Consumers Confound Linux Leaders, Apr 19, 2008

Two of the biggest names in the world of Linux and open-source software picked the same day to back off their designs on a new world order in consumer computing.

Novell came up aces in its third-quarter report yesterday. The operating loss was smaller than last year, despite tepid sales growth of 3%, and $20 million in free cash flow is nothing to sneeze at.

... it's time to put away the training pants and the stroller, and swap the cap with the puce propeller for a more adult carmine chapeau. Red Hat is all grown up and ready to do some serious business

After an interesting deal with Microsoft last November, Novell's stock surged 16%. Unfortunately, the boost proved short-lived, given investors' ongoing concerns about the open-source software firm.

Red Hat's revenues grew by 45.5% to $60.8 million, compared with last year's $41.8 million. The bulk of its growth came from subscription sales: $49.2 million versus $30.6 million a year ago.

And as for going back to basics and making money from something like selling a computer service? Well, SCO's financial backers have pretty much cracked the whip. It's lawsuit or nothing. I'd bet dollars to doughnuts it comes up nothing.

Webmaster's note: Just thought I'd post a story that completely conflicts with the previous one!

Wal-Mart recently began Internet sales of a new line of PCs loaded with a flavor of Linux designed by Sun Microsystems called the Java Desktop System. The days of the open source OS's status as a programmers-only computing environment must be gone for good, since the people shopping for $400 computers in my neighborhood Wal-Mart don't look like the kind of folks who write code for fun.

The grassroots challenge to Microsoft's pre-eminent Windows OS will likely be savored by the Libertarian-leaning, worldwide Linux community, even though the software is coming from tech giant Sun, rather than one of the scores of free, downloadable Linux distributions. These Microtel machines will also come bundled with StarOffice, a Linux production suite featuring word processing, spreadsheet, and other software.

f SCO thought threat-born licensing fees would provide a quick boost to the bottom line, it looks to have miscalculated. As fellow Fool Tom Taulli noted last month, SCO has tried to cast its lawsuits in apocalyptic terms. But with the entire computing world putting its money behind Linux, it appears that, for SCO, the apocalypse is now.

New regulations have made it harder for small-cap companies to get noticed, but this is certainly not the case for The SCO Group. Whether you like him or not, CEO Darl McBride is a master of PR. In March, he sued IBM for $3 billion, hiring "take-no-prisoners" law firm Boies Schiller & Flexner, and raising a cool $50 million to pay for the battle.

Of course, mega-message PR has a downside: It demands a steady flow of mega messages. Last week, McBride declared in an open letter, "There is a group of software developers in the United States, and other parts of the world, that do not believe in the approach to copyright protection mandated by Congress ... The future of the global economy hangs in the balance."