Novell, Inc., today announced it has acquired privately held Ximian of Boston, Mass., a leading provider of desktop and server solutions that enable enterprise Linux adoption. No financial terms were disclosed.

The acquisition of Ximian expands Novell's ability to support Linux solutions as the company adds best-of-breed Linux desktop, groupware and management technologies, and welcomes several of the open source community's leading visionaries to the Novell® team and a strong core of Linux developers into the Novell fold.

Novell plans to carry forward two key Ximian Linux market initiatives: GNOME, a project to provide a full-featured Linux desktop, and Mono™, designed to allow applications developed using Microsoft .NET to run on Linux, UNIX, Windows, and other platforms.

Ximian, was founded in 1999 by Miguel de Icaza along with partner Nat Friedman, and has over a million users worldwide of its desktop and management products aimed at lowering the total cost of Linux ownership for enterprise customers. Ximian Red Carpet is the de facto standard for software updating across leading Linux distributions. Red Carpet Enterprise software provides enterprise customers with centralized software management of Linux servers and desktops. Over time, Red Carpet Enterprise will be tightly integrated into the Novell ZENworks™ product line, leveraging Novell directory services and policies management functionality.

De Icaza, CTO of Ximian and now chief technology officer for the Novell Ximian Services business unit of Novell, said, "It's a huge step forward for the open source community to gain strong support from a company like Novell. Initiatives like GNOME and Mono will only improve with Novell's resources behind them."

The acquisition of Ximian was an all-cash transaction and is not expected to have a material effect on Novell's financial statements in the current fiscal year. No further details as to the specific terms of the transaction are being disclosed.