I've been following some of Novell's efforts since they overtook Ximian because I've come to really respect the Ximian guys. This is particularly because I've become a big fan of C# and have been watching the Mono project with interest. It's good to see an open source C# compiler, and great to see Mono having come so far so quickly in terms of usability and cross-platform development.
The cool thing is to see how much the Ximian attitudes seem to have infused Novell. I'm not sure if it was some sort of memetic takeover from within or the company was truly heading in that direction anyway, but Novell seems to slowly over time not just move towards Open Source development, but to actually get it (more than I have in the past), unlike some that just seem to some days be providing lip service (IBM, Sun).
One of the neat new Novell open source projects is the Hula Project, found via this announcement. Hula is an open-source Mail and Calendar server, that was boot-strapped from Novell's existing NetMail code. UofL uses the NetMail product, and if Hula is the direction NetMail is heading, then I actually have a better opinion of NetMail now.
I'm particularly interested in the rich webclient code, which I think could be reusable in and of itself in other Open Source projects. Several I've had in mind could benefit from a good framework, at the very least.