Attachmate Talks About SUSE, openSUSE Support

One month ago it was announced that Attachmate would be acquiring Novell (and some of Novell's IP would also be sold off to a consortium owned by Microsoft and other companies), but not many details were known at that point how this acquisition would impact Novell's SUSE or openSUSE Linux distributions. Today though a brief interview has been published between Attachmate's CEO, Jeff Hawn, and the openSUSE Community Manager, Jos Poortvliet.

The key takeaways from this interview on openSUSE News include:

- Attachmate intends to establish a SUSE business unit similar to the existing Attachmate and NetIQ business units. "We believe that establishing SUSE as its own business unit will give greater focus and flexibility to grow within a competitive market. We view SUSE as a well regarded and proven technology in the open source and enterprise Linux community and we want to further build upon that. We intend for SUSE to continue to provide the same high quality open source technology solutions, such as SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, needed to meet users’ demands for scalability, interoperability and cost effectiveness."

- It doesn't sound like Attachmate plans to sell the SUSE business unit, at least not at this time. "I want to be clear here: all of our efforts will be focused on doing the things necessary to make SUSE the highest performing business with the strongest openSUSE community that we can. This is a healthy, growing dynamic business. We want to continue to nurture this business and grow it. This is why we want to elevate the SUSE brand and operate that part of the business as a distinct unit where it will receive greater visibility and focus."

- There's no official word on the state of Novell's other open-source projects, such as Mono, and how they will be positioned within Attachmate. "No decisions have been made regarding any specific projects or sponsorships. Much more integration work needs to happen before discussions of changing the status of individual projects can occur. But we can say that the new SUSE business unit will stay committed to participating in the projects and initiatives that are most important to the SUSE business and its customers."

- Attachmate will continue to let Novell Linux engineers focus upon upstream kernel development.

- Attachmate intends to continue supporting openSUSE, but no word on whether the level of participation and funding will decrease, increase, or remain the same. "Our intent is to continue to sponsor and participate in the openSUSE project." Attachmate at least won't shut-down the openSUSE community project.

It will be interesting to see how Attachmate operates Novell's business units and particularly their open-source projects once their billion dollar acquisition is complete.