Summary: Matthias Hopf leaves the company formerly recognised as Novell, validating what we have said about the general trend in SUSE

OPENSUSE is trying to bury bad news. Key people from the board speak about the conference and impending releases such as OpenSUSE 12.1, which is now in milestone 5. Yesterday I spoke to someone who plans to leave OpenSUSE and he is currently checking what to move to. This is not an unusual sight. After SUSE had signed a patent deal with Microsoft and got Microsoft sponsorship, fewer and fewer people can sincerely believe that SUSE was ever dissociated with Novell's infamous Microsoft deal. why would a supporter of GNU/Linux stick with the Attachmate-led and Microsoft-funded SUSE when there is so much other choice out there? And why work for SUSE when there is a thriving Linux market out there and high demand for Linux skills? Well, Matthias Hopf has reportedly just left SUSE (his blog confirms):

Matthias Hopf, a SUSE developer working on the X11 stack for the past seven years and one of the original xf86-video-radeonhd driver developers, has left the company.

This long-time X developer is leaving two years after SUSE lost another one of its RadeonHD developers, Luc Verhaegen. Luc was laid off with several other developers at the German office in 2009 when Novell was attempting to cut its costs during the global economic crisis. Matthias is leaving SUSE to become a professor of Applied Computer Science at Georg-Simon-Ohm University. Ohm is a university of applied sciences in Nürnberg where he currently resides.

What's left of Novell are some security patches for proprietary software [1l, 2] (no new releases) as news is very scarce and Novell/Attachmate PR is done for proprietary VMware, not Linux virtualisation. It is sad to see what happened to Novell, but since it signed a deal with Microsoft, this was inevitable. ⬆