Bonum Certa Men Certa

Unrest in OpenSUSE Forums

Summary: OpenSUSE departures noted, Novell defends its OpenSUSE trademark

SIGNS suggest that the OpenSUSE project has slowed down. With the departure of one key person (voluntarily) leaves yet another.

Today, Wolfgang Koller, the founder of former suselinuxsupport.de and one of the three Site Admins of the openSUSE forums, announced his immediate resignation from the OSF staff. I myself feel this as a loss, that is both unexpected and severe. From my perspective, he deserves our respect and appreciation for everything he has done for the openSUSE community and thus this post is dedicated to his person and contribution.

Also in answer to his decision, I myself announced my own immediate resignation from the OSF staff as well.


The author of this post receives many comments.

Some people say that SUSE has not been the same ever since Novell acquired it. Novell thinks differently. Novell even defends its exclusive ownership of "OpenSUSE", the trademark. Looking at its PR department, they use an article published by Novell staff (Zonker) to justify what they choose to do.

Zonker’s argument is founded on the Four Freedoms outlined by the Free Software Foundation which have nothing to do with the ability to commercially profit from open source software.


Microsoft's pledge to OpenSUSE developers calls them "hobbyists" and says almost explicitly that they are only permitted to work with SUSE as a hobby but not to make money using SUSE. What kind of GNU/Linux supporter would tolerate that? How could Novell, which accepted and knowingly signed such an agreement?

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