To be fair, SUSE before Novell was in a worse state. If I’m not mistaken they were close to missing payroll and has tried to shop themselves to Sun before Novell agreed to buy them.
Evil IBM(TM) threw in $50m to help the deal along and preserve SuSE for its hardware.
Also, it didn’t help that SUSE folks and Ximian folks were like oil and water. Novell tried a combo that made sense on paper but there was culture clash.
