With the start of 2012 Merlin Solutions has sadly decided to part company with an old friend Novell....................Netware it seems is finally dead.

History:
Novell began in 1979 when Dennis Fairclough, Drew Major, Dale Neibaur and Kyle Powell left ERI. to found Novell Data Systems Inc., a hardware manufacturer producing CP/M-based systems.
 
In January 1983, the company's name was shortened to Novell, Inc., and Ray Noorda became the head of the firm. Later that same year, the company introduced its most significant product, the multi-platform network operating system (NOS), Novell NetWare. Initially this was a proprietary hardware server based on Motorola 6800 CPU using the first network operating system (NOS) called ShareNet. Later, ShareNet was ported to run on the Intel platform and renamed NetWare. The first commercial release of NetWare was version 1.5.

Novell did extremely well throughout the 1980s. It aggressively expanded its market share by selling the expensive ethernet cards at cost. By 1990, Novell had an almost monopolistic position in NOS for any business requiring a network.

In June 1993, the company bought Unix System Laboratories from AT&T,acquiring rights to the Unix operating system.

In 1996, the company began a move into internet-enabled products, replacing reliance on the proprietary IPX protocol in favour of a native TCP/IP stack.

However, by 1999, Novell had lost its dominant market position, and was continually being out-marketed by Microsoft

In November 2003, Novell acquired SuSE, a developer of a leading Linux distribution, which led to a major shift of power in Linux distributions. IBM also invested $50 million to show support of the SuSE acquisition.

The successor product to NetWare, Open Enterprise Server, was released in March 2005. OES offers all the services previously hosted by NetWare v6.5, and added the choice of delivering those services using either a NetWare v6.5 or SUSE Linux Enterprise Server v9 kernel. The release was aimed to persuade NetWare customers to move to Linux.

From 2003 through 2005 Novell released many products across its portfolio, with the intention of arresting falling market share and to move away from dependencies on other Novell products, but the launches were not as successful as Novell had hoped. the company's revenue was not falling rapidly, it wasn't growing, either. Lack of clear direction or effective management meant that Novell took longer than expected to complete its restructuring.

In June 2006, chief executive Jack Messman and chief finance officer Joseph Tibbetts were fired, with Ronald Hovsepian, Novell's president and chief operating officer, appointed chief executive, and Dana Russell, vice-president of finance and corporate controller, appointed interim CFO.

On November 2, 2006, Novell and Microsoft announced a joint patent agreement to cover their respective products. Initial reaction from members of the FOSS community (over the patent protection) was savage.

10 days later, the Samba team expressed strong disapproval of the announcement and asked Novell to reconsider

February 2007, Reuters reported that the Free Software Foundation had announced that it was reviewing Novell's right to sell Linux versions, and may even ban it

Novell announced in November 2010 that it had agreed to be acquired by Attachmate for $2.2 billion. More worrying was the 882 patents owned by Novell are to be sold to CPTN Holdings LLC, a consortium of companies led by Microsoft and including Apple, EMC, and Oracle

On 27 April 2011, Novell announced that the merger with Attachmate had been completed. Novell completed the sale of "certain identified issued patents and patent applications" to CPTN Holdings LLC Novell was now a wholly owned subsidiary of The Attachmate Group, the parent company of Attachmate Corporation.

Fortunately the U.S. Department of Justice intervened and ensured that all of the Novell patents acquired must be subject to the GNU General Public License /OIN License .
 
On April 2011, Attachmate announced layoffs for the Novell workforce, including hundreds of employees from their Provo Utah Valley centre raising questions about the future of some open source projects such as Mono.

Today some of Novell's products and brands have been transferred to NetIQ, and the SUSE Linux brand has been made its own business unit.

Goodbye old friend