openSUSE is a free, open project. Although Novell sponsors it heavily, the project belongs to the openSUSE community. Things were not always this way; before Novell's acquisition of SuSE, SuSE internally managed the course of the distribution, with little input or participation from the user community.

To strengthen the openSUSE project we’re looking for an enthusiastic Chief Evangelist to: promote and spread the adoption of openSUSE; be a public face for the project on conferences and events; act as voice of the community back to Novell’s leadership team; develop and nurture the openSUSE communities; pro actively drive openSUSE marketing;

Novell's CTO Jeff Jaffe and Zonker (the symbol of OpenSUSE) say their last words before leaving Novell, replacements are imminent

THE developer of GNote [1-6], who has worked for Novell until recently, is moving to Fedora.

SUSE Linux used to be a very KDE-centric distribution. Then Novell came around, bought SUSE and Ximian, and slowely but surely they turned the now-openSUSE distribution into effectively a GNOME-centric distribution with KDE as its sidekick. The openSUSE community, however, doesn't appear to be particularly happy with KDE being a sidekick.

Another distribution to release recently is OpenSuSE 11.2. OpenSuSE serves as the base for Novell's SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop. In some ways, it's to SuSE what Fedora is to Red Hat. But unlike Fedora, OpenSuSE doesn't live on the bleeding edge.

Next up, Novell will turn its SUSE Linux attention to enterprise developers, according to Novell Channel Chief John Dragoon

I’ve used SUSE Linux before, but that was way back in the day of version 9. Things have changed a lot since then, both with OpenSUSE (the open source incarnation of Novell’s SUSE Linux) and in the open source community as a whole.

Novell announced quarterly results on December 3. So how are the company’s individual solutions groups performing — particularly the SUSE Linux solutions group? And what’s the latest with Novell’s partner efforts? The VAR Guy got some perspectives from Novell Chief Marketing Officer John Dragoon. Here’s a recap.