Microsoft ‘Has Acknowledged The Enterprise Role Of Linux’

He doesn’t dismiss the legitimate concerns some people have with the deal, or with the IP claims Microsoft made about Linux: “I would say that Microsoft is internally conflicted in how it deals with open source,” he concedes.

But he sees nothing but progress: “Even Microsoft is a contributor, including to Linux kernel,” he says.

And the controversy over Microsoft’s Codeplex Foundation is, once again, caused by people who are speaking too soon: “The minute something is announced, people rush to be the first to have han opinion,” he says. “I don’t think we seen enough of Codeplex yet to have an opinion”.

Businesses should get involved

Speaking of the OpenSUSE community, he says businesses should get involved, even if they are buying support for the commercial version, SUSE Linux Enterprise. “It’s vitally important that companies learn to work with the community – and vice versa,” he says. “We have a good interaction between companies and the community.

The community affects the code considerably, he says: I”We have a strong feedback loop with the developers,” says Brockmeier – and it starts with getting involved in decisions. “For example, a while back year ago we had a question of whether we should continue shipping [Linux user interface] KDE 3.5 or just KDE 4.0. My job was to give some community feedback to the people who make that decision and advocate for continuing both.”

Later in the process, when an engineering decision is made, he explains, he may have to work with the vocal minority that wanted it to go the other way.

“OpenSUSE is the foundation for the enterprise version,” he says. “So, when say OpenSUSE 11.0 comes out, it has a whole lot of changes, Novell engineers work on that with the community and 11.1 comes out with fewer radical changes, but a lot of bug fixes. That’s then taken as the Foundation for SUSE Linux Enterprise Linux 11.”

“OpenSUSE is a superset of SUSE Linux Enterprise,” he says,”because we ship more packages for it”.

It’s possible also, that more peoplpe might be using OpenSUSE at the moment, shifting towards the “free” version in a recession. “There probably would be a bit of an uptick in companies choosing between unpaid over paid,” he says, but he expects it to swing back the other way, because people do want support, and are aware of the risks in not having it. “People want a company behind them.”