ReadWriteEnterprise

It's been a long, strange trip for SUSE. What started in 1992 as a small German company (SUSE was an acronym derived from "Software und System Entwicklung," or "software and systems development") with a derivative of Slackware Linux became a mighty Linux distribution in its own right. Money problems led to a sale to Novell in 2003, which had its own share of troubles.

Finally Novell was sold to Attachmate in a deal that closed in April of this year. Attachmate then decided to spin SUSE off into its own business, and tapped Nils Brauckmann as president and general manager of the unit.

For those of you that cut your teeth on graphical OSs and have never had to use a command-line terminal emulator, this article isn't for you. There is no Flash here, no OCD multi-tasking, cutting-and-pasting from one window to another. If the term "command line" reminds you more of the movie Tron than of something you actually use everyday, then perhaps you won't find much joy from reading the following post.

But for the rest of us that grew up when PC DOS first came into corporations and when mainframe programmers walked among us, you might enjoy this trip down memory lane.

Independent software company Attachmate will purchase Novell for $2.2 billion the companies announced today. CPTN Holdings LLC, a consortium of companies lead by Microsoft, put up $450 million of the $2.2 billion in exchange for 882 patents from Novell, ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley discovered. Microsoft isn't talking about what patents it's purchasing from Novell.