The early registration email to SUSE customers proclaims:

SUSE will have a dedicated and significant presence at BrainShare with participation in the keynotes, and with its own demo area in the IT Central, as well as its own conference session category with special Linux and Open Source session tracks. All components of the SUSE Business Unit (including the Enterprise Linux Server related business, the SUSE Studio/Appliance part, and the openSUSE project) will be presented to BrainShare attendees.

If I were a SUSE customer, I think I’d be trying harder than usual to get my boss to spring for sending me after all the changes that have occurred this year. Attachmate will be judged by its performance at this show, and I think the future of SUSE depends on it. I know that after my discussion with Nils Braukmann, SUSE president and general manager, I had some remaining questions about the future of the operating system and future technical innovation.

What do you want to hear from SUSE? Are you planning to attend BrainShare 2011?

Attachmate has also announced the creation of four business units going forward.

1. Attachmate: Includes solutions for host connectivity, legacy modernization, managed file transfer, and enterprise fraud management. This portfolio and leadership remains unchanged as a result of the combination and will continue to be headquartered in Seattle, Wash.
2. NetIQ: Solutions from NetIQ will be combined with the identity, security and data center management solutions (with the exception of SUSE) from Novell. Leadership and location in Houston, TX, remains unchanged.
3. Novell: The Novell business unit will focus on the products and solutions that were previously referred to as End User Computing. This includes solutions from both collaboration and endpoint management. Bob Flynn will lead this business unit as President and General Manager in addition to leading the Attachmate business unit. Operations will be headquartered in Provo, UT.
4. SUSE: Established as its own dedicated business unit under Nils Brauckmann in Nuremberg, Germany, with the charge to “unleash the potential of SUSE on the market in ways that matter to both the community and customers.”

Stephen J. Vaughan-Nichols has tried to find out what’s happening to Mono, but he received a statement from Attachmate CEO Jeff Hawn that the new SUSE business unit will be in charge of deciding how that project progresses. Meanwhile, Mono’s leader, Miguel de Icaza seemed surprised on Twitter at the rumors of his demise.

With all of this unrest, others are speculating that Attachmate will sell off SUSE, which seems supported by the separation of business unit strategy that Attachmate has decided upon.

We will continue to follow this news as it breaks, and are interested in hearing from any former Novell employees (on or off the record) to get a better idea of how these developments are going to affect enterprise customers and the Linux landscape. Leave comments below or contact us.

I would really like to know what part of the patent sale (and which specific patents) were deemed to be a threat to the future development of the Linux operating system. We know that Red Hat’s voice was heard via the Open Source Initiative, as we reported last week. And it sure seems like IBM would have been likely to throw some cash at the issue. There was some fear that CPTN could be another SCO debacle.

The changes that have been made to the original CPTN patent arrangement include:

• Microsoft will sell back to Attachmate all of the Novell patents that Microsoft would have acquired, but will continue to receive a license for the use of all of the Novell patents, including those acquired by other entities or held by Novell.
• EMC will not acquire 33 Novell patents and patent applications related to virtualization.

But perhaps the most interesting, and what could be considered the biggest victory for the open source community are the following three changes to the deal:

• All of the Novell patents will be acquired subject to the GNU General Public License, Version 2, and the Open Invention Network (OIN) License.
• CPTN does not have the right to limit which of the patents, if any, are available under the OIN license.
• CPTN nor its owners will make any statement or take any action to influence or encourage either Novell or Attachmate to modify which patents are available under the OIN license.

Now that this is all settled, according to Novell documents filed Wednesday with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the new closing date for the sale is April 27, 2011. How settled does that leave you feeling?

Attachmate is primarily known for its mainframe connectivity and terminal emulation software as well as NetIQ, Windows systems management software acquired in 2006.

Other, unnamed, IP assets will be sold to a consortium including Microsoft Corp. Novell and Microsoft have agreements in place to ease SUSE Linux and Windows interoperability. That deal is worth $450 million.

Attachmate will pay $6.10 per share or about $2.2 billion in cash, about a 28% premium over Novell’s price on March 2, 2010, the last trading day before Elliott Partners announced its unsolicited bid to buy Novell.

The concurrent sale of “certain intellectual property assets” to  CPTN Holdings LLC, is also on deck. CPTN Holdings is a consortium including Microsoft and other “technology companies.” This deal is worth $450 million in cash, Novell said.

Things had been so quiet around Novell recently, that company watchers suspected a deal was in the works.

Early reaction among Linux shops has been surprise at the name of the acquiring party. Speculation had run rampant both inside and outside of Novell that VMware was a top contender. Told that Attachmate was buying Novell, one long-time Linux user yelled: “WHO?”

Barbara Darrow is senior news director of the SearchDataCenter/Virtualization group at TechTarget.
Let us know what you think about the story; email Barbara Darrow, Senior News Director at bdarrow@techtarget.com, or follow us on twitter.