The value still inherent in Novell was, to some extent, reaffirmed Monday by a definitive in which Attachmate  is expected to purchase Novell for $2.2 billion.

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Why is still worth that much? Despite the decline of , Novell has SUSE Linux, one of the most popular commercial distributions of the open source operating system.

Novell's SUSE Linux business reportedly , which seemed to be interested in purchasing this portion of Novell. But in the end all of Novell, with the exception of $450 million worth of intellectual property assets purchased by a Microsoft-organized consortium, went to Attachmate. A deal has seemed likely since at least March of this year, when Novell rejected a from Elliott Associates. 

"Probably the biggest plum here is the SUSE Linux assets," says Pund-IT analyst Charles King. "SUSE has run a fairly distant second to Red Hat, simply because I don't think Novell had the wherewithal to expand services around Linux. They were a bit over their heads there. With Attachmate being focused on enterprise modernization, cloud computing and so on, I can see where Linux could be a particularly valuable asset there."