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Jun. 30, 2009

Let's go back a bit in time...

SUSE Linux was originally acquired by Novell in 2004 for US $210 million in cash, with a US $50 million injection from IBM. Having been beaten by Microsoft once before, some believed that Novell might once again take aim at their former foe.

As Novell made it clear at the time it acquired SUSE, their goal was to well position themselves so as to defeat the number one player in the market, Red Hat Linux.

Novell’s Chief Executive said at the time “together, we are an effective competitor to the current No. 1 company in Linux support.”

Novell's CEO also stated that they had no immediate plans to alter the development of the operating system. They took on an additional workforce of about 410 staff and things mostly stayed the same.

The question today is, how did SUSE changed since?

Upon the acquisition of SUSE Linux, Novell set about integrating products and services and selling them to enterprise business customers. But 6 years ago, their main competitor Red Hat created a community based version of its commercial offerings, called “Fedora Core”.

Simply known today as Fedora, it is a community-based Linux operating system which Red Hat uses as a test bed for its more robust Red Hat Enterprise Linux OS.

Well Novell didn't have any other choice and had to do something. In 2005 it followed suit, announcing the creation of “openSUSE”. The product would replace “SUSE Linux Professional” and was to also be a community based open source operating system, with releases every year.

The Linux distribution would also have a development branch, called Factory. Future commercial SUSE Linux products have been born out of the openSUSE development community.

It took about two years for Novell to find its feet and garner community "traction" for its products. Looking back however, they have become very successful at this and appear to be adopting more of a community orientated open source development model.

Moving towards this new era, in October 2007 Novell opened what has become known as the “openSUSE Online Build Service”. As the name suggests, this is an Internet-based service which any developer can use to create packages not only for Novell products, but also for all other major Linux distributions, even Red Hat and/or Fedora as well.

Novell is now hoping that it will become a central hub for future development in the free software community.

In April, the Linux Foundation decided to make it available through their developer network. The build service itself however has other benefits. It has allowed Novell to further embrace the open development model and harness the power of the wider community, like all good open source projects...

The Novell development team has successfully used the Online Build Service to successfully develop and release version Eleven of openSUSE.

For now, the development has remained mostly in the control of Novell employees, rather than the community itself. But this is about to change very soon.

In the openSUSE newsletter, community manager for the openSUSE product Joe Brockmeier announced that, “openSUSE Factory is Now Open. Factory development is changing, and we’re making it easier for contributors to take full responsibility for packages and to contribute directly to openSUSE. This means contributors will be able to be directly responsible for packages, without having to go through a Novell employee to make changes.”

Prior to the acquisition by Novell, SUSE Linux was actually quite a closed operating system. It was built upon Linux and free software such as GNU, but the core development model and central software stack was closed source.

It wasn’t until 2004 that YaST was released under the GPL free software license. Other core components weren't so readily disclosed however, such as those from the Ximian portfolio.

Novell was hoping to make it available only for their commercial products. Still, the open sourcing of YaST was the first major step in opening up SUSE Linux itself to the wider community, which in turn has allowed for the creation of openSUSE and a more open source focused development model.

Whatever the root cause, the clear winners here are the users themselves. The openSUSE community has won out tremendously with this decision and Novell is to be commended for that. Perhaps openSUSE will regain even more mojo and enjoy a further increase in popularity as a direct result.

The effects of this decision are yet to be seen, however. How will future releases of Novell commercial software cope? And what shape might openSUSE take as a community?

It’s important to note that the unit has not been wholly handed over and that Novell still holds control on the project, but there is still room for openSUSE itself to begin to take shape as a community-driven operating system nevertheless.

Users should now get more of a say in the direction of the Linux distribution, which is especially important should Novell disappear.

It will be interesting to see how this develops in the next 12 months, and the impact Novell can have on Red Hat's Fedora Project, if any.

Source: Novell.

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