Shocking news on the AppArmor mailing list today. Novell laid off all the guys they hired when they aquired Immunix a few years ago, back in 2005. I had noticed that my friend Seth had sent a message a while ago indicating that he has no longer with Novell and passing on a new email address and just chocked it up to him moving on. But now I see this message from Crispin on the AppArmor development mailing list which pointed to this CNET news piece describing what happened.
Sounds like Novell wants the opensource community to pick up development of AppArmor (they must, they apparently let the entire team go). Perhaps the success of OpenSUSE got to their heads and they’re looking for cheap labour now? At any rate, I find it rather ruthless.
Not that I’m concerned about AppArmor… I know SELinux is the star of the Fedora/Red Hat show, but AppArmor has a good showing in Mandriva 2008, forthcoming Ubuntu, and Annvix (amongst probably others). Oh, and OpenSUSE/SLES itself.
It’s also nice to see Crispin is still motivated to work on AppArmor and has built a consultancy company around it (and other security hardening technologies), Mercenary Linux. Good for them, and I hope that turns out well for them and I also hope that Novell doesn’t try farting around with AppArmor too much and wreck it even further (seems like Novell is doing quite a lot these days to piss on people…)