Under terms of the deal announced Monday, an entity called Attachmate Corp. will acquire Novell and operate the company as two different business units. Novell will operate separately from its SUSE open-source business.

Attachmate is owned by an investment group led by Francisco Partners, Golden Gate Capital and Thoma Bravo. The firm said it will add the Novell businesses to its own Attachmate and NetIQ businesses.

I like Novell and think they had some pretty decent products. The Open Source Linux side is the most important to me now. I hope the let them continue that work or sell that off to someone who cares.

Seems Novell is about to sell off the Linux, SUSE, part of the company to VMWare. This is not Lotus news but it is news that may impact Lotus over time. See Domino, the Do it all Application, Mail, and Web Server, runs like a champ on SUSE Linux or SLES.

Will this lead to more SLES and DOMINO on VMWare? Will IBM see this as a good thing and spend more time pushing Domino for Linux? What does this mean for Domino in a Cloud? or Domino on a VM? I love all the mad and crazy thoughts about what could happen with Lotus and VMWare+SLES!

Will this also mean that REDHAT gets removed from VMWare and SLES is not the underpinnings of VMWare? Oh the questions I would have if I were able to get answers. I think we are all wondering the same thing.