Summary: OpenSUSE and SUSE rely on old news and past glory while in present/reality there's depression of progress

IT has been almost a week since we last caught up with SUSE. There is not much to catch up with really. There's just OpenSUSE 11.4 promotion from the former community manager of OpenSUSE and Novell employee Joe Brockmeier (the article at least contains a disclosure). Sebastian Kügler from KDE ran for the OpenSUSE Board and didn't get elected. Instead it was Vogelsang and Linnell who got elected:

The last few weeks in the openSUSE project have been very interesting. Two seats on the openSUSE Project board were up for election. The Election Committee closed the polls on Wednesday, and we are pleased to announce the results:

1. Henne Vogelsang (125 Votes) 2. Peter Linnell (72 Votes)

Pascal stepped away under bizarre circumstances. This may have been the last election ever.

Apart from ZENworks 11 proprietary "Appliance" and some more proprietary enhancements to GroupWise, it emerges that Novell has a new SUSE deal with HP. We'll write about it at a later date, but meanwhile here's a portion of Timothy Prickett Morgan's report (there is the press release too, for comparison):

Systems software maker Novell has announced today a special deal for customers building clusters with its SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. If you cluster servers with the company's High Availability Extensions, you get those extensions for free.

There's all sorts of other gimmes too, and the deal runs through June this year.

This all sounds well and good. If customers plunk SLES 11 on their ProLiant rack, tower, or blade servers, they can get a support contract for the HA Extensions tossed in for nadda, which costs $699 per server for a one-year support term or $1,890 for a three-year term. According to the Novell announcement, this HA Extension deal is only available through HP and its resellers.

Simultaneously comes more drivel from Novell's PR people, including this item about Penguin Computing. It says: "Dan Dufault, Novell’s Global Director of Partner Marketing, recently sat down with Penguin Computing’s Chief Hardware Architect, Philip Pokorny and the Company’s director of product management for high performance computing, Arend Dittmer to discuss their experience providing solutions to the Linux market as well as Penguin’s partnership with Novell."

There is also something about VMware's use/support of SUSE (not news) and belated announcement regarding LibreOffice for OpenSUSE (they built 3.3.0 later than most). With new security problems in proprietary software from Novell [1, 2] it sure seems like Novell is falling behind. A lot of the above is basically repetition of existing deals; Novell tries to pass them off as "news". ⬆