American software house Novell Inc is buying Germany's SuSE Linux AG for $210 million. The move "follows on the heels of its acquisition of open-source developer Ximian Inc. in August. These two acquisitions will make Novell, according to Novell representatives, the first billion dollar Linux software company.
"IBM and Novell will apparently continue to follow SuSE's path as a major IBM Linux partner; Novell also announced that IBM intends to make a $50 million investment in Novell convertible preferred stock as soon as Novell officially acquires SuSE." See eWeek for more.
Comment: Novell has bought and sold a lot of software in its day: it used to own Unix and WordPerfect, and brought together the applications that became part of WordPerfect Office before selling them to Corel. However, over the past five years it has been going nowhere fast, and in the past two years, it has lost money.
As for being "the first billion dollar Linux software company", Novell will be a billion dollar software company whether you include SuSE's $35 million to $40 million annual revenues or not. On the same basis, IBM is the world's first $81 billion Linux software and hardware company, and Microsoft is the world's first $32 billion computer games company.
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