Novell is buying them out?

Sounds like a repeat attempt at their original business strategy in purchasing rights to Unix: port Novell Netware and its associated services to run above a real Unix kernel. Maybe they'll get it right this time.

sounds like win-win to me.

Suse get access to the biggest directory out there and a worldwide infrastructure, while Novell get one of the better linux distributions.

Don't overlook IBMs involvement in all this as well.

I forgot to add.....
Novells' commitment to open source track record has been pretty good so far. They have been using and contributing to various projects such as apache, samba and mysql for many years.

Novell Netware 7 will have two versions. One, an upgrade to the existing 6 core, and will work in a similar fasion. A second version will use Linux at the core.

Netware 6 uses Apache and some form of X-Windows. Novell is definitly looking at Linux more and more these days, and I personally see it as a good thing, instead of seeing some of the innovations in Netware simply fade away

Aren't Novell and Caldera/SCO both part of the Canopy group? It would be rather unfortunate if SCO's incompliance with the GPL left SuSE unable to redistribute the Linux kernel.

Peter

Novell History and the Canopy Group dosen't show anything about Canopy owning Novell. They do own SCO though.

This might explain the confusion:
Canopy Group
Headquarters: Lindon
History: Founded in 1995 by former Novell Inc. chairman Ray Noorda to act as a technology incubator