Novell seems to have come to the conclusion that AppArmor might not be worth it’s money. At least they have dissolved the project and, as it seems, fired the team that has been working on it.
The team around Crispin Cowan, one of the AppArmor-developers, said they won’t give up AppArmor, but it seems they will mostly focus to create application profiles.
If development of AppArmor does not continue it will probably not have better chances to get included into the kernel, or get more users.
SELinux is still under active development, with a lot of support from Red Hat. Also Tresys puts a lot of effort into development for SELinux, most notably the Reference Policy and SLIDE.
AppArmor on the other hand was “only” taken care of by Novell.
Novell’s decision to stop working on AppArmor could also influence the next release of Ubuntu. Ubuntu 7.10 was supposed to feature AppArmor. But I am not sure if this is going to happen now.
Maybe Canonical and the Ubuntu-community are willing to continue working on AppArmor, probably together with the team around Crispin Cowan.
However AppArmor goes on, I don’t think this event has a positive effect for it.
Also I think it’s questionable if Novell turns back to using, and maybe even supporting, SELinux. They had tried it before they bought Immunix (where AppArmor originally was developed) and failed because they had no working policy.
That SELinux by now is ready for every day use, and more or less even for everybody, can be seen when you take a look at the Red Hat-distributions Red Hat Enterprise and Fedora, which both come with SELinux enabled by default. And from my personal experience I can say that you really don’t notice anything of it. I use Fedora on my PC and on my notebook, and there are no problems at all.
Well, I guess we will see if and how AppArmor will be continued. But in my opinion this was a goal for SELinux.