Rumors just won’t die that Novell will be laying off more employees. The rumor mill has Novell laying off everything from simply more than the announced 100 staffers to a retracted story of about 1,000 employees. The reality is, drum-roll please, it’s still less than 100 employees out of about 4,000 employees.

According to Ian Bruce, Novell’s PR director, Novell has no plans for future layoffs and the layoffs of not quite 100 individuals out of Novell’s worldwide employees are now completed. Bruce was not able to say whether these layoffs were focused in any one geographical or technical area.

Rumors have had it that there would be more layoffs in Novell’s SUSE Linux Nuremberg office or in its Provo, Utah offices. However, I was unable to find any substance to these stories.

In a time of deepening economic gloom, it’s easy to see how these rumors can gain creditability. Bruce said that Novell’s cuts were “in response to the global economic downturn.”

Meanwhile, in reality, Novell still seems interested in acquiring other open-source companies. The company has also revamped its channel program to make its pricing easier. And, last but not least, Novell has just released is open-source version of Microsoft’s Silverlight, Moonlight. In short, Novell is acting like a company that’s still expanding and looking for business rather than retrenching to survive the economic downturn.

Novell will be announcing its financial results for its first fiscal quarter 2009 on Thursday, February 26, 2009 at 4PM Eastern Time. While Novell is not expected to do as well as Red Hat, which has been flourishing in the down economy, Novell’s Linux business is continuing to grow.