Drying up but not dying

Summary: The OpenSUSE project lacks the level of activity it had back when Novell was in charge; the deemphasis occurs following the separation imposed by Microsoft's partner, Attachmate

In order for the OpenSUSE conference to materialise, Jos Poortvliet has already begun looking for sponsors [1, 2]. A few years back OpenSUSE also sought sponsors for a server, as if Novell was being too cheap to buy its own project the necessary means to operate. What exactly is going on there? Despite the fact that activity remains in the project (however minor as it's hard to find much of it), Attachmate left the project somewhat orphaned and development therefore relies on the likes of Google for funding [1, 2, 3] of key projects like YaST, For the rest, OpenSUSE relies on many packages from other companies/distributions.

Following the separation between SUSE and Novell there is hardly anything to see in OpenSUSE. Did Attachmate, a Microsoft partner, help/agree to keep OpenSUSE dry? Novell's sale to Attachmate was financially assisted by Microsoft. What were the conditions? ⬆