Novell CTO Jeff Jaffe addressed a forum sponsored by Insight Venture Partners (the parent company of eWEEK) to discuss the progress of its Fossa Project, which Novell announced during its BrainShare conference in March.

Fossa is a pretty ambitious attempt to get the open-source community behind a project of a magnitude with which it isn't usually associated. As Jaffe noted, open-source projects are traditionally focused on specific technologies, whereas Fossa is about creating an agile overarching infrastructure.

No wonder Novell is open-sourcing this project. It may be a $1 billion company, but even this is too large a chunk for anyone to bite off by themselves. Jaffe admitted as much: "We're making it open source, not because we're philanthropic, but because we can't do it ourselves."

Jaffe said an architecture document, white papers and a collaboration portal will be ready by summer 2008, and the goal is to have detailed product road maps and architecture details finished in 2009.

The heart of the project seems to be splitting the traditional operating system in two: a very basic physical operating system just to get a system up and running, but without the pieces needed to run an application (Jaffe called this the P-distro), and the V-distro, containing the more complex operating system functions, which will be bundled with specific applications.

Novell announced the first iteration of the P-distro, called JeOS (for Just enough Operating System, pronounced "Juice"), on April 17, 2008.

It's pretty clear that Novell is looking for oxygen in a world where Microsoft is increasingly sucking up all the air. The company said it called its project Fossa because that is the world's most agile animal, but it will need the agility it is claiming as the merit of its project for itself.

Jaffe said Novell intends to make Fossa "a business objective as well as a technical objective."

By business objective, he meant that this wasn't just an abstract effort--technology for the sake of technology--but underlying that had better be a significant business objective for Novell itself.