Don't Panic - don't you know where your towel is?

I know I'm a bit late to the party, but in case you hadn't heard yet, Novell's agreed to be acquired by Attachmate.  Sorry, but I've been busy job hunting, the wallet's a bit more important than the blog at the moment.

There's been all sorts of back and forth, rumor, speculation and general FUD about the whole deal  Don't panic just yet.  No one knows yet what this will all mean for those of us Novell die-hards.  Patents are being sold to CPTN holdings, which is apparently a Microsoft company in some fashion; Novell has said they're holding onto the UNIX patents.  That being said, none of this has cleared the SEC yet, so there's no definitive "these are going here, those are staying there" statements to be made yet.

Richard Bliss has put a spin on it that I've been mulling over, but does it in a much more brilliant fashion than I ever would/could.  I suggest you check out his blog postings about the imminent sale.  There can be much good from this, especially going from public to privately held companies.

http://preview.tinyurl.com/279ga6y

I've been asked a lot of "but what does this mean for us?"  Just a reminder folks, I don't work for Novell.  And even if I did I wouldn't be able to tell you.  My suggestion (having been a survivor of many mergers and layoffs) is to take a deep breath, continue about your business and wait for Novell, Attachmate, and the SEC to make accouncements as things commence.  Worst case scenario is that you need to migrate off of your current systems due to support concerns.  Best case is things vastly improve, the support that we used to know and love returns to its heyday.  More than likely, things will end up somewhere in the middle as usually happens in this kind of situation.

There is one truth here to be remembered though: IT is all about change and if you're change resistant you're in the wrong industry.

As for me, I'm back into my MCITP books, checking into financial aid for another round of college classes, and planning for the next sharp turn in this crazy thing we call IT.