It seems to me there are a few points here: 1) Is the Inquirer a reliable news rag? Who knows, but the story was also in eWeek, which, I think, has a better rep: http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1814335,00.asp So, is the story factual? Probably. 2) Are the Novell "Linux leaders" leaving? Well, the following paragraph is taken from the eWeek article: "...after the departures of vice chairman Chris Stone last November and of chief technology officer Alan Nugent this March, both of whom were pivotal players in the company's decision to embrace Linux and open source across all of its products and services...." It would appear that some good brains have left Novell recently. What the article doesn't answer is, "Why?" 3) What effect will this have on SuSE and Novell? I've heard SuSE described as Novell's "dying gasp", but that, obviously, is one person's opinion. We'll see. And 4) (tangentially) Is SuSE getting better? That, as has been seen on this list, is debatable. My personal opinion is that Linux (in general) has improved drastically over the past 5 years, but is still only about as usable (for a desktop system) as Windows 98 was. SuSE is a pretty good flavor. So's Red Hat. Red Hat has the advantage of being the flavor of choice in America, which is a pretty big, unified market. There was also news yesterday of Michael Dell's investment of $99.5 million into Red Hat. The European market is fragmented, to say the least. What does all this mean? I hope some intelligent folk on this list will chime in, but my opinion is that SuSE will maintain its small sliver of a market share, and some new brains will be found to replace those who've left Novell, and the world will continue to turn.