Novell acquires SUSE

Novell acquires SUSE

Hm. As much as I like Novell's attempts at understanding and supporting Linux, this seems to me an overall worrisome step.

SUSE has supported a lot of more or less free developers, and had an alround commitment to Linux and free software - the sheer abundance of free software which they supported out of the box was always their strong point. (I know, YaST is not Free, blah blah, but arguably YaST is not why anyone buys their boxes.)

For Novell, however, this may be a different story - why would they care to support two desktops with very similar functionality (Gnome, KDE), for instance? Two different groupware solutions? Several office packages? What's the benefit for them to package lprng together with cups? Must they really sell six CDs just so that I can get my grace binary from their rpm (instead of having to figure out which development headers are missing this time for a build from source, grmphhh)?

As far as I understand, Novell's core business model is YaNP (Yet another Netware Platform). This business has not been booming for a long time. Unless they change that model, running two independent Linux companies in addition to the "core" is going to seem overly complex to whoever will seriously take on their financial turnaround.

For the benefit of Linux, SuSE would have been better off as an independent entity, IMO. On the other hand, who knows just how much real cash they have left at this point ...