Novell No More: Page 3 of 3

Rob Enderle, Enderle Group, thinks Attachmate will use the interconnects into the Novell customer base to both protect their existing operations and to expand their customer base. "For the most part Novell as a company is done but they should be able to get support from some of the service organizations and licensees like HP and IBM for the foreseeable future. And none of these buyers wants to piss off the Novell customer base needlessly but it may take a while to work out who will do what."

Both Red Hat and Google have cause for concern, adds Enderle. "Red Hat should be concerned because they fought off Microsoft's first attempt to get them to license from them, and the next attempt will likely be vastly more aggressive now." As for Google, its been at war with Microsoft for some time and have proven unable to defend its licensees effectively. Linux is at the core of Google's products and Microsoft has been aggressively seeking royalties from those licensees. many of which seem to be paying more now to Microsoft than to Google. "In a time of heavy IP litigation, the more patents you control the better your odds and we seem to be in a massive IP litigation war with many of the emerging products leveraging some or all of the core UNIX patents and copyrights."