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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Recurring outages on major networking sites such as Twitter and LinkedIn, along with incidents where Twitter members were mysteriously dropped for days at a time, have led many people to challenge the centralized control exerted by companies running social networks.

Whether you’re a street demonstrator or a business analyst, you may well have come to depend on Twitter. We may have been willing to build our virtual houses on shaky foundations might when they were temporary beach huts; but now we need to examine the ground on which many are proposing to build our virtual shopping malls and even our virtual federal offices.

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As investors and analysts digest this morning’s Oracle-Sun news, some are wondering what will happen to Sun (JAVA)-owned MySQL, and whether combining the Oracle (ORCL) and MySQL database businesses would represent an antitrust concern.

While MySQL would be a small part of Oracle’s overall business, it’s a popular open-source database that competes with other Oracle offerings. The deal, writes Seeking Alpha’s Mike Butcher, “has massive implications for the future openness of Java and MySQL.”

“MySQL is clearly a big prize for Oracle,” writes Om Malik on GigaOm, who says that the acquisition takes out Oracle’s No. 1 threat.

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You know, BusinessWeek asked me about Apple potentially open sourcing the iPhone over a year ago. Since then: nothing out of Apple, despite mounting pressure from projects like Android that are vying for Apple’s throne. With Christmas only days away, I’ve only got one thing I want to ask Santa Jobs for, and it ain’t a Red Rider BB Gun. All I want from Apple is a more open platform. Sure, the odds are slim as long as they remain dominant. That’s why I’m not asking them to completely open source the iPhone. I’m just asking them to crack the door and let the breeze in.

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For anyone who hasn’t been paying attention to the software industry lately, I have some bad news. The open-source business model is broken. Companies have long hoped to make money from this freely available software by charging customers for support and add-on features. Some have succeeded. Many others have failed or will falter, and their ranks may swell as the economy worsens. This will require many to adopt a new mindset, viewing open source more as a means than an end in itself.

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I am very impressed lately by Google’s commitment to open source. Specifically, I love their “Catch and Release” strategy for developing their ecosystem of developers and partners. This strategy for ecosystem development is much different than Microsoft’s (MSFT) old model (closed ecosystem embrace and extend). Google (GOOG) is earning credibility in a new way by enabling key technology, and then by releasing code for open collaboration and development–Catch and Release.

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Admit it. When you read that headline–“Gartner: 85 percent of enterprises using open source”–you assumed that was a good thing, right? Who’s afraid of enterprises saving a lot of money and getting much more flexible IT for their IT budgets?

Gartner, apparently. According to Gartner, that widespread adoption is cause for alarm, as Glyn Moody rightly notes (and pillories). Somehow, Gartner assumes that if 85 percent are using open source and 69 percent don’t have a formal open-source management team, the world is going to end.

As Moody notes, however, IT organizations have virtually nothing to worry about when adopting open source:

“About a dozen times a year,” [Software Freedom Law Center general counsel Eben] Moglen says, “somebody does something [that] violates the GPL. Most of the time, they’re doing so inadvertently, they haven’t thought through what the requirements are. And I call them up and I say, ‘Look, you’re violating the GPL. What you need to do is this. Would you help us?’” The answer is invariably yes, he says.

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In response to today’s news that Google is releasing its own browser, code-named Chrome, I decide to call John Lilly, CEO of Mozilla Corp., the folks behind the fast-growing Firefox browser. My intention was to find out what Lilly thought about this development, especially since Mozilla has been viewed as close personal partner of Google’s.

The open-source browser maker depends heavily on a lucrative financial deal it has signed with the search company. The pair recently renewed the deal to last through 2011. Was Lilly worried about yet another browser in the market?

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Nokia, already a stakeholder in mobile OS maker Symbian, has announced that it will buy the remainder of the company and throw all the assets into a new platform called the Symbian Foundation, which will unite all the flavors of Symbian into a single, common software platform that will go open source in two years. The story is not that this happened but why–and what it means for the mobile industry.

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Companies used to give away pens, squishy balls and coffee cups to worm their ways into the hearts of customers. Now, they pass out database software. That is, in a sense, Sun Microsystems’ strategy with its $1 billion purchase of MySQL, said Sun CFO Mike Lehman at Sun’s Global Media Summit here today. Very few customers have or will pay for MySQL, he admitted. However, they are installing it in large and growing numbers, and that gives Sun an opportunity to visit them and try to sell them servers and storage systems.

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What is the greatest threat to Microsoft’s dominance: Google Inc. or open source? The answer is both, especially when they’re working together.

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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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