Novell buys Ximian. Novell, fresh from embracing open source wholeheartedly this spring at Brainshare (where the company announced a Linux version of its NetWare server stack was in the works for the next major release cycle), has bought Miguel de Icaza's home of GNOME. The question is, for what?

Could it be in response to Lotus' introduction of a Linux client for Domino? Ximian's Evolution mail client, essentially an Outlook for Linux, is part of the “MadHatter” desktop strategy at Sun. Or (more likely), is this about Mono, the open-source implementation of Microsoft's C# and .Net web services architecture?

Novell has already been pushing hard on the app server side with its acquisition of Silverstream last year. It got a Java application server and a web services integration platform out of the deal. It bought a commercial license for MySQL last year as well, adding a simple but powerful departmental database server to its NetWare application stack. With the addition of Mono, Novell could start to position NetWare as the Swiss Army Knife of network service platforms–it prints, it files, it connects your 3270 applications to your BizTalk workflows by way of Java…

What this means to the rest of the open source and Linux platform communities is, well, TBD. But Novell is certainly putting its money where its newfound open source religion is.