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Ah! My first Linux-related post for a long while! Anyways, the folks at Novell have finally decided to go the Redhat way, and open up SUSE to the community. Here’s what the OpenSUSE wiki says:

“The openSUSE project is a worldwide community program sponsored by Novell that promotes the use of Linux everywhere. The program provides anyone with free and easy access to the world’s most usable Linux distribution, SUSE Linux.”

This is the way to go. With the open-source business model that Redhat/SUSE have, it’s imperative to let your community access your products in the easiest manner possible. Restricting the availability of your product to retail, boxed-only sales is not going to work. (Who buys a SUSE Linux CD box from a computer store anyways? In fact, who even stocks them?) Nor is not putting up ISOs for free downloads and putting in artificial restrictions like FTP-only installs. It’s self-defeating. I, for one, was a Redhat/Fedora user mostly because I never had a chance to give SUSE a spin until Novell shipped me a SUSE Linux 9.1 DVD under some programme. And I loved it!

So SUSE finally remained the only distribution, major or minor, to have these kind of restrictions, and it had to give in. I hope this speeds up adoption of SUSE even more.

It’s a good, healthy ecosystem. All of Redhat’s and SUSE’s revenue comes from the sales of their Enterprise Linux versions, and the support for them. (And, of course, other services based upon these). The other, community version is their base for the whole community-based development bazaar. As the Fedora home page puts it:

“It (Fedora) is also a proving ground for new technology that may eventually make its way into Red Hat products.”

So therefore you want as much community involvement as possible. It almost eliminates the huge investment that a traditional, commercial Operating System company (Microsoft, IBM, not Sun anymore!) makes in its OS development teams, for this now happens out in the Community. The core team of OS developers (who are Redhat/SUSE employees) play leadership roles in the community, since they’ve gained credibility and respect (absolutely crucial, cannot be stressed enough) as the original developers of the product, and guide the overall direction of the project. Major innovations and improvements to the product are integrated into the Enterprise versions of Redhat/SUSE, which are sold as boxed sets directly to customers (typically bundled with support).

In return, the community gets a mature, usable platform with quicker releases, a community who’s not driven by any factor other than technology, and more receptive to their contributions. Debian’s been that way; it’s focus has been only the community. Fedora was the first of the Big Two to wake up, and now SUSE. The other major entity to Open up was Sun. Solaris 10 is now as much a community-driven project as Fedora and OpenSUSE.