Novell's again raised their bet on Linux, today they <a href=http://www.suse.com/us/company/press/press_releases/archive03/novell_suse.html>announced a buyout of SUSE</a>.  In the face of creeping market irrelevance, Novell has bet the farm on a sort of Linux migration strategy - although Netware-the-OS will still be maintained, they are porting their whole application stack to Linux.  Their August buyout of <a href=http://www.ximian.com>Ximian</a> indicated they may be dreaming of some sort of future Novell workstation plans.  Ximian was complementary to such plans, having a more polished version of GNOME and a handy Outlook clone named Evolution that could even work with Exchange servers.<br>
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Presumably, the SUSE aquisition will provide a solid base distro for Novell's future server and workstation products.  Being German, and friends with IBM and Sgi providing the software solution for big-iron systems, it could also help them in the German market and in pushing netware out to big businesses.  One interesting twist is that SUSE has always been more of a KDE backer than a Gnome backer, and even employs a few KDE devs.  With Ximian in house, those two groups would be producing redundant technology...  which one will Novell choose?  Ximian was all about Gnome, SUSE does more than just KDE, so likely Ximian will win out rather than become totally useless.<br>