Novell Lays Off AppArmor Team

Shane Coyle

2007-10-12 05:03:25 UTC
Modified: 2007-10-12 18:32:34 UTC

It has been said on this site before, we do not really hate Novell (certainly not the employees and community), and we absolutely recognize and appreciate all of Novell's contributions, we just want them to see the error of their ways. Call it tough love, if you will.

So, keeping that in mind, realize I am not particularly comfortable writing about the current layoffs at Novell. However, this story really shocked me, I must admit.

Apparently, Novell has layed off the AppArmor team (and it's confirmed, so this isn't like when it appeared that the Samba developers left Novell, but hadn't - a little embarrassing).

Two years after acquiring the company that developed the AppArmor security software for Linux, Novell has laid off team members behind the project, CNET News.com has learned.

AppArmor's founder and leader, Crispin Cowan, joined Novell in 2005 when it acquired his company, Immunix, which developed the software. But he and four others from the project lost their Novell jobs in Portland, Ore., on September 28, Cowan confirmed.

However, he plans to continue AppArmor development. He and two other laid-off AppArmor programmers, Steve Beattie and Dominic Reynolds, launched an AppArmor consulting company on Wednesday called Mercenary Linux.

The article goes on to say, from a rather cold economic perspective, that Novell intends to rely on the AppArmor community to lead development of the project since it is an even lower-cost option than outsourcing.

With the adoption of AppArmor really beginning to take off, in my mind, it seems rather odd that Novell would dissociate itself from the core team in such a way - as Cowan put it, "tossing it in the wind and hoping" - yet Novell terms it as "improving our product development process".

What are we to make of this rather sudden, somewhat shocking (even to Crispin Cowan) move? It's like Novell wanted to embrace the "Bazaar" development model, and just now is going to a bizarre development model.

P.S. Best of luck to the Mercenary Linux folks (great name, by the way!).

Comments

Karl Rove

2007-10-12 18:07:42

I just got laid off from Novell. I'm going to have to sell my $300K boat and my $3 million dollar home. Don't cry for me Argentina
kripken

2007-10-14 10:24:04

Well, the procedure might be bizarre, but the result makes perfect sense to me.

Obviously the AppArmor people are going to be experts at hardening Linux systems, and this skill is highly valuable. Keeping them inside Novell would imply their work is only applied (at least directly) to SUSE. But as Mercenary Linux, they can now support Red Hat, Debian, etc., in addition to SUSE. An enormous market.

That is, unlike GNOME developers, etc., who Novell has on staff, the marketability of hardening skills is such that it makes sense to spin it off.

In conclusion, I think this is very good news, and I wish the Mercenary Linux people luck. Sounds like a good career move.

GNOME Console Won’t Support Color Palettes or Profiles; Will Support Esperanto: Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer
Let's Hope GNU Makes it to 100: Can GNU still be in active use in 2083? Maybe.
GNU is 40, Linux is Just 32: Today it's exactly 40 years since Richard Stallman sent a message regarding GNU
GNU/Linux and Free Software News Mostly in Tux Machines Now: We've split the coverage
Links 27/09/2023: GNOME Raves and Firefox 118: Links for the day
Links 27/09/2023: 3G Phase-Out, Monopolies, and Exit of Rupert Murdoch: Links for the day
IBM Took a Man’s Voice, Pitting Him Against His Own Work, While Companies Profit from Low-Effort Garbage Generated by Bots and “Self-Service”: Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer
Links 26/09/2023: KDE, Programming, and More: Links for the day
Mozilla Promotes the Closed Web and Proprietary Webapps That Are Security and Privacy Hazards: This is just another reminder that the people who run Mozilla don't know the history of Firefox, don't understand the Web, and are beholden to "GAFAM", not to Firefox users
Debian More Like an Exploitative Sweatshop Than a Family: Wiltshire is riding a high horse in the UK, talking down to Indians who are "low-level" volunteers in his kingdom of authoritarians, guarded by an army of British lawyers who bully bloggers
Small Computers in Large Numbers: A Pipeline of Open Hardware: They guard and prioritise their "premiums", causing severe price hikes due to supply/demand disparities.
Microsoft Deserves a Medal for Being Worst at Security (the Media Deserves a Medal for Cover-up): There are still corruptible/bribed publishers that quote Microsoft staff like they're security gurus
Real Life Should be Offline, Not Online, and It Requires Free Software: Resistance means having the guts to say "no!", even in the face of great societal burden and peer pressure
10 Reasons to Permanently Export or Liberate Your Site From WordPress, Drupal, and Other Bloatware: There are certainly more more advantages, but 10 should suffice for now
About 200,000 Objects in Techrights Web Site: This hopefully helps demonstrate just how colossal the migration actually is
Good Teachers Would Tell Kids to Quit Social Control Media Rather Than Participate in It (Teaching Means Education, Not Misinformation): Insist that classrooms offer education to children rather than offer children to corporations
Twitter: From Walled Gardens to Paywalls and/or Amplifiers of Fascism: There's moreover a push to promote politicians who are as scummy as Twitter's owner
The World Wide Web is Being Confiscated From Us (Like Syndication Was Withdrawn About a Decade Ago) and We Need to Fight Back: We're worse off when fewer people promote RSS feeds and instead outsource to social control media (censorship, surveillance, manipulation)
Next Up: Restoring IRC Log Pipelines, Bulletins/Full Text RSS, Wiki (Archived, Static), and Pipelines for Daily Links: There are still many tasks left ahead of us, but we've progressed a lot
An Era of Rotting Technology, Migration Crises, and Cliffhanging: We've covered examples from IBM, resembling the Microsoft world

Novell Lays Off AppArmor Team

Comments

Recent Techrights' Posts