8/2/2005 11:40:34 PM, by Ryan Paul
The community dynamic perpetually stimulates the progress, development, and communication that enable distributions like Gentoo, Fedora, and Ubuntu to maintain their position at the pinnacle of Linux popularity. In an attempt to create a community of its own, Novell plans to announce the creation of an OpenSuSE community at LinuxWorld in San Francisco.
Novell intends to make the entire body of SuSE Linux source code available to the public by the end of 2006 via its future OpenSuse.org web site. Novell believes that collaboration with the Linux community will substantially benefit Novell as well as Linux developers and consumers. Novell's open source marketing director, Greg Mancusi-Ungaro says "We're trying to make it easier for application developers to come to Suse, create forks, create packages and build the software." Source code accessibility will bring new developers into the fold, which could potentially yield exceptional new technologies. It will also broaden the base of active testers, which will enable Novell to squish bugs faster.
Despite plans to make the new, fully open incarnation SuSE Linux widely available at no charge via Internet downloads and CD give-aways, Novell will also sell OpenSuSE in boxed sets. Distribution and availability are key in this game, and the marketing minds at Novell are well aware of it. According to Mancusi-Ungaro, Novell previously "made [SuSE] not widely available--just retail stores or a packaged download from an FTP. It's not the easiest way to gain a large user community." He says that Novell now plans to "give away thousands [of copies] at user group events."
Migration towards a community model is always a very positive change for everyone involved. The value of a strong community is possibly best seen in Ubuntu (which means "I am what I am because of who we all are"), a widely popular Linux distribution that places an incomparable emphasis on collaboration. Ubuntu was named best community of the year, and best distribution of the year in the 2004 Ars Technica Linux Awards and continues to be a favorite of the Linux.Ars crew. By establishing a well-knit community of users and developers, Novell hopes that SuSE will be able to achieve the level of success and notoriety attained by open distributions like Ubuntu. SuSE has always been a popular commercial distribution, and now by actively engaging its fans in the development process, it could become one of the new Linux leaders, both on corporate desktops and in the homes of individual users.
Novell is already the proud custodian of countless imperative Linux technologies like Mono, Evolution, Hula and Beagle. OpenSuSE will give Novell even more leverage as it struggles against fierce competitors like RedHat and Mandriva. The notion of an open SuSE is not a new one. In May, Jason Perlow wrote an article for Linux Magazine in which he states: "It's pretty darn clear to me that to make mojo, SuSE Linux Professional needs to look deep into its roots and re-birth itself as a public, open-source project similar to Fedora." Now that Novell has heeded the call of the community, SuSE will have an opportunity to grow and evolve in ways that it never could before, and Novell will have many excellent opportunities to capitalize on increased community interest.