Summary: Banshee and Pinta rear their head again; no considerable changes in OpenSUSE

THE WORLD of Novell is a misty mixture of Microsoft and SUSE, .NET and Linux, even Microsoft tax on Free/libre software. The patent trap which is Banshee has a rather belated (and bloated) release (Banshee is a Novell project) and Pinta, a project conceived by a Novell developer, still helps spread Mono. After reports that it had died there was a call for volunteers to help save it and the program is said to have been resurrected. So there is still work to be done making Mono and Xamarin go away (back where they came from, Microsoft culture).

While things remain quiet in OpenSUSE (with few exceptions) and there are delays reported (as covered here twice before), it seems like the project opened up a bit to women:

At the openSUSE conference last week, Lydia Pintscher from the KDE Community Working Group led a BoF on “women in openSUSE”. This is what we (Stella, Bruno, Lydia, Pascal, Susanne, Greg) worked out...

This seems more like PR. OpenSUSE is most predominantly a male group and it is run almost exclusively by people who are employed by SUSE/Attachmate (formerly Novell) and partly funded by Microsoft. The community was not even part of the decision to bond with Microsoft. ⬆