Beleaguered software vendor Novell (NOVL), which has been fighting a lawsuit by bankrupt SCO Group for the last several years, could see a silver lining, writes Ladenburg Thalmann analyst Aaron Schwartz in a note this morning. He says SCO may settle with Novell in its claim of infringement of intellectual property SCO holds with respect to the Unix operating system, rather than proceed to a jury trial against Novell.

Schwartz notes that the incoming court-appointed bankruptcy trustee for SCO Group fired Darl McBride, the CEO, on Monday. McBride had made himself a vilain in the world of Linux and open source software by suing numerous parties reselling or distributing the Linux operating system, including IBM (IBM), but also Daimler (DAI), claiming Linux infringes on Unix operating system rights that SCO acquired several years back.

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Ultra-low prices on portable computers are nothing new, and in fact have increasingly become the norm since the debut of netbooks–small and light ultraportables that are virtually defined by their low cost. However, there are some strong reasons to believe that Microsoft’s (MSFT) upcoming Windows 7 operating system, in addition to new types of Linux-based portables, could help drive profit margins for hardware manufacturers to surprising new bottoms.

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Has Nokia (NOK) finally come up with a smart phone that can take on the Apple (AAPL) iPhone?

This morning, the company launched a new model called the N900 which is based on the company’s Linux-based Maemo 5 operating system. Not everyone is going to be convinced, but Davenport & Co. analyst F. Drake Johnstone is. Late this afternoon, he raised his rating on Nokia to Buy from Hold, setting a price target of $18.

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Canaccord Adams software analyst Peter Misek today cut his rating on Microsoft (MSFT) to Hold from Buy, while lowering his price target to $24 from $30.

Misek cited two reasons for his more cautious stance. One, he thinks consensus estimates are overly aggressive given the worsening macro spending environment. Misek points out that Microsoft had based its guidance on seeing some improvement in conditions in the second half of the year; Misek says he now questions the validity of that assumption. And two, he sees increasing competitive threats. In operating systems, he notes that the company has lost some share to Apple (AAPL); he thinks some PC OEMs may be looking at competitive alternatives to Vista, including Linux and OS X.

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Digg founder Kevin Rose had a message for the audience at the Future of Web Apps conference on Thursday: It’s time to grow up.

“We have to do better,” he said in his talk, called “The Future of News,” and said that it’s time for the social news site that he founded in 2004 to to expand beyond the geek set and get some real-world relevance. “Why click a button and make the number go up by one? Why does that matter?”

Digg, after all, gets more than 30 million monthly visitors, but Rose said that the site only has slightly over three million registered user accounts–those are the people actually “Digging.” That indirectly confirmed what Digg critics have been saying all along: that it’s reflective of only a tiny and vocal subset of the Web, resulting in a heavy bias toward anything iPhone, anything Linux, anything Barack Obama, and plenty of wacky local news stories.

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Chrome is not going to replace Windows. A computer requires an operating system such as Windows, Apple’s OS X or Linux to make the machine work. It does, however, have the potential to do what Mr. Gates feared: make the choice of operating system less important.

So writes John Gapper, the fine columnist for The Financial Times in today’s paper. Chrome, of course, is Google’s new browser, which is pretty explicitly designed to be a Windows killer. As Mr. Gapper notes, that precise fear–that an Internet browser could become such a powerful platform for applications software that it would effectively take over the function of the operating system–is what caused Microsoft to start the browser wars in the 1990s, effectively putting Netscape out of business.

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Cisco Systems (CSCO) today announced a deal to acquire privately held PostPath, a Mountain View, Calif.-based provider of Linux-based email and calendaring software, for $215 million. Cisco said the deal will extend the email and calendar functions of its Webex Connect collaboration platform. Cisco said that PostPath’s software is “interoperable with many other email solutions and provides a browser-independent AJAX Web client.”

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Google vowed that its Linux-based Android mobile platform would empower enthusiasts and amateur developers, but today we have seen compelling evidence that this is an empty promise. Third-party Android application developers, who have grown increasingly frustrated with the lack of SDK updates, were shocked to discover that Google has been secretly making new versions of the Android SDK available to the Android Developer Challenge finalists under nondisclosure agreements.

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Windows’ enterprise adoption declined in 2007, with the gains going to Linux and Mac OS. Vista is a bust. Forrester published the data on March 27, but only released it publicly today. Forrester surveyed a whopping 50,000 users at over 2,300 large to very large enterprises throughout 2007.

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After almost a decade of leading Red Hat, I have decided to transition my CEO and president role for the personal reasons I have already discussed. It’s my privilege to continue serving this great company in the role of chairman of the board. Red Hat will be in the capable hands of a world-class executive team under the leadership of Jim Whitehurst as president and CEO.

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