Summary: Another Novell employee moves to Red Hat and Novell continues to focus on initiatives that make Microsoft stronger

Novell has not been particularly healthy to SUSE's reputation, especially after it signed that patent/collaboration deal with Microsoft. Jakub Steiner left Novell last month and he is joining Red Hat, which also scooped up Novell’s director of ISV ecosystems last month.

Today was my first day at Red Hat.

As SUSE people move to Red Hat, Novell is left with Mono and Moonlight. Its developers keep developing such Microsoft enablers and there is little news apart from that. To Novell, OpenSUSE is just a volunteers magnet from which to produce SLES/SLED, which Microsoft makes money from. Novell helps Microsoft in HPC using SUSE as a ramp (Microsoft finds other routes) and Microsoft also profits from Xandros, by imposing its patent tax on Scalix which was last mentioned in this press release.

Scalix, the award-winning Linux email, group calendaring, and messaging subsidiary of Xandros, Inc., today announced that Ecommerce, Inc., a world leader in web hosting solutions (IX Web Hosting), has chosen Scalix as the premium groupware of choice for their customer base.

There is nothing else in the news about Xandros and very little about Novell, except the OpenSUSE 11.3 release which Stephan Kulow writes about ahead of parties in places like Nürnberg (not much anywhere else). The RC of OpenSUSE 11.3 is now out:

Two weeks after the first release candidate arrived, the openSUSE development team have issued the second and final release candidate (RC) for version 11.3 of the openSUSE operating system. According to the developers, the latest development preview is a "final check" aimed at making sure that "11.3 is polished and in good condition".

To OpenSUSE's credit, it gives a fair deal to KDE [1, 2]. With Mandriva having difficulties (Red Hat hired some of its developers), OpenSUSE remains essential to cutting-edge KDE.

wstephenson announced on the opensuse-kde@ mailinglist that openSUSE 11.3 will ship KDE SC 4.4.4, so you want might to test those packages.

OpenSUSE ought to distance itself from Novell/Microsoft, but this requires a name change because the "OpenSUSE" trademark is owned by Novell. ⬆