There has been a lot of news accumulating, so here's a summary that's mainly composed of snippets.

Novell gives interim CFO job on permanent basis

Russell was named to the post on a temporary basis in June after his predecessor abruptly left in the midst of a management shake-up, amid investor pressure to improve Novell's financial performance and boost its stock price.

IBM Extends Open Source Virtualization Solutions

Building upon the company's commitment to providing clients open solutions based on Linux and virtualization technologies, IBM announced its extensive portfolio of middleware and systems platforms will support Novell's new SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 offerings. The new SUSE Linux Enterprise offerings incorporate the open source Xen virtualization software to help businesses increase server utilization and lower management costs.

There also this disappointment:

'Open source software vendor Novell has made an aggressive lunge for the Intel system builder channel by appointing Microtronica as its fifth UK and Ireland distributor'

[...]

Mark Johnson, general manager software Europe at Bell, said he was “disappointed and surprised” by the appointment. “I can understand Novell wants to move into the system builder space, but there are opportunities in its existing distribution channel,” he said.

VBA project for OpenOffice to become open source

For its part the converter by Novell, written in C++, integrates completely into the free Office suite, but is available, in an early version, only in the company's own OpenOffice distribution for Linux and in one Windows variant. So far the converter can only handle Excel macros.

No Mono after all. Just C++. Here are some opinions and analyses.

Shifting sands: Mono, take note

And now we come back to the question of shifting standards. There is no doubt that Microsoft has co-opted many ideas and methods first developed in the FOSS community and used them to its benefit. Even if it doesn't follow its famous "embrace, extend and extinguish" method, Microsoft has no difficulty in keeping up with any changes in FOSS ideas it borrows - the source is available.

There are (at least) 3 new press releases which involve Novell:

• SiteScape Signs OEM Agreement With Novell SiteScape's Next Generation Collaboration Platform to Complement the Novell Open Workgroup Suite
• Novell Strengthens Workgroup Portfolio With Team Workspace and Real-Time Collaboration Offerings
• Novell Training Services to use Paragon Software Group's NTFS for Linux 5.0