Q&A: Chris Stone on why Novell picked SUSE over Red Hat

Computerworld - Chris Stone, Novell Inc.'s vice chairman, spoke today with Computerworld about the strategy behind his company's plan to acquire SUSE Linux AG, and why Novell chose SUSE instead of Red Hat. Excerpts from the interview follow:

How did the idea to acquire SUSE germinate? In April at BrainShare is when we made the first announcement that NetWare services were going to go basically on top of Linux (see story). We wanted to learn how the open-source community actually works. We didn't want to be the big, bad enterprise company that dove into it.
We had been working with SUSE for quite some time. But we decided strategically that we really needed to provide the entire stack. So it was about two months ago that we really decided to go for it. They weren't out grocery shopping. We really decided this is what we wanted to do, and we went after it.

Did you consider Red Hat as well? Sure, we looked at everything. The two largest were Red Hat and SUSE, and then we looked at the others -- there are a good 35 Linux OSs out there. Obviously, Red Hat was a bit pricey, so we decided we had the best fit -- economically, peoplewise, culturally -- with SUSE. They think like we do; they work like we do. They're very technically competent. So it was a really natural fit.

When you say Red Hat was a bit pricey, does that mean there were negotiations that got to the point of naming a price? No, we decided that SUSE was who we wanted to acquire. We made a decision early on that SUSE was where we wanted to go. There was always an effort on the part of Novell to have a relationship in some form with Red Hat. We tried to form a support agreement with Red Hat, and that didn't work. It worked beautifully with SUSE.

I'd really like to clarify to what extent you had acquisition discussions with Red Hat as well. I'm not going to go there.

Novell Vice Chairman Chris Stone