Novell wants Linux to be a mainstream O-S

Sam Varghese
Thursday, 24 September 2009 03:43

Opinion and Analysis

The Linux Foundation's 600-strong LinuxCon conference in Portland, Oregon, is just getting over and some of the talk emanating from that direction has been interesting, to put it mildly.
Linus Torvalds' comment about kernel bloat falls into that category - but much more interesting have been the comments made by Joe Brockmeier, the community manager of Novell's OpenSUSE project.

OpenSUSE is a community GNU/Linux distribution that seeks to copy what Red Hat has done with its Fedora project - involve outsiders in developing a distribution. Features that are first tried out in the community distro often find their way into the enterprise distribution sold by Novell.

As that doughty publication The Register reports, Brockmeier is one person who wants the Linux desktop to grow; others like IBM and the Foundation itself appear to be more or less content with the current state of affairs.

Brockmeier sees mainstream success on the desktop as crucial, wants PC vendors to promote Linux "beyond offering it as a check-box in an order form" (El Reg's words) and exhorts Linux backers to work more closely to promote the operating system in toto.

This, coming from the representative of a company which signed a patent licensing deal with Microsoft, seems a bit rich. One of the better known free software hackers, Jeremy Allison, even quit the company in protest at this act which was widely seen as a sellout.

But given that nearly three years have passed since that act of perfidy, I guess many people have now, as the Americans love to say, "moved on".

CONTINUED