On 15 December 2015 at 14:09, Basil Chupin
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It goes against what I think is best for the Project
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And there's the rub.
You are not elected by the Community members to the Board.
You are an unelected appointee by SUSE to the OpenSUSE Community Board and as such represent in the first instance SUSE's interests.
You are correct that I am appointed to my position as Chairman of the openSUSE Board by SUSE But you seem to forget the fact that I was an elected member of the Board since 2013 - first stepping in after Pascal stepped down as the next highest candidate in the previous elections, then directly elected to the Board by the community at the end of 2013. My 'interests' are, have been, and will continue to be, first and foremost openSUSEs. My role as Chairman includes communicating those interests to SUSE, and communicating SUSE's interests to the community. Beyond that, I'm still a contributor to this project with 10 years of experience with this project, and I think it's perfectly reasonable for me to contribute in all the ways available to me.
There are other Board members who are elected, and have been elected, and yet you seem to have usurped the task of them speaking for themselves. Do you speak on all of their behalves? I (?we) do not know. If it is the case -- that you have been chosen to speak on all their behalves -- then it would be very nice to know that this is the case and you should have begun by stating -- or at this stage, which is not too late, to advise here -- that you speak on behalf of all the members of the Board.
When I speak on behalf of the openSUSE Board, I make sure my signature says 'on behalf of the openSUSE Board' When I speak 'as Chairman' (ie. when I am conveying SUSE's interests in my formal role as Chairman), I make sure my email says 'Chairman of the openSUSE Board' Otherwise, I'm Richard, the openSUSE contributor.
However, if I recall correctly, you did mention in one of your posts that you were expressing your own opinion - and on matters which appear to be out of your main sphere of responsibility (apart that is from representing SUSE's interests): the latest wiki (https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Board) states that you are, ".... involved as a maintainer of GNOME and the openSUSE branding packages, and working on packaging Spacewalk for openSUSE. ".
While you are quite welcome to express your opinions as an ordinary user of openSUSE you nevertheless have referred to yourself as the chairman of the Board (see above) which throws a totally different perspective on what you express and therefore what people conclude from your utterings.
If people are only allowed to talk about what is 'among their main sphere of responsibility'.. then I think there would be a dramatically reduced selection of topics which you would be entitled to talk about Basil.. I'm a contributor, I'm interested in the future of this Project and a great many aspects of it.. It's probably one reason why the community elected me to the Board and why SUSE appointed me as Chairman I work hard to coordinate and collaborate with those already working in those areas, learn from them, try to help them out (like I did in this thread conveying Wolfgangs intention to give up Ownership of Evergreen in November). I'd like to see more community members take a similar approach, rather than the somewhat limiting mindset of 'oh, someone else is already taking care of/will take care of that'
Now, I do not have an intimate -- or otherwise -- knowledge of the workings of openSUSE or its relationship with SUSE and how the distro is "put together" and to date I, or anyone else I suspect, have not had to ask about this relationship because the progress of openSUSE has been harmonious until now, but to me it seems that your job description with SUSE, that of being employed as SUSE's "QA Engineer", confines you to worrying about quality assurance -- the pre-activity to quality control -- but not to how, say, repositories are managed and whether openSUSE 13.2 should be followed by openSUSE 13.3 or whether fonts used in openSUSE should be XXXX or YYYY.
My job as QA Engineer at SUSE has little to do with my contributions to openSUSE - besides that my experience in openSUSE has helped me push for adoption of openQA inside SUSE for testing of SLE, which is now leading to an increase in contributions from SUSE to openQA, which is also benefiting openSUSE Since joining SUSE 2 years ago, as a QA Engineer, I have had the pleasure of learning a LOT about how a distribution is put together. I don't consider myself an 'expert' on the topic, but I do consider myself knowledgeable, and I don't see any reason why I should keep that knowledge to myself just because I learnt it working for SUSE. Besides that, my work on filing bugs, dealing with the branding package, helping the GNOME team, attempting (and failing) to package Spacewalk were all started long before I joined SUSE 2 years ago. And I intend to continue contributing in as many different means as I can..just last week for example me and a few others were building JeOS images for Leap..
To me the wherefore of, say, how repositories should be managed is the responsibility of Stephan Kulow and Stephan alone.
Stephan Kulow is the Release Manager of openSUSE. He has broad responsibilities, but I do not think they extend to the Build Targets of Repositories managed by other Teams. This kind of thing can, and will always be, down to the individual choices of the maintainers in question - but as a Project we can talk about such things here, because it's a good place to debate, get a feel for the Projects opinion, consider a broader perspective..and maybe even form consensuses out of it
What fonts should be used in openSUSE is a matter for the Community to decide and not for SUSE's appointee to the Board to waste time on as the "QA engineer".
It's a good thing I didn't work on the Fonts topic during my work hours then, isn't it? What about all the other people (who happen to work for SUSE or not) who actually finished the Font revamp after I started the discussion? The community did decide, and I'm part of that community; Or is your intention to suggest I should contribute to the openSUSE Project less now that I happen to work for SUSE than I have for the past 10 years?
The above, of course, is based on my own experience gained some years ago when working with computer programmers and computer programs designed to achieve an effective and gainful result but things may have changed in most recent years and so I can only state that what I just expressed is my opinion and is not meant to be offensive, discourteous, impertinent, rude or offending.
And of course, you're entitled to your opinion, and perhaps with this additional information you realise that much of what you say seems to be based on incorrect information or assumptions. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org