Novell: Community Wants OpenSUSE Foundation

He explained how SUSE Linux has been hosted and primarily supported by Novell since it acquired SuSE Linux AG way back in 2003. “Novell had been developing openSUSE but could not contribute to it, and then after a while Novell decided to work with the community,” explained Poortvliet.

“Novell has been opening it up, so that anyone in the openSUSE community can contribute what they want. It is an open process, and every two years Novell takes openSUSE and builds their commercial products,” he said. These products include SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES)

“openSUSE is governed by the openSUSE board made of community people (only 40 percent of board members can be from a single company), in this case two from Novell,” said Poortvliet.

The roots of the Foundation

“Back in the summer (June) of 2009, a couple of voices within the openSUSE community began asking to create an independent entity to govern openSUSE because the board didn’t have any power. It couldn’t ask for sponsorship, and our conferences [were] mostly organised by Novell, and our finances and legal aspects were also handled by Novell,” said Poortvliet.

“But that summer people said that we wanted to govern our own foundation, and since then we have been working on the transition to a foundation,” said Poortvliet. “Novell has been working with the board, and the resulting foundation will not be a Novell foundation.”

This is not a Novell initiative, the board has no choice and if it is bad for the interest of Novell, they have little choice to move along with this,” insisted Poortvliet. “No final Attachmate decision has been made, but as we speak board meetings are in progress and it is happening in the open.”

Who will pay for the Foundation?

And what about any possible financial implications about the Foundation?

“The finances for the foundation will depend on the foundation,” said Poortvliet. “Novell will obviously be one of the sponsors, but is is hard to go into specifics.”

And does Poortvliet have any idea of the potential workforce or staff members at the foundation? For example the ill-fated Symbian Foundation began with roughly 200 people to manage a mobile operating system. Poortvliet said this was difficult to answer but that figure could be in the same region, although it is “hard to say” at this time.