As published on
http://news.opensuse.org/2010/11/22/novell-agrees-to-be-acquired-by-attachma...
Is this thing on? *tap* *tap*. Good evening friends, this is your
openSUSE Board [1] speaking. If you didn’t hear yet, Novell [2] has
agreed to be acquired by Attachmate Corporation [3]. What does that mean
for the openSUSE Project? We don’t know exactly yet because our crystal
ball is currently in the shop and therefore fortune-telling is not our
greatest talent ;-)
However, we have other talents: we are a software developer community
and we’re here to work on one of the greatest GNU/Linux distributions
and other world class software distribution tools to advance Free and
Open Source software together with the global FOSS community!
For now, we don’t know much about Attachmate, we have had no dealings
with them yet and, as Novell is a publicly traded company, all of this
is as new to us as to anyone else. But the openSUSE Project has had,
since its beginning, a very vibrant cooperation with Novell, especially
with Novell’s SUSE business, and we are looking forward to continuing
this once Novell and SUSE become part of Attachmate! Our best wishes go
out to the people of our community that are employed by Novell and SUSE,
may this bring nothing but good things for you and your careers.
The second part of the deal relates to the intellectual property that is
changing hands. Our hope is that this does not add to the minefield that
software patents are today for Free and Open Source software developers.
The openSUSE Board generally believes, like the rest of the global FOSS
community, that software patents impede innovation and are inconsistent
with Open Source and Free Software.
What makes us proud is that Attachmate wants to further and strengthen
the SUSE brand, which is based also on products and technology built by
the openSUSE Project. Furthermore we are more than willing and looking
forward to teaching another corporation about the principles, values and
strengths of the Free and Open Source software development model. If you
are reading this as an Attachmate employee, we would like to encourage
you to just swing by and talk to us about the opportunites we can offer
you to participate in this project!
And apart from all that it’s business as usual and we are continuing to
work on, rather than predicting, the future of this project and have a
lot of fun!
By the way if you wonder what that means practically, the next step into
the future of this project is described in the post below: Our great bug
squashing day on Saturday. See you there!
[1] http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Board
[2] http://www.novell.com/
[3] http://www.attachmate.com/
[4] http://news.opensuse.org/2010/11/22/opensuse-bug-day-on-saturday-november-27...
In the behalf of the openSUSE Board (board@opensuse.org),
cheers,
--
-o) Pascal Bleser