[dmacvicar]

I worked there for more than a decade, and I can never highlight enough:

- How great the place was for those involved in the open-source ecosystem

- How great Novell and Attachmate were as owners

The company had, like many others, good and tough times, but the people were very passionate about it.

I will never stop feeling lucky for it being part of me for so many years.

[mugsie]

I was only there for a year or two, but it was a great place to work, and I 100% agree on the upstream contributors, but the main thing I will remember is how much people cared.

In some cases, waaayyy too much about little things, but a lot of the time about the right thing to do for the product and for the open source community around it.

I think the main thing I will miss is sitting down on a Friday afternoon and reading the dev list (devel@ I think?), it was a thing of beauty.

[_kdave]

> How great Novell and Attachmate were as owners

This is the opposite how I and not only I remember it. Novell did save S.u.S.E. in 2005 by the highly controversial deal. And then started to slowly dissolve its internal identity within the whole company and almost succeeded. The Novell management was incompetent, trying to save it's dying business by bending what SUSE was doing. Barely survived the 2008+ crisis.

Attachmate, another legacy product company was interested in Novell due to assets and customers. That there was a business unit (SUSE) that was quite capable was merely a surprise to the new owners. They let us live and do our jobs. Which paid off because Novell died in a year or so after attempts to salvage it. The Attachmate management wanted to make money, no interest in SUSE. You can call it good management, but mainly due to the fact that the accounting was internally split from Novell and the numbers did not lie.

The secret sauce of SUSE is that it has strong foundation and longtimers that still somehow manage to keep the spirit and attract new poeople who appreciate it in the work environment. The miracle of SUSE it's been able to survive any shitty and clueless top management it had had installed by any of the buyers. So far. Fingers crossed.

[jasoneckert]

I agree that Novell was great for SUSE back in the day.

I co-wrote 6 academic textbooks with Novell on SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for Thompson / Course Technology, and I have fond memories of the whole team at Novell during that time.

Each time I was asked to write another textbook for Novell on SUSE, the publisher used YaST (Yet another SUSE Textbook) in the subject line of the email.

Oh, and yes, SUSE is a great distro!

[PeterStuer]

"How great Novell and Attachmate were as owners"

Could you elaborate on that? What made them great?