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 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org