Summary: More people are leaving OpenSUSE while BrainShare faces an uncertain future (if any)

AS EXPECTED, following the acquisition news and Novell's sale of patents to a Microsoft-organised consortium, people are leaving and AttachMSFT [sic] can't do anything about it. Despite some OpenSUSE news and Jos Poortvliet's announcement of another milestone (more interviewing with him), the project is losing momentum and Sascha Manns reveals that people still walk away:

Right now the following Sections need someone taking over:

* Tips and Tricks * In the Community * On the Web.

OpenSUSE was once somewhat of a leader and right now it might be following others, e.g. with Canonical's Unity:

Unity Coming to openSUSE too?!

After the announcement by Canonical that Ubuntu would be moving to Unity for its interface, other developers have expressed some interest in porting it to their distributions just for fun. Fedora's Adam Williamson was one of the first to start building packages for other distributions, but now someone is working on openSUSE packages as well.

Nelson Marques, openSUSE contributor, began by porting some of Ubuntu's Indicators to openSUSE; many of which are available now in openSUSE:Contrib for 11.4 Milestone 4 and beyond. Some of these include the Me Menu Indicator, Battery Status, and Sound Indicator. Soon after sending those up to the contrib repository, Marques stated that since many of the Indicators and dependencies are shared with Unity, he might as well try to package Unity as well.

OpenSUSE has become a follower rather than a leader and as a Novell expert revealed last week:

With Novell's announcement of the postponement of BrainShare in March of 2011, GWAVACon takes on a little bit more significance this year.

GWAVACon still depends on AttachMSFT's decision regarding GroupWise. Will they keep it or let it go in the long term? ⬆