Rick, I think your assesment of Novell's innocence in Corel's demise is way
too rose-colored.

When the acquired it, they showed interest and support for it very briefly
before sidelineing it, for whatever reason.  Certainly, even if Corel as
they acquired it was a weak distribution, all the resources necessary to
make it as strong as RedHat were available in the Open Source world at the
time.  Novell could, for that matter, have taken the "Linux from Scratch"
HOWTO and some custom graphics and made their very own distribution.  There
was a backlash of business sentiment toward Linux at the time though, and
Novell decided they didn't need to work with Linux.

Novell must really be complimented for even existing today.  They have let
so very many oportunities pass through their hands it's amazing that they
haven't gone the way of Lotus, WordPerfect, and Smartware, but they soldier
on.  They have managed to blow more marketing opportunities than even IBM.

I really wish that we had seen SuSE buy Novell instead of Novell buying
SUSE, but maybe SUSE still has enough strength to really change how things
are done at Novell.  That would be great - it would really be cool for a
company that once had the strength to teach Microsoft about arrogance come
back and offer real inovation and realistic alternatives in the personal an
office computing arena again.

Anybody who's honest about the current state of the market, though, has to
admit it would be a big change for Novell.