Martin Schlander has written an interesting post on Novell from the openSUSE community perspective. I wanted to take the time to blog a bit about some of his points, and also talk about where I see the Novell/openSUSE relationship going.

Martin says that “volunteers and the Novell employees working on openSUSE generally get along great and in a very productive way” but “sometimes you wonder if the parts of Novell that are _not_ involved with openSUSE is friend or enemy. Every now and then they do something that really hurts us.”

He mentions several issues, including confusion over KDE’s standing in Novell’s enterprise products, some comments about openSUSE being “just ‘bleeding edge for geeks and enthusiasts,’” and the most recent issue — the Flash login page for Bugzilla that caused a short-lived stir.

A couple of points on Martin’s post:

I think it’s necessary to recognize and acknowledge that mistakes have been made, and that there have been times when Novell may not have communicated as well as it could have or may have made decisions that turned out poorly. However, it’s important to recognize that Novell isn’t being an enemy simply because it has made mistakes or product decisions (ZMD) that, in retrospect, turn out to be poor choices.

No one is perfect, but I know Novell is full of people who want to do the right thing(s) for the openSUSE and open source community. For example, even though the Flash login page was obviously not the right choice for openSUSE users, it was fixed quickly.

As for comments in the past made by other Novell spokespeople that openSUSE is ‘just bleeding edge,’ — that is not the goal for openSUSE, and I want to be sure that openSUSE is a leading edge distribution for all users. The distinguishing features that set openSUSE and SUSE Linux Enterprise apart should be the following:

• Support
• ISV certifications
• IHV certifications
• Management tools
• Software Ecosystem

In short, I want to make sure that we deliver the best distro we can with openSUSE, and allow Novell to use that as the core of the enterprise offering — that they build the aforementioned support plans, certifications, management tools, and so forth on top of an already stable distro. (Seeing as how I run openSUSE on my machines, I have a rather strong incentive to make sure that it’s the best it can be…)

We will experiment with new technologies in openSUSE — but I hope that the end result will be enjoyable leading edge features. This is, I’m not ashamed to point out, an area where interested community members can help us with greatly — by testing alphas and betas (or just running Factory) and letting us know when something is buggy.

And I also want to encourage Martin and others to feel free to contact me when you think Novell or the project has a problem that needs to be addressed, or if you have a suggestion on how we can improve. (I’d also happily accept any comments about things we’re doing right, though I know people are rarely motivated to comment on positive experiences. Still — I’d like to let other Novell folks know when they’re being recognized as doing a good job.)

If you have a bug or whatnot, please follow the appropriate channels — but if you see areas where we could improve our cooperation with the openSUSE community and things of that nature, please get in touch. Please be patient if you email me and don’t get an immediate response — I get rather a lot of email (and I’m not counting the spam…) and travel more than is conductive to speedy email response, but I will do my best to reply and follow up on any issues that affect the community.

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