Novell's openSUSE Effort Gains Steam

Published: January 10, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Commercial Linux distributor Novell says that its openSUSE effort to take the SUSE variant of the Linux operating system to a community development model is gaining some steam.

The openSUSE project was launched in August 2005, and the site that hosts the project has had 13 million page views and over 750,000 verified installations of Linux as of last week, according to Novell. By Novell's math, SUSE Linux is installed on a computer of one sort or another about 7,000 times each day from the openSUSE project. While this momentum is important--some would say vital--to Novell's efforts to turn itself from a vendor of closed source network operating systems to open, community-developed Linux products, what has not yet happened is the roll out of a community development platform so outsiders can contribute to the SUSE distribution.

Novell has been promising this since last August, and last week, the company said that "in early 2006" it will begin to release a public development framework for SUSE Linux. Novell says that this framework will let open source contributors and third-party application software providers get their hands on Novell tools that will let them streamline their code and patch contributions to SUSE Linux. This framework will have code libraries and a public build server that any registered openSUSE project member can get into. Novell's goal is to make it easy for developers to work either on Linux itself or on the thousands of programs that are included in a SUSE distribution. The build server is called AutoBuild, an internally developed Novell content versioning system.

AutoBuild was used internally by Novell and was actually created by SUSE, not Novell; the service is not a full-blown content versioning system, but is rather a server that manages the process of culling updates to the thousands of open source projects that were encapsulated in the commercial SUSE Linux distribution. The package maintainers who work at Novell have been using AutoBuild to select code from the projects out there in the ether and deciding what goes into each SUSE Professional release; after a new feature and the code behind it makes it into SUSE Professional and is released commercially, it is tweaked, tested, and extended up to the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server edition and pushed down into the Novell Linux Desktop edition. The big change with openSUSE is that the package maintainers at Novell will be in contact with the openSUSE community, who will be submitting bug reports and fixes as well as suggestions for what should be included. AutoBuild is not aimed at being a repository of code, like SourceForge or CollabNet, but will rather point to these sources. The openSUSE project managers who are tweaking AutoBuild warn contributors that it will not support frequent edit-compile-test cycles and it will not host binaries--just source. Binary RPMs will come later.