Novell: Community Wants OpenSUSE Foundation

“What you are seeing here is two actions,” said Ian Bruce, the director of Novell’s global public relations, also on the call. “You are seeing changes in the openSUSE organisation with the community supporting openSUSE, and you are seeing the transaction of Attachmate acquiring Novell.”

Attachmate’s influence

But what about concerns that Attachmate, which after all is run by venture-capital financiers, may not be willing to allow for the spinning out of a primary asset?

Attachmate has already said for example that it would split up Novell so that the open source SUSE business is in one division, while other Novell products for networking and systems management will be merged into Attachmate’s business.

“It is important to reiterate that the openSUSE team have been discussing these change for a long time now, and this is not related to Attachmate,” said Poortvliet.

Both he and Bruce pointed to the open letter from Jeff Hawn, the chairman and CEO of Attachmate, over questions about whether Attachmate would honour the move to foundation status.

“In that letter Attachmate made some strong statement in support of openSUSE,” said Bruce.

“openSUSE is an open community, it is strong and it is a growing community,” said Poortvliet. “We are growing up and we want to get more responsibility and capability to interact more with corporates. It is a bottom up community compared to other communities like Caronical. The relationship between openSUSE and Novell is based on mutual trust.”

When Will It Happen?

Poortvliet said he was unable to give a possible timeframe for the transition to foundation status as he could not speak for Attachmate.

“From the community side however the board has made clear their opinion that they want to move on with this, and it has already set up the bylaws,” said Poortvliet. “But there is a lot of legal stuff to consider. I personally hope to finish that this year, but it is hard to see, and the board is in charge here. They are going through the legal process of setting up the foundation and talking to all the stakeholders. Novell is simply a partner in this, one of several partners in fact.”

“I would like to emphasis that this move to Foundation is a step in a long process of opening up openSUSE,” said Poortvliet. “It is really a positive thing and it is a process that takes time as it is complicated. That said, I am really happy because it is going this well. As I said, we are growing up.”

Poortvliet explained that eventually the membership of the organisation will elect the board. He also refuted comparisons to the Symbian foundation saying that the openSUSE foundation would be a lot more lightweight (than Symbian) and would not be burdened with engineering responsibilities, and would be based on voluntary work.

“Novell’s commitment to openSUSE has not changed,” said Ian Bruce. “It has strong support from Attachmate. The move is motived by the community itself, and any indication that Novell is backing away from openSUSE is definitely not the case, and Jeff Hawn’s letter backs this up.”