Novell not committed to S.u.S.E.

AS ONE OF our readers put it, he knew it would be bad news when an American proprietary software company, Novell, bought a darling of Europe, which was competing closely on the desktop against Mandriva.

It was a particularly quiet week for OpenSUSE last week and it turned out, based on two independent sources (one is private), that Novell's core SUSE developers were affected by low-key layoffs.

Is Novell moving further towards GNU/Linux and open source as it so boldly claims or is it running further back to development of proprietary technologies and Microsoft copycats that only weaken GNU/Linux and open source?

The following article from the Germany-based Linux Pro Magazine rightly expresses disappointment, according to gentle signs in the writing style.

ovell openSUSE: Development Ebbing?

[...]

Of the 160 openSUSE workers, around 30 (or 20%) were affected by the layoff.

Novell does not want either to confirm or deny any cuts in the popular Linux distro's development and still defers to last week's announcement. Financial results are expected February 26.

We are hardly able to find OpenSUSE news this week and the only article found so far is not favourable to OpenSUSE.

Open SuSE 11.1

I knew there would be issues with this machine, simply because it is more than 5 years old. In the case of OpenSuSE, it appears that the integrated video card is the main weakness. Or at least it was a jumbled display that kept me from getting very far. I did try several of the screen options from the default to 800×600 to VESA. Nothing seemed to be working. I’m sure some of you could have done some command line magic to make it work, but I’m only going so far on a live CD. The purpose of the live CD is to see if the program works on my hardware, and in this case, OpenSuse would not. I may try it on my laptop just to see how it looks and does on more modern hardware.

Is it time to branch out of SUSE and rid this good project from the bad name of Novell, including the encumbrances it imposes on OpenSUSE? ⬆