I relieze that Novell is a company, but how do they own SuSE and what else do they do? What is this groupwise stuff about? Does Novell just make web programs to run ontop of Winblows and Unix?

Novell is a company that makes not only client-server access software, it makes a whole operating system. The Novell server operating system is based upon UNIX, and it server as a file storage and client access point. The client is a program (and a protocol) that runs on top of Windows.

Groupwise is a groupware product (certain similarities
to Lotus Notes), Novell has native products for Windows
and uses Java for some other platforms (for GW, that is)

They started out with a pretty good (though memory hungry)
NOS that was started (still is these days, will only run on
Linux in the next release) from a DOS partition and then
completely replaced DOS' functionality.

There's also a "native" client for Linux for the novell
file-server.

And these days Netware uses IP instead of IPX by
default ...


Cheers,
Tink