"We're adding Linux not abandoning NetWare" says Novell

Rather like the father of the bride contemplating the new relationship with his son-in-law, Novell's public attitude towards its open source connection has been 'we're gaining Linux, not losing NetWare'. But despite the company's best efforts to show there's still a lot of love for the home-grown operating system, the evidence seems to be stacking up to the contrary.

Novell CEO Jack Messman was in bullish mood about his commitment to NetWare, speaking at the company's BrainShare event in Barcelona. But while Novell's operating system has been consistently losing ground to Microsoft, Linux has been going from strength to strength and the Utah firm is now keen to get its hands on a slice of the pie, with Messman announcing that Novell intends to become a "champion of the open source community".

With support agreements in place with both SuSE and Red Hat Linux and a beta version of Novell's Nterprise Linux Services on the way, the future for Novell looks very much like Linux is in the driving seat. Messman said that the company would be looking to "aggressively expand" in the open source arena, but there were no more acquisitions planned following the Ximian buy-out.

He added that he didn't believe the ongoing SCO battle would faze customers in the long term, although he acknowledged that the legal wrangle may have "slowed things down".

Messman said that even in the event of a legal victory for SCO, the cumulative cost benefit for customers of a switch to open source would still be enough to keep customers on the non-proprietary track. He said: "If you subtract out any licence fees if SCO win - which I doubt - there's still a compelling reason to move to Linux."

He said the company had no plans to offer any insurance to customers over the SCO-Linux issue.