Novell president and chief operating officer Ron Hovsepian sees the acquisition of the JBoss application server by Red Hat as having “further validated our early adoption of JBoss.” Novell still has a satisfactory contract in place with JBoss in its new guise, despite its favouring of the Suse distribution of Linux. The company claims to have a consistent code base from mainframe servers through to mid-range servers and down to the desktop. Business users’ decision-making criteria on Linux have shifted from cost to reliability, scalability and security, says Hovsepian.