tl;dr – To all you doomsday FUD mongers about Novell/SUSE/openSUSE STFU & let us show you what we can and will do!!
For those living under a rock, yes Novell has agreed to be acquired. Welcome to the world of business, and especially in software this sort of thing is very common.
Now for some reason a whole heap of people seem to think that this spells doom for Novell, SUSE and openSUSE. Why? I really can’t answer that. What I do know is that all their negative speculation is at best counter productive, at worst foolish and damaging.
As with any form of speculation there are no facts to back up what they reckon is going to happen – hence the speculation. If there is enough negative talk, negative things will happen. Current customers will look at switching from Novell products whether they be SUSE based or not, purely based on all the negativity that is being generated.
No-one is giving Attachemate a chance to prove what they have openly said – Novell, SUSE and openSUSE’s contribution to the wider community will continue and that it is business as usual. If you look at when Oracle bought Sun they said sod all about OpenSolaris and the rest of Sun. This is different. The new overlords are actually communicating – maybe not as much as we would like, but hey it’s a bloody good step in the right direction.
The latest negative piece comes from the 451 Group. Why the frig would Novell’s purchase change their kernel contributions? Why the frig would Novell’s purchase change any of their current contributions to the vast array of projects including GNOME/KDE/Banshee/LibreOffice/Systemd and a whole heap of others? Simple, it doesn’t.
Don’t get me wrong Novell has screwed up big time in the past, but we are working together as a community to learn from these mistakes. All this negative noise is counter productive and just gets in the way. If you want to see Novell, SUSE and openSUSE flourish hows about you roll your sleeves up and get stuck in? If you don’t want to chip in STFU and wait and see if something does happen. Then you can berate us and tell us how and where we went wrong.