Novell frees SUSE Professional under new branding

Novell is renaming SUSE Professional and releasing it as 100% open source. Novell spokesman and director of public relations Bruce Lowry says his company is “pushing” to make SUSE Linux available to anyone who wants it. According to sources close to the company, SUSE Professional is to be rebranded as OpenSUSE.Lowry says Novell is will make SUSE freely available, starting with the 10.0 beta, at the Linux World Conference next week. More info here. “We really are focused on pushing Linux adoption as aggressively
as we can, and think opening up SUSE Linux to users and developers is a
good way to do this,” he says. “We’re opening up the development process up front.” Sources say Novell hopes its flagship Linux product, SUSE Enterprise, will benefit from community development.

Lowry did not confirm it, but sources say that Novell will also make the multi-platform software build system freely available to the community, so developers can build versions of packages for any hardware they support. Novell will still sell boxed versions of SUSE with tech support, but everyone will have access to updates and developmental code.