ReadWriteWeb

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.

While most companies are scrambling to attach "cloud" to any product they can, Novell is turning out the lights on its Vibe Cloud service. Instead, the company plans to focus on its Vibe OnPrem hosted solution, and is giving customers until September 30 to land. While bad news for the small group using Vibe Cloud, it might be a good policy for making existing Novell customers happier.

Earlier this month Attachmate laid off the developers working on Mono, an open source implementation of Microsoft .NET sponsored by Novell. Attachmate acquired Novell last year.

Today Mono creator Miguel de Icaza announced the formation of a new startup to support the open source project: Xamarin.

These thee Microsoft stories weren't the biggest news of the week, but they are worth knowing about if you missed them. One of the stories is merely a clue into an ongoing mystery surrounding Microsoft's acquisition of some patents from Novell that have analysts speculating and open source advocates worrying. Each story sheds a little light on Microsoft's strategy and where the company is headed. For example, the release of Forefront Endpoint Protection 2010 indicates how Microsoft is consolidating various enterprise management tools into a single interface.

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.

We are curious how Google Wave will re-emerge in Google's various product offerings. Most of its components will go open-source so we will see it in all sorts of various forms out in the wild.

But there is a question about Google's timing. It's an enterprise collaboration service that had gained some acceptance in the market. For a stretch earlier this year we saw a number of companies adopting the Wave protocol.

Still, the level of frustration about the service is palpable. It's almost as if Google realized the Wave environment could not scale. Following that thread, it's conceivable that over time distrust about the service would be insurmountable.

The news came recently that Novell will be developing a cloud-computing platform with Tencent, China's largest Internet service provider. As part of the deal, the two companies will establish a research laboratory in Shenzen, China that will be used to develop the data center network that will serve as the cloud platform.

These kinds of deals often seem distant as our knowledge of China's Internet community is a bit limited. But sometimes news comes out that provides a whole new insight.

That's exactly what happened this week when China Computerworld dropped the F-bomb on Tencent in an article and featured the company's mascot bleeding from knife wounds.

Novell is providing the first glimpse of Pulse, its new real-time collaboration service. The new service will eventually fully integrate with Google Wave. This version does not include Google Wave as part of its service. But there is an expectation that eventually the integration will serve as a federated platform that may serve as the basis for new open-source collaboration efforts.

Novell is releasing the service initially to analysts and participants at BrainShare, its user group meeting next week in Salt Lake City. Each person will get to invite one new user, Novell will provide a fuller release in the next few months. A release at the end of the year will include OpenID as a core aspect of the platform.

IBM is extending its cloud infrastructure to the IBM Cloud and enhancing its offering with commercial- and enterprise-grade test and development services with a broad reach of partners and collaborative approaches. The effort follows its launch in November of a test-and-development cloud-based service. With this announcement, IBM is laying the foundation for a cloud ecosystem that will differentiate the company from Google, Microsoft and Amazon.

Perhaps one of the most compelling aspects of the news is that PayPal is joining IBM as a partner to offer services to enterprise clients. This puts IBM on a a direct trajectory into the heart of the market - with Amazon in its sights. By partnering with PayPal, IBM is laying the framework for more transaction-oriented services with smart phone customers the prime target for applications developed in its partner community.

Earlier today Novell demoed it's Google Wave-like product to the enterprise world. Pulse is the latest workplace collaboration platform to announce at this year's Enterprise 2.0 Conference and ReadWriteWeb was lucky enough to catch up with Novell's VP of Engineering Andy Fox for a demo of the new tool. The beta product is expected early next year.