By now, you have probably read that the court has ruled in Novell's favor in the SCO case. My sentiments toward Novell aside, this ruling goes beyond merely acknowledging Novell's rights; it pretty much exonerates the GNU/Linux community and Linux kernel developers.

Okay, the headline is a bit dramatic. But the Sun-MySQL business combo makes The VAR Guy wonder: Will Novell wake up and start buying open source application providers … or is Novell doomed to repeat the exact same mistakes it made in the 1990s? Alas, Novell in 2008 looks a lot like Novell from a decade ago. That’s not good. Here’s why.

Novell’s latest quarterly financial results, revealed today, were a mixed bag for the SUSE Linux provider. Novell made progress in some areas. But didn’t really thrive in others. Where does the company go from here? The answers will likely surface at the Novell BrainShare. Here are the details.

A bunch of bad news for Novell, brought together under one roof
Market Start Ending

Last week, the U.S. District Court for the District of Utah finally granted Novell's request for declaratory judgment and ruled against SCO's last frantic attempts to keep any of its claims going. Or, to quote Pamela Jones, editor of Groklaw and top expert on SCO's endless anti-Linux lawsuits: "The door has slammed shut on the SCO litigation machine."

Novell is aimless without SUSE (GNU/Linux), but GNU/Linux is not Novell's property. Novell's latest results make a solid case for abandonment and a restart of S.u.S.E. under a different name

OK, so sometimes I'm wrong. Miguel de Icaza called out an error I made in criticizing Novell for its open-source strategy. I admit that I find it hard to see beyond Novell's patent pact with Microsoft but, as Miguel pointed out in a string of emails between us today (which he graciously allowed me to cite), this leaves out a lot that Novell does well.

I thought it would be fun to look at Chris Sontag's testimony as a whole, instead of just covering the SCO v. Novell trial according to the particular day. Sontag was called by Novell on the first day, April 29, 2008. They didn't finish so he was back on the stand on the 30th, so I've cobbled together the relevant sections from the two day's transcripts to show you the complete performance.

First on the stand yesterday in SCO v. Novell was James Tolonen, who you may recall was Novell's CFO from 1989 to 1998 and was the chief business executive who provided direction for the APA and Amendment 2.