At Brainshare, Novell’s annual user conference in Salt Lake City, our CTO, Jeff Jaffe, announced a new technology vision, code-named “Project Fossa,” [pdf] intended to enable computing and collaborating with agility. The fossa is a cat-like mammal from Madagascar, sort of related to raccoons, weasels, and palm civits. (Fossas may be viverrids like civits or the falanouc, another Madagascar endemic; the taxonomy seems to be contested.) Fossas are supposed to be very agile, and if you have little kids you know them as the villains in the animated movie Madagascar. The project’s name is also a play on Free and Open Source Software (FOSS).

Here‘s some press coverage including the priceless hed “Novell focuses future strategy around endangered mongoose” from the UK edition of ZDNet.