Summary: Novell promotes SUSE for a change, but it also leaves OpenSUSE to continue struggling with downtimes

NOVELL has hardly done anything to promote SUSE this month (unlike Fog Computing), until it issued this press release, had Markus Rex write for Novell's PR, made a buzz in the OpenSUSE community [1, 2, 3], and probably contacted journalists in order to generate some coverage [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] which included:

It has been a year since Novell launched its SUSE Appliance Program, which offers a set of online tools, dubbed SUSE Studio, for spinning up software appliances based on its SUSE Linux distro. The appliance tools were aimed at software developers who wanted to code appliances for their own purposes – perhaps as a means of more easily supporting and redistributing their own application software to their customers – not for distributing software appliances to the general public.

Now there is SUSE Gallery.

Novell uses these appliances to sell SUSE though some 'open' core companies that put SUSE Studio underneath. Novell also has some SUSE server collaborations going on with IBM [1, 2] and while more volunteers are needed in SUSE (packaging helps), there is also this OpenSUSE Build Service job opening. Novell's Duncan Mac-Vicar P. produces Build Service for Android.

There is hardly any other OpenSUSE news, except perhaps for the release of OpenSUSE 11.3 (covered before), the end of 11.0, some work on the Wiki, and server downtimes (Novell does not properly support the OpenSUSE project, which is looking for sponsors as a result). If Novell neglects OpenSUSE, then it's time to move on. ⬆