● 07.22.11

●● Source Code Advantage of SUSE Blurred by ‘Cloud’ (Fog Computing) Promotion

Posted in Microsoft, Novell at 4:32 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Analysis of the latest news from SUSE, which is by far dominated (in the news) by the phenomenon of ‘cloud’ computing

THE OPENSUSE project carries on and we tried hard to find news about it. We do not turn a blind eye to any of it, but it is hard to find press coverage about the project, so we must rely on blogs and technical sites for the most part. We never use Sascha Manns’ weekly news (not even the latest) as it would just result in replication. So anyway, what have we found?

The OpenSUSE news blog speaks of another milestone (more here or here) and Henne provides an update on what the OpenSUSE Boosters are doing (not much based on what we can see on the Web). He writes:

This time around the Boosters took on a milestone for the benefit of the Membership Officials team. To explain who they are and what they do we have to look a bit further into the openSUSE Project. Because of its history and relatively young age the project is trying very hard to avoid hierarchies, policies and rules. It emphasizes the creative, a bit chaotic, side of the FOSS ways for openSUSE to get things done, quickly. Everyone that is participating is equal, everyone that is participating is following the same Guiding Principles. The only formal structure is a a group of “Primus inter pares”, that is elected to provide guidance according to the principles: The Board.

We must remember that OpenSUSE is still mostly managed by SUSE, which is in turn managed by Attachmate. The Desktop Summit is partly sponsored by SUSE, along with other parties that we are not big fans of (even Intel). OpenSUSE’s Community Manager, Jos, helps organise a conference for later in the year — one that concentrates just on OpenSUSE.

We realise that SUSE means a lot to some people who are associated with the project, but our action against Novell is nothing personal. Novell helped rationalise the patent attacks on GNU/Linux, so the action is reactionary. When people are having problems with OpenSUSE (like in this new case) we advise people to steer away from Novell’s OpenSUSE and go to alternatives that are free from Novell’s deal with Microsoft and all those liabilities (see the list of affected companies).

Andreas Jaeger Has an update on Factory, which is generally not receiving much coverage anymore (except in blogs) and OBS too gets coverage from OpenSUSE people, not from the press.

Most of the SUSE news we found this week was about “cloud” (Fog Computing), which is perhaps where the project is heading for a business model. Here is one example and here is Novell’s PR from IDC, which is a brand to distrust because it says what it is paid to say. The rest of the PR is about Studio in the context of “cloud” and there is press coverage about it as well, even in blogs masquerading as “news” (ZDNet) and smaller news sites that are Linux-friendly. Novell’s blog network gives that a push and we also happen to have noticed an OpenSUSE-derived appliance making it into the news early in the week:

NetSecL Linux 3.2 releasedNetSecL 3.2 ReleasedNetSecL 3.2 comes with a brand new XFCE which increased dramatically the performance experience, we closed many bugs and also gained more compatibility to OpenSuse 11.4 – most packages are 11.4 compatible. GrSecurity kernel is updated to 2.6.32.8 please check installation instructions if you wish to use GrSecurity.

Novell’s account in YouTube is using the “private” cloud buzzterm, or “OnPrem”, which is promoted whenever Novell is releasing Vibe promotion and ‘success stories’ [EN | DE]. If Fog Computing (suitable name for “cloud”) is what Novell promotes these days, then there is no FOSS future in Attachmate at all, just as we argued all along. It’s proprietary with a new marketing strategy. █

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