Can Novell get its good name back?

Hillary Clinton faces such a choice today. You're either for the war or agin' it, girl. Don't talk about future planning. No long words like efficacious, either. Yea or nay.

Novell faced such a choice six months ago. Microsoft offered it a fat check for its corporate soul.

Novell took the check.

Now it wants a do-over. Novell promises to (finally) share the full agreement. It couldn't before because, you see, it was being investigated for back-dating stock options, which should tell you all you really need to know.

Oh, and Novell insists it's not for software patents, that it's supporting the EFF's efforts to challenge what it considers bogus patents. Trouble is that many in the open source community think all patents on math are bogus. (Except perhaps for this, the product of a Goethe University graduate.)

Novell wants its good name back, with open source. But that plane has lifted off the runway. Goethe wrote a great play about it once. (This particular Faust image lives next to a paper on literature at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.)