Summary: Reminder that the rumour about Canonical's interest in OpenSUSE came as a word through the grapevine, not a speculation

LAST week we shared a rumour we had heard about Canonical having an interest in buying OpenSUSE. In one of the IRC channels I've asked Jono Bacon (from Canonical) if they could deny this rumour, which is not ours. Jono did not deny it, but he said he had not heard about it, either. As for OpenSUSE, its community manager told me that it would not work well for a community, but he did not deny the possibility, either (no party has yet denied it).

There is a new article about the subject and while I agree with Brian that there is a lot of overlap (redundancy) between OpenSUSE and Ubuntu, I was not attempting to explain the practical rationality of it, just to pass on what I had learned. If at some point it crossed Mark Shuttleworth's mind, then maybe he inquired now that Novell is looking for a buyer, quite likely a buyer of parts of the company. It is very diverse in its portfolio, very much like Sun, so finding a suitable acquirer that can leave all projects alive and also pass antitrust scrutiny is hard. Here is what Brian wrote:

There's a rumor running around that Canonical, for reasons that I have yet to fathom, is supposedly interested in buying openSUSE, the community distribution project that is currently maintained and staffed by Novell.

Now, it's important right from the get-go to understand that the primary source of this rumor is Roy Schestowitz, blogger-manager of TechRights.org--a site that until recently was known as Boycott Novell.

I think it's safe to say that Schestowitz has negative bias when it comes to reporting about Novell and openSUSE. Boycott Novell was started as a protest site after Novell's sales and marketing agreement with Microsoft was announced--the same deal that infamously included patent protection from Microsoft for Novell customers. Schestowitz has not been shy about his contempt for Novell, and has even come after me as a Novell sympathizer.

He is an OpenSUSE user and in some posts earlier this year he did give the impression of not having any real problem with Novell. "Sympathiser" is not a negative word by the way (it probably depends on how it's said, but text has no tone).

If Canonical bought OpenSUSE, it would probably be good news for the distribution. Here is a new article about the crown jewel of SUSE:

Although I love Yast and its graphical incarnation, I am yet to see innovations in the areas of simplicity and also with being current.

OpenSUSE also has a lot of KDE talent and it shows:

OpenSUSE 11.3, the best binary KDE distribution or best KDE distribution?

[...]

Interestingly, OpenSUSE 11.3 was released not so long ago and the performance is very nippy. If you haven’t tried it, I suggest you do.

My utter disappointment with OpenSUSE 11.2 (it was very sluggish) is what made me try out Gentoo.

Funnily enough, OpenSUSE 11.3 has changed some of my thoughts about Gentoo.

It is possible that Novell will also carry on with Wave where Google left it off. Not everything which Novell does is bad and especially when it comes to OpenSUSE, there is great importance to this project because it helps GNU/Linux as a whole. ⬆