Hard on the heels of Novell Vice Chairman Chris Stone's resignation came word that Microsoft was paying Novell US$536 million to settle an anti-trust action related to Novell's former NDS for Windows NT products. Some observers think there might be a connection.

After accepting the payment, Novell withdrew its support from the European Union's anti-trust action against the Redmond monopolist. But some conspiracy theorists (and the Linux community seems to have even more of those than the state of Montana) began rumor mongering that Novell sacked Stone at Bill Gates' request and snagged a bunch of money in the process.

While it's true Stone was the lead evangelist for Novell's move into open source (and, thus, probably anathema to Microsoft), it is Novell Chairman and CEO Jack Messman who is frequently quoted as a champion of the open source way - and he isn't leaving the company just yet.

What intrigued me about the settlement was the suit that didn't get settled. Novell said it planned to file a new anti-trust lawsuit against Microsoft tied to decade-old competitive practices involving Novell's WordPerfect word processing software.

Novell reportedly had Redmond dead to rights on the NDS for NT issue, including a "smoking gun" quote from the former head of the networking group for Windows NT, who had warned Novell that if it proceeded, Microsoft would break the product.

The WordPerfect story, though, is different. Novell is charging that Microsoft manipulated Windows to give an advantage to its own Microsoft Office package of office productivity software while disadvantaging Novell's WordPerfect Office suite.

Microsoft settled the NDS for NT suit because the company couldn't easily defend itself. Microsoft refused to settle the WordPerfect suit, though, because in that case it's Novell that will have the difficult time proving its case.

Difficult because Microsoft didn't bring about the downfall of WordPerfect Corp. (except indirectly, by providing an alternative), which allowed Novell to buy the company.

WordPerfect was done in by its own faulty decisions, a situation that also seemed to survive the company and accompany the product as it went from hand to hand - first to Novell and then to Corel.