Novell News

With the creation of a new SUSE business unit dedicated to pushing the envelope of Linux innovation comes a renewed commitment to the openSUSE community. Today SUSE announced commercial support options for the Open Build Service (OBS) – formerly known as the openSUSE Build Service – via a new OBS Developer Services (DS) program. Customers will now receive configuration and set-up support as well as code fixes for bugs. The new Open Build Service name emphasizes this solution's open and cross-distribution nature.

OBS is aimed at software packagers and offers two key functions: an easy-to-use command line interface and web interfaces with powerful collaboration features that include change tracking, project teams, access rights and merge requests. Packages are built in a distributed fashion using virtual machines for operating system- and architecture-independent compilation. Also, as part of the program, SUSE is collecting requirements for OBS and incorporating them into the OBS planning process. SUSE will be working with partners to enable them to offer implementation and consulting services for Open Build Service.

According to Ralph Dehner, CEO at B1 Systems, "In the past B1 Systems has written build environments for the customers by itself. With the open Build Service now exists a "standard" which makes it easy to build packages for different distributions and architectures. This will be also interesting for many other open source projects."

OBS is developed in a collaborative fashion by the openSUSE project with contributions from a variety of partners including the Linux Foundation, Intel and Dell. OBS Developer Services offers commercial support options for customers and partners that want to run their own instance of the Open Build Service.

You can read the full release here: openSUSE renames OBS