Novell Buys $100 Million in Shares, Joins Google Summer of Code

Published: May 20, 2008

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Commercial Linux distributor Novell said last week that its board of directors has authorized the company to head on down to Wall Street with a couple of bales of cash to buy up shares of the company's stock in a effort to bolster the shares and boost per share earnings growth calculations in the coming quarters. Novell also announced that search engine giant Google is funding some openSUSE projects as part of its Summer of Code donations back to the open source community.

Novell first started doing share buybacks in September 2005, when it authorized $200 million in buybacks, as the company's former chairman and chief executive officer, Jack Messman, came under pressure to grow sales and profits at Novell in the wake of the SUSE acquisition. In April 2006, Novell doubled the authorization of share purchases to $400 million, and at that time, Novell had nearly $1.7 billion in cash and short-term investments in the bank. The $100 million share repurchase authorization that Novell's board voted for last week could take more than 4 percent of the company's shares off the market (at last week's closing price), which obviously helps make per share earnings look bigger. This time around, Novell has stabilized its financials, has a new chief executive at the helm (Ron Hovsepian), and is spending less dough to buy back shares, but had $1.8 billion in cash and equivalents in the bank at the end of January, which is when its fiscal first quarter terminated.

In a related announcement, Novell said last week that Thomas Plaskett is stepping down as non-executive chairman of the board and that Richard Crandall, the founder of decision support company Comshare, a venture capitalist, and a former chairman of consultancy Giga Information Group (founded by Gartner founder Gideon Gartner and then reabsorbed into that company), has taken over in that position. Crandall is also chairman of the Enterprise Software Roundtable, a group of the 35 largest software companies, which he founded in 1994. To say that he is a heavy hitter in the software area is an understatement.

Novell also said, is a separate announcement, that Google is ponying up the cash to support 10 development efforts under the openSUSE community development project behind SUSE Linux. Google gives such support through its Summer of Code projects, which has paired more than 2,000 mentors and 1,500 students from over 90 countries to develop code as a summer job. This summer, Google is paying for projects for over 1,125 students participating in over 175 open source projects. Here are the 10 openSUSE projects Google is paying for and their students and mentors:

1. LTSP GUI management for openSUSE; by Jan Weber, mentored by Jigish Gohil
2. Interactive crash analysis; by Nikolay Derkach, mentored by Jan Blunck
3. Face-based authentication; by Rohan Anil, mentored by Alex Lau Chun Yin
4. Grub4ext4: enable ext4 file system as boot partition; by PengTao, mentored by Coly Li
5. New approach for (RPM) packages creation; by Andrei Oprisan, mentored by Stanislav Brabec
6. Libzypp download failover; by Gerard Farràs i Ballabriga, mentored by Peter Poeml
7. GNOME Build Service client for openSUSE; by Mario Ðanic, mentored by Rodrigo Moya
8. Integration of OpenID Consumer to Build Service; by Hameedullah Khan, mentored by Cornelius Schumacher
9. Migration assistant reloaded; by Peter Libic, mentored by Pavol Rusnak
10. Build Service-Eclipse integration; by Long Hong, mentored by Michal Marek

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