Elliott Associates Offers to Buy Novell

Posted Mar 3, 2010 9:35 UTC (Wed) by rodgerd (guest, #58896)
In reply to: Elliott Associates Offers to Buy Novell by ajross
Parent article: Elliott Associates Offers to Buy Novell

Mainframe customers. SuSE is dominant in this space, and much, much cheaper than RHEL on headline licensing cost. Enough that they could literally double their prices, comfortably. Hell, they could probably quadruple them, and people wouldn't be able to migrate away (although it would cost them new sales), given the cost of rebuilding the world, as it were.

Novell's patent deals with Microsoft could also be exploited with legal action against Red Hat and/or Canonical.

Elliott Associates Offers to Buy Novell

Posted Mar 4, 2010 21:11 UTC (Thu) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]

I'm not sure Novell has standing to initiate legal action with regard to the patents associated with MS. If there is going to be legal action I think MS has to initiate it. Elliot/Novell would certainly benefit in the short term during the ensuing active shooting war as a safe harbor for customers...but they'd have to goad MS into initiating the legal action. Not sure Elliot has that kind of pull.

-jef