Summary: OpenSUSE flavour in marketing of KDE and a look at Novell's marketing as of late, which is all about proprietary software

THE OPENSUSE Web site has this new post about KDE bugs and another new post speaks about the OpenSUSE KDE repository. No doubt OpenSUSE plays an important role in KDE development. Another new post offers an OpenSUSE Build Service cheat sheet and Jos Poortvliet, the new OpenSUSE community manager (also key KDE person), praises Build Service:

openSUSE is far more conservative when it comes to upgrading packages in the stable release. Making it a much more stable platform. So, that means you're always a bit behind and you can't have the latest and greatest? No! openSUSE users CAN have their cake and eat it too. Thanks to the Build Service, newer versions of enduser applications and libraries can be entirely build against the stable distribution, lowering the number of packages you need to pull in and thus increasing stability.

To a certain extent, Poortvliet is responsible for marketing KDE but his paymaster urges him to market OpenSUSE. How can objectiveness be maintained under such pressures? Can one consolidate two roles without a conflict of interest?

Historically, Novell has been good at marketing, not necessarily at execution (not in recent years anyway, as it suffered a brain drain). Some years ago Novell made commercials for GNU/Linux, but ever since it signed a deal with Microsoft there has been almost nothing of this kind. Even right now, the videos produced by Novell promote Novell Teaming (proprietary) and user "Novelldemo" uploaded many Novell Pulse videos this month, starting with this one. Pulse is also proprietary. It has been a long time since Novell produced anything promotional about Free/open source software. User "Novell" in YouTube uploaded 6 success stories at the beginning of this month [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6] (there is another one about Novell's booth at VMworld 2010), but that too has nothing to do with software freedom.

It sure seemed like several years ago KDE rebuilt and rewrote the site so as to introduce KDE as "Free software" (as in freedom, not open source). It would be a shame if Novell's involvement in KDE changed that. KDE is already being used to promote OpenSUSE (e.g. the live CD). ⬆