And the winner of the Novell sweepstakes is...Microsoft?

Novell is facing a potential breakup if it's bought by Elliot Associates L.P., a hedge fund. The open source community is justifiably worried. But a chorus of people point to a potentially very unlikely white knight --- Microsoft. The company that some consider as the scourge of open source may well be Novell's savior.

Elliot Associates says that it owns 8.5% of Novell stock. It made a bid back on March 2 to buy Novell for $1.8 billion. As my friend and open source guru Steven J. Vaughn-Nichols points out, Elliot Associates is known as a vulture fund --- they buy a company, break it up, sell off the pieces, come away with a pretty profit, and leave the company to die. So the open source community has good reason to be concerned.

A number of potential white knights have been identified that could swoop in, buy Novell, and leave it intact, or even help it prosper with more funds and better relationships, including IBM, Oracle, and HP, among others.

The most intriguing one, though, is Microsoft. As Steven J. Vaughn-Nichols writes:

...the guys from Redmond know quite well that the IDC server numbers tell only part of the story and that Linux continues to make big server gains. So long as they're on good terms with Novell, they have an automatic in with businesses that might otherwise turn completely to a Linux-based server infrastructure.

His views are echoed by the Standards Blog, which writes:

Curiously enough, one of the companies that may have the most to lose if Elliott acquires Novell is Microsoft.  Microsoft is no friend of open source in general, and of Linux, the OSS poster child, in particular, to be sure.  But Microsoft continues to be dragged by its customers down the road of tolerating, if not (yet) embracing, OSS.  Given that its customers have already opted in to heterogeneous operating system environments, Microsoft has had no choice but to work with those customers to make those environments work well --- or lose those customers entirely.

Later on, the blog adds:

Given that a loss of a viable Novell Linux distribution would at most impede, rather than reverse, the march of Linux, Microsoft thus has much more to lose than to gain if Novell's distribution were to rapidly lose market share

Vaughn-Nichols and the Standards Blog are both right. No matter what happens with Novell, Linux is here to stay. Too many enterprises have invested too much money, time, and intellectual capital in it for it to vanish. After all, open source was alive and well before Novell came into the picture, and it will be alive and well even if it dies.

Many people in the open source community will never accept Microsoft, no matter what the company does. But many others are pragmatic-minded rather than politically minded, and care above all about making the best use of technology. They may well welcome Microsoft becoming a big player in the open source community, because Microsoft would then be even more committed to making Linux play well with Microsoft technology. Many companies use both Linux and Microsoft software; a Microsoft buyout could help them.

Microsoft would be buying more than just good will. It would gain a very substantial installed base to whom it could sell Linux services and products --- and you can be sure it would try to sell Microsoft technologies as well. So don't be surprised if Microsoft comes riding to Novell's rescue.