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.

No doubt, it's sometimes difficult to measure Ubuntu's business success. Canonical says Ubuntu now has about 12 million Linux users - up from an estimated 8 million users in 2007. That sounds impressive, but what does that really mean in terms of Ubuntu's market penetration, Canonical's march to profitability and Ubuntu's progress as a Linux distribution?

There is a business behind the popular Ubuntu Linux operating system and according to its lead commercial sponsor Canonical, that business is good.

Sure, Windows is expected to run on 1 billion devices by 2010. But a loud minority is making its voice heard by moving to Ubuntu Linux. In fact, Canonical’s marketing materials state that Ubuntu now has more than 8 million users.

The life of South African Mark Shuttleworth has been a kind of geek dream: found and sell Internet company for $500+ million in mid-20s; spend $20 million to become the second space tourist; and create a GNU/Linux distribution with a cool name that has become the most popular on the desktop.

Symbian, the company behind the popular proprietary mobile/embedded operating system of the same name, just turned 10, but it won't see its next birthday. Nokia, which had long owned a substantial portion of Symbian, announced today that it would be buying the rest of the company, 52% for about 264 million euros, or approximately $410 million.

Some people may see Google's Chrome operating system as competing with existing Linux desktop distributions. Canonical, the company behind popular Linux distribution Ubuntu, isn't one of them. They're working with Google to make Chrome.

John Lilly, Mozilla’s Chief Operating Officer, has estimated that Firefox, the company’s popular open source web browser, is used by at least 126 million people around the world.

I've told a million times by now, that I am a Linux person. I like the operating system, the tools, the applications, the works. I like the process. I like the community. I like the people. And all these positive feelings are not distribution-specific, or "KDE vs. Gnome" or "Is Amarok the best media player?" kind - its genuine people-to-people kind of a thing, and the love for the technology.