While commercial Linux distributor Red Hat has not grown enough to justify the ridiculous valuations that Wall Street put on the company when it went public a decade ago, the company is more or less on track to break $1bn in sales in the next couple years.

Novell beat Wall Street's estimates with a solid third quarter, but the real story is in its continued Linux growth. Net revenue rose to $245 million from $237 million in 2007, but Novell's third-quarter loss quadrupled to $15.1 million from $3.7 million in 2007.

Sun Microsystems reported net income of US$89 million on strong hardware sales for its first quarter of fiscal 2008, with the company posting its fourth consecutive profitable quarter after several years of financial loss and instability.

Novell's Linux business is keeping the company buoyant in trying economic times, the company's third-quarter earnings indicate. On Thursday, the software maker published its third-quarter results, which revealed that revenue from its Linux platform products had increased 22 percent, year-on-year, to US$38 million.

It is no secret that Microsoft uses a lot of GNU/Linux in house and we covered some examples of this in the past. Even just a week ago Microsoft acquired yet another company (Forecast) for over 100 million dollars and that company has merely everything based on Free software, including GNU/Linux. It brags about it in its Web site.

I wouldn't mind being in a list with companies like Google and Salesforce.com, which is precisely the company Red Hat is keeping in its continued growth trajectory. Forbes just named Red Hat the 11th fastest-growing company in the United States. Red Hat's sales have grown 41 percent over the past five years.

The European Commission slapped Microsoft with a fine of EUR 561 million for breaching a 2009 settlement over the bundling of Internet Explorer with Windows. Under this agreement, the company promised to display a “browser choice” screen on Windows installs in Europe, inviting users to choose other browsers in addition to the company’s own program.

Automattic, the parent company of popular open source blogging platform WordPress, announced this week it received $29 million in funding from four investors who will take a minority stake in the company. Though this isn't the first round of financing for the not quite three-year-old company, it has drawn a lot of notice because one of the investors is the New York Times. It's an unusual pairing of two industries -- blogging and conventional media -- typically thought to be at odds with each other.

For the quarter, Novell's sales fell by 7 per cent to $214.9m and were hurt by a dramatic drop off in software license sales, which fell by 29.7 per cent to $28.3m. Services sales at the company fell even more dramatically, down 31.7 per cent to $27.8m.