Novell, one of the founding members of the Open Invention Network, decided to make the community an important part of their development process by opening widely the distribution development to outside contributors in 2005, creating the openSUSE distribution and the openSUSE Project. Novell employed more than 500 developers working on SUSE in 2004.[3] On 27 April 2011, Novell (and SUSE) were acquired by The Attachmate Group,[4] which made SUSE an independent business unit. Later, in October 2014, the entire Attachmate Group, including SUSE, was acquired by the British firm Micro Focus International.[5] SUSE continues to operate as an independent business unit.[4] On 2 July 2018, it was announced that Micro Focus would sell SUSE to Blitz 18-679 GmbH, a subsidiary of EQT Partners, for $2.535 billion.[7]