Summary: OpenSUSE is down for the weekend and there are no proper fallbacks

EARLIER this year, OpenSUSE was looking for sponsors because its Web site/s went down and Novell was not helping much; in fact, Novell appears to only scale down its workforce in Germany [1, 2] where OpenSUSE (and subsequently SLE) is being developed, at least for the most part. This leads to unrest.

As we wrote a week ago, OpenSUSE was to have a downtime, but its duration is a little surprising:

While the work itself will take place on Saturday and Sunday, the downtime will begin today, Friday the 11th, at 13:00 UTC (9:00 AM EDT) and is scheduled to end Monday, September 14, at 7:00 UTC (3:00 AM EDT).

That is a very long time. Why has Novell not helped implement a proper mirror? This is not the first such long downtime for OpenSUSE, so they never seem to learn from experience. This would not happen to Mono, which is on a separate network. It probably shows that their priorities with Mono are quite high up [1, 2].

The date of the downtime has potential significance.

A planned maintenance for the transformers for the openSUSE servers at the Nuremberg office will bring down the critical services for a few days over the 9/11 weekend.

OpenSUSE went down on 9/11. Wouldn't independence be better? ⬆