OStatic

While Novell recently reported down earnings due in large part to shortfalls in its Linux business, Matt Asay notes that the company remains very focused on Linux. He singles out CEO Ron Hovsepian's comments today at the Open Source Business Conference on Suse Linux 11 and data centers, Novell's efforts to make Suse Linux appropriate for netbooks, and more. The thing that really caught my eye is something I wrote about recently: Novell's focus on interoperability.?

Fresh on the heels of disappointing quarterly earnings that were largely pinned on underperformance for its Linux business, and a small round of layoffs, Novell and market research firm IDC are out with survey results on Linux interest and adoption. The respondents were executives in the IT industry. There are several notable findings in the survey, including strong interest from respondents in interoperability between Linux and Windows. Here are some of the key results.

The Open Source Business Conference (OSBC) is rapidly approaching, to be held March 24th and 25th at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. The conference will include much discussion on the future of open source. In preparation, OStatic has been? running a series of guest posts on this theme, featuring thought leaders from top open source projects. We checked in with Dries Buytaert, founder of the Drupal content management system, and co-founder of Acquia. Martin Schneider, director of product marketing for SugarCRM, weighed in on the open cloud, and Novell VP Justin Steinman wrote about open source and mass customization. In this new post in the series, Brian Gentile, CEO of Jaspersoft, discusses the consumerization of information.

Savio Rodrigues is out with a very interesting post on Red Hat's financial consistency. Long story short, he concludes that over the past two years a whopping 48 percent of Red Hat's income before taxes is classified as Other Income. Specifically, this refers to interest income the company generates and capital gains on investments, and it's clear that the mix between this type of income and earnings generated from the company's core software business are about evenly matched. Is this good or bad?

Yesterday, the openSUSE Project announced that it will move to a fixed release schedule after November's release of openSUSE 11.2.

openSUSE developer Stephan Kulow said that the developers are considering an eight month release cycle at the moment, as they feel successfully producing an up-to-date and solid release in this time frame is more realistic than a six month cycle. However, the development team invites feedback on the openSUSE-Project mailing list.

Among the big issues to be discussed at the upcoming Open Source Business Conference (OSBC), ?March 24th and 25th at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco, will be the future of open source. In preparation, OStatic has been running a series of guest posts on this theme, featuring thought leaders from top open source projects. We've checked in with Dries Buytaert, founder of the Drupal content management system, and co-founder of Acquia. Martin Schneider, director of product marketing for SugarCRM, also delivered some thoughts on open source and cloud computing. Now, Justin Steinman, vice president of solution and product marketing at Novell, gives us his thoughts on open source and mass customization.

In November, openSUSE implemented some significant changes to its licensing model, with the aim of making the distribution easier to remaster, re-work, and redistribute. At that time, openSUSE community manager, Joe Zonker Brockmeier, said that work was also underway to clarify openSUSE's trademark guidelines.

This week, the openSUSE Project released the newly re-examined trademark guidelines. The guidelines, available in PDF format, are designed to complement the new, easier to customize and redistribute openSUSE releases by explaining how to handle branding in different situations.