In case you’ve missed it so far, Microsoft announced today that they’d be changing its business practices to better support interoperability with the open source community. Rather than recapping the news, I’ll just point you at some of the coverage so far:

• Microsoft Pledges Not to Sue Over Open Source
• Microsoft makes boldest move yet embracing open source
• Reading the fine print on Microsoft’s new open-source promises
• Red Hat was right, Novell was wrong

Let’s look at that last one for a second.

It’s interesting that, given the scope and potential implications of Microsoft’s announcement, Matt’s first response is to go after Novell again. He does backtrack a bit after he notices that the pledge is only for non-commercial entities, but says nothing of the anti-Novell shot he took before fully digesting the details of the Microsoft announcement.

But since Matt specifically mentioned me in the first post, I thought some sort of response was warranted.

Novell and the Community

I do appreciate Matt’s confidence in my ability to help Novell find its footing with the open source community. Given Matt’s fondness for taking Novell’s leadership to task, I’m not sure if his endorsement is going to be particularly helpful there…

But, seriously, I do think Novell’s leadership is interested in doing right by the community and learning how to have an effective partnership with the open source community that works for everybody. Right now I’m in our Nuremberg office to meet with some of the folks who are the backbone of the openSUSE project and to find out what we can do to meet some of the goals we have for the project. Specifically, how we can:

• Raise the visibility of openSUSE and other open source projects within Novell.
• Grow the community by attracting new users and contributors.
• Give existing community members the tools they need to contribute effectively and ensure that they have a say in deciding the direction and development goals of openSUSE and other projects.
• Figure out how to allow other companies to sponsor openSUSE and bring additional resources to bear on its development.

Since Matt’s looking at Novell from the outside, he can’t see what I’ve been seeing in my brief time with Novell so far — that there’s a strong commitment to the open source community from the teams I am working with, and a desire to work hand-in-hand with the open source community at large.

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