my interview yesterday with the Nugent, the Novell CTO made some interesting statements, one of which had to do with his role in overseeing Novell's mergers and acquisitions strategy. "Part of my job is to make sure that our strategic investment goes into areas that are not commodities," Nugent told me. "The base operating system is an example of such a commodity." Considering that Novell had just announced the acquisition of something (an operating system) that by his definition is a commodity, I was confounded by his statement.

"Yes, the operating system itself is a commodity, Nugent added, "But the distribution is not." But if that didn't make it clear, this next statement did: "By doing this, we can make sure there are no problems with dependencies [in Novell's application stack] or intellectual property." We were getting warmer.

In talking to customers, Nugent went onto explain, Novell was told over and over again that there needed to be at least two enterprise Linux offerings (Red Hat being the other) with the backing of a large global company. I wondered if that was the message that IBM was getting too. Generally speaking, "backing of a large global company" equals assurance.