Stan Beer
Monday, 10 April 2006 23:14
IT Industry -
Development
Page 2 of 3
“My intention is in the (American) summer, you should be able to pop
the box open and fire her up,” Hovsepian says. “Why we created Open
Suse.org was for the kernel to build up a feedback loop for us. We very
closely manage that relationship between the developers and the
community who give us feedback through Open Suse.org.”
So what’s the end game as far as the Suse distribution is concerned?
“Our goal from our customer’s perspective is to let them know that
they’ve got strong support and ecosystem behind the Novell Suse Linux,”
says Hovsepian. “That means the Suse Linux has a whole big company
behind it. In terms of the community, what we would want them to know
is that we’re really just playing the role of a trustee to continue to
develop things in the open source spirit while making sure that our
commercial customers and their commercial needs get met.
“We’ve got a list of 50 open source projects that we’re participating
in but, at the end of the day, if you’re running your business on this
stuff you need to know that you have the right support infrastructure,
a toll free number you can call and get the right level 1, 2 and 3
support., which we do for our customers. So we would want to position
Suse Linux to really be that enterprise class support, service and
quality of Linux. We also want to continue to work with the community
by making the donations that we have with (security) products like
AppArmour.”
And what of the many rumours that have circulated that Novell plans to
kill off its KDE desktop interface and move forward with the
increasingly popular Gnome? Hovsepian says the rumours are false.
“We absolutely support both KDE and Gnome. Both of those are critical
things in our distribution, that will not change and you can quote me
on that.”
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