Rex, lately Novell's VP, services strategy, is on loan from Novell until the end of 2008. Apparently Novell will pick up Rex' tab.

At the foundation, he is supposed to lead all its winnowed-down technical efforts including the Linux Standard Base and be the primary technical interface with members and technical advisor to the board on which he has previously served.

Murdock has been nominally responsible for the LSB even from Sun, but that will change now.

Meanwhile, starting next spring Sun is planning to release OpenSolaris binaries on a six-month release cycle under a project code named Indiana, an improvement considering, as Murdock points out, the open source, nominally community-edition OpenSolaris is "more than a kernel but not quite a complete operating system" and unfriendly perhaps in the extreme.

What they're shooting at is a Linux-like distro that exposes people to Solaris technologies like DTrace.

The Indiana code, a step before graduating to Sun's enterprise Solaris kit, is supposed to be easy to install and include network-based package management and Sun's chi-chi Zettabyte File System (ZFS) as the default.

Although Sun expects it to be deployed in production it's also supposed to be a test bed for new technologies and a way to get Sun more community visibility and more market penetration.