Novell still seems to be struggling internally to define itself and its own philosophy, first embracing and then recently retreating somewhat from Open Source, preferring to categorize themselves as a "mixed source" company.

Recently, Red Hat announced the Red Hat Exchange (RHX) program, an online marketplace for open source solutions. Well, Novell's Bruce Lowry wants to remind us of Novell's long-standing effort in this area, Market Start, and detail some recent additions to the program.

Anybody who had any doubts about whether open source has the power to go beyond operating systems and other infrastructure roles need look no further than this list of Novell Market Start partners. Together, we’re making it increasingly easy for customers – big and small – to tap into the flexibility, cost benefits and performance power of open source.

Lowry's outlook and attitude towards open source seems markedly more positive than that of Stafford Masie, appearing at the CITI Forum shortly after the announcement of the Microvell deal.

We believe today alot of the open source technology has not caught up yet to enterprise customers’ needs in the security domain, management domain. Where Linux is open source, specifically Linux is completely applicable is the platform, the desktop, office productivity suite, the database, etc so there’s kinda 5 major areas where its good enough if not better than whats out there, ok? where its not there yet, Novell has proprietary technology and partners that provide 3rd party technologies to that proprietary technologies where we wrap our technologies around this Linux technology. so, like zenworks management, our zenworks management suite is a proprietary piece of technology.

So, which is the real Novell?