Novell To Open Source SUSE

jambarama writes "Newsforge reports Novell will be open sourcing SUSE professional under the name OpenSUSE. Is Novell following in the footsteps of Red Hat Inc., with its Fedora Core Linux distribution, or continuing its own open source policy as it has in the past as with YAST?" Note that it looks like the opensuse.org site is not yet up.

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The real question: binary compatibility

[TripMaster Monkey]

Is Novell following in the footsteps of Red Hat Inc., with its Fedora Core Linux distribution, or continuing its own open source policy as it has in the past as with YAST?

While I'd much prefer the latter, I'm betting that the former possibility is much more probable. However, either option would be just fine, provided that the new OpenSuSE is binary-compatible with SuSE Professional.

From TFA:

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.

From this excerpt, it seems that Novell doesn't intend to make the two binary-incompatible, as Red Hat did with Fedora and RHEL. I certainly hope they don't change their minds on this.