Summary: Foggy slant from Novell staff at the event which promotes Linux (LinuxCon) but not necessarily software freedom

Novell has a lot of influence inside the Linux Foundation and its employee Markus Rex used to be a chief there. Notice this new report from Sean Michael Kerner.

Rex was speaking at the LinuxCon conference in a keynote address.

As Sean points out, "It's not just about the cloud as a delivery model either. Rex noted that workload management, security and tools to build appliances for the cloud (all of which Novell has products for) is the key to really unlocking innovation in the cloud." Novell is again hyping up Fog Computing, which is a route into lock-in, proprietary software included in this case. Why can't Rex just promote SUSE without resorting to marketing terms like "cloud"?

Anyway, Rex is not the real problem here. The marketing/management people at Novell must have indirectly pressured the staff to recite nonsense like "cloud". What does OpenSUSE have to say about it? There are still some flaws in OpenSUSE but also some better coverage (mostly technical). Susan Linton, for example, says that:

It's hard to find another Linux distribution equal to openSUSE. Many try, but most fail. It's an excellent choice for any level of user from beginner to developer.

Linton has been an OpenSUSE sidler for years, so it's actually more curious to find Charles installing it:

Last but not least, I have to share something that may interest a relatively minor portion of the readers of this blog, nonetheless I won’t refrain from letting you know that upon installing the latest OpenSuse 11.3 on my father’s laptop, I noticed a notable performance improvement of the Evolution Email and groupware suite. However, I still do not understand why for the love of G*d Evolution cannot use multiple inboxes…

Now that Novell has at least 3 options for sale, it seems possible that OpenSUSE will be separated from Novell. We shall see. ⬆