Novell is circling down the drain

Summary: The degradation of the entity once known as Novell following the Microsoft-assisted buyout (euthanasia) which left the patents in Microsoft's coffers and the OpenSUSE volunteers rather aimless, disinterested even

TECHRIGHTS spent entire years covering Novell and upon the company's demise we continue to track its last days (pre- and post-acquisition). In recent posts we noted that managers and PR people had vanished from Novell and the OpenSUSE community lacked the level of activity it once boasted. Over the past week we have observed more of the same trends and this post is a short summary of evidence.

"In recent posts we noted that managers and PR people had vanished from Novell and the OpenSUSE community lacked the level of activity it once boasted."Novell in Poland (Novell w Polsce) is the only source of new Novell videos [1, 2] and the only PR blogger left (there used to be a handful) is pushing proprietary software (SUSE-washed though) while a Novell-oriented site emits a couple more [1, 2].

As in prior weeks, with the exception of weekly news (from Sascha Manns in his blog and elsewhere), it is hard to see much evidence of progress on the Free/open source side of things, namely OpenSUSE. SUSE bloggers move to other places and some resort to less activity due to new jobs. To quote this one new example:

Nevertheless, Yast has fallen behind on design. The program is powerful and versatile. But there could be some improvements made in organization and space-use customization.

There is still a lot of stuff from Greece in the Planet and the blog, e.g. this post. There is some support and funding from other companies -- that which is able to keep some progress going. Google Summer of Code, as we noted before, helps fund some projects that are beneficial to OpenSUSE [1, 2]. For Google it is a good investment for PR reasons and also for advancement of the Free software commonwealth that Google's largely proprietary empire is built upon. Google is mostly a 'cloud' (or Fog Computing) company and the hype around this buzzword does not escape OpenSUSE, either. But just riding the Wave [pung intended] won't save it. Attachmate is not genuinely interested in helping Free software. ⬆