So, today has seen the news that Novell are to buy SUSE. There has inevitably been a lot of discussion about this already on the SUSE mailing lists, and here's a redux of my thoughts on the matter.

The acquisition by Novell of SUSE, should it go through potentially represents a massive investment into Linux/Free Software development, Novell are paying $210m in cash for SUSE - they're not short of a few bob. At the same time, IBM (remember them?) are investing some $50m in Novell.

Here we have a GNOME-focused (Novell own Ximian) company buying a KDE-focused company. The potential here is that for the first time we'll have a commercial Linux distribution where the two major desktop environments in the Free Software world are equal partners, complimenting each other in the distribution, rather than one being pushed at the expense of the other.

Here's a great quote from the Press Release:
"Novell is firmly committed to open standards and maintaining the existing open source kernel development efforts. From advocacy and development resources to events and support of open source efforts like kernel projects, XFree86, ReiserFS, KDE, GNOME and Mono, Novell stands side-by-side with the open source community."
There's a certain other three-letter company who are trying to kill the open source kernel development efforts, Novell potentially provide muscle to fight SCO alongside IBM.

There's currently a webcast going on, seems Novell are saying they don't want to junk KDE from SUSE (which possibly confirms my KDE/GNOME thoughts). They're bigging up the SUSE development team, and they'll be using their existing support and services to push Linux, "the future of computing"