David writes a moderately tongue in cheek blog posting and now he's 'naive, ignorant, deceptive, incompetent, a rabid pro Microsoft partisan apologist.... and a dupe'. Which is so funny to anyone who knows him - and / or has any sense of humor whatsoever.

'Some' people (cough W Anderson cough) are so in love with their own 'wisdom'. One wonders why they reserve it for the comments section - rather than enlightening us all with their own wise, enlightened, forthright, shrewd, impeccably researched, impartial and sincerely perceptive journalistic efforts..... Oh well, at least he gave me a laugh!

Yahoo use FreeBSD and not much Linux. Plus the EU will never let this happen. This seems to be a poorly researched article.

It is not clear as to the understanding by David Harrison of the "real" issues regarding Novell suit against Microsoft for WordPerfect suppression, since he may be either too young to know matters at the time or is not a knowledgeable technologist.

Microsoft can indeed, and probably did restrict WordPerfect for working effectively on their Operating Systems (note: this has been proven in courts of law around the USA and internationally many time in last twenty years), so for the article author to claim there is no connection is being disingenuous at best and naive, ignorant or deceptive at worst.

Technology media must monitor their writers more closely for competence and absence of rabid partisanship, especially for all the Microsoft apologists and dupes that abound in the tech media industry.

Otherwise the overall credibility of technology reporting will (and is falling) fall to the level of the trash Inquirer magazine.

W. Anderson kimalcorp@nac.net

The biggest problem to that is regulatory. The author glossed over what would be the showstopper. Let's not forget that Novell has a significant customer base in Europe, and it is home to the SuSE division. I don't think the EC has a problem saying "no" to MS. That right there would probably stop the purchase worldwide. There is already a precedent for this: the attempted GE/Honeywell merger. The DOJ said yes, the EC said no, and that was enough to stop the merger based on GE's and Honeywell's assets in Europe.

Yes I forgot to consider the ZEN suite in the context of that argument which was really concentrating at the services level. That being said software management is a field in a state of flux right now with the onset of virtualisation and software as a service (SOA). Whilst the ZEN suite is arguably at the top of its class, Novell will need to ensure they maintain their competitiveness in a field that will see rapid evolution over the next few years.

I agree in part with your article, but I think Novell has a lot more to offer Microsoft than just SLES and Identity. The ZEN suite of technologies is superior to anything Microsoft can offer, and is already fully AD/Windows ready. So, three core areas of Novell's business are potentially attractive to Microsoft, add Platespin to that mix, and it gets even more interesting.