Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-project (930 mails)

["Bryen M. Yunashko" <suserocks@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 2010-06-08 at 23:03 +1000, Basil Chupin wrote:
> > > I hear rumors Novell is for sale.  Will opensuse get its own
> bugzilla
> > > independent from Novell?  And what else needs to be done for
> opensuse to
> > > gain full independence?
> > >      
> > Novell is a public traded company and it received an unfriendly
> offer for buy-
> > out that was rejected.  Let's not speculate what will or could
> happen but
> > instead look where we want openSUSE to go.
> >    
>
> Well you now have 3 rumours to contend with: that Novell is looking
> for 
> someone to take it out it of its misery, that Google is thinking of 
> buying Novell, and that the rival Linux distro Red Hat is also "in
> the 
> race".
>
> Haven't heard any denials from Novell about this.
>
> Good luck.
>
> BC 

And you won't hear any denials nor confirmations of this from Novell.
Novell can't comment on such speculations until there is an actual
agreement in place to purchase Novell.  The only item you mentioned
above which is not a rumor is that Novell is up for sale.  This is
indeed true, but as Dominique has pointed out, technically all
stock-owned companies are for sale at any given time.

Rumors of a company actually buying Novell is nothing new, this has been
the case for 20 years now (as far back as I can remember.)

With regards to the question of independence brought up by Trifle Menot,
the openSUSE Board did bring up the question of what immediate impact
Novell's "up-for-sale" status has on the Project, and we all agreed that
as of this time, it is business as usual.  We will proceed as we have
always planned.

As I'm sure you have been following previous discussions, the openSUSE
Board is moving towards establishing a Foundation.  This Foundation's
intent is to give the Community some measure of control and influence on
the project.   However, it does not mean we intend to remove Novell from
our project as a main sponsor.  Their contributions to openSUSE is
invaluable, and regardless of the future of Novell, we intend to
continue to build upon this partnership as well as partnerships with
other sponsors of openSUSE.

With regards to infrastructure control, such as bugzilla and other
areas, like OBS, we certainly are not going to move forward and start
dismantling that relationship at this time, simply because of rumors.
That would be premature and frankly, quite immature to do so.  Even if
Novell were bought out today, it would still have to undergo regulatory
approval process by government agencies and thus would take a long time
(possibly up to a year) before any transition became formalized.   At
the time that such an acquisition occurs, we will use this period of
time to review the project's standing with whomever the new owner would
be and what measures we want to take in order to ensure the health and
success of the Project.  Anything before then is just simply wild
speculation because we don't even know who will purchase Novell (or even
if someone WILL purchase Novell.)

Sincerely,
Bryen M Yunashko
openSUSE Board Member

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