Date: Thu, 18 Jan 2001 09:46:13 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: opentrax@email.com Cc: tlambert@primenet.com, howardjp@well.com, freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG, netbsd-advocacy@NetBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Why did NetBSD and FreeBSD diverge? Message-ID: <200101180946.CAA02733@usr08.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <200101180855.AAA00887@spammie.svbug.com> from "opentrax@email.com" at Jan 18, 2001 12:55:26 AM
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> >> AT&T sold Unix to Novell for $1 Billion dollars in the middle > >> of this and in reallity it was Novell that settled. BTW, this > >> $1B almost bankrupted(sp?) Novell. > > > > Novell bought USL for $80M, which is only 8% of the figure > > you quote. This is the same price they charged Sun to get > > out of royalty payments, and the later sale of USL to SCO was > > nothing but gravy for them: very good ROI, in fact. > > The figure I'm quoting was one I was given. > If it is incorrect, then I need to get the correcting > reference. Both John and I are working on a History of BSD. > As such, the correct nature of facts becomes us. > > If you can please Terry, and reference information, rather > that word of mouth, would assist us greatly. I got "uncooked" numbers, as a senior employee with stock, so it's not exactly "word of mouth". 8-). Not only that, Novell almost made 100% ROI in one year. > > The $1B purchase made at around the same time was the purchase > > of Word Perfect. Along with AppWare (another company started > Terry, I've forwarded this information to John as a > possible error in our notes. See: http://www.secinfo.com/dr6nd.b43.htm#191stPage The $268.7 includes a $9.4M debt assumption, does not include the $80.5M Sun paid, does not include net sales by USL, and the value of the Novell stock at the time the transaction actually went through. I guess you could subtract out the earlier "investment in USL", which was actually a stock swap so that both companies had some skin in the game over Univel, so I think it shouldn't count as anything but a $17M paper cost. See also pg193 for income figures (you have to multiply the missing percentage, but it's simple algebra): http://www.secinfo.com/dr6nd.b43.htm#193rdPage Not including the overvaluation, the cost was $178.8M. If you include what Word Perfect did to the Novell stock, the cost drops to about $87.3M; I guess it depends on how you want to cook the books... For more more fun, look at the 1992 numbers for the VAX/VMS deal; I was one of 3 engineers responsible for that nice $15M number. Robert Withrow, also a FreeBSD person, was on the DEC side of that deal, as their primary (IMO) engineering contribution... I figure that I personally paid for almost 6% of the USL purchase with around one year of work, and between the 3 of us, it was over 17%. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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