On 18 December 2015 at 10:54, Basil Chupin
[stuff]
Unfortunately I have never heard of you being an elected member of the Board until you just mentioned it. (Goes to show what an impact your presence caused in that period :-) .)
http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-project/2013-03/msg00020.html https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Board_election_2013_platform_rbrownccb http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-project/2013-12/msg00337.html http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/richard-brown-to-chair-opensuse-proj... I think the fact you had not heard of me says more about your knowledge, involvement and engagement with the openSUSE Project and less about my own impact.
So, as Chairman of the Board you convey SUSE's interests re openSUSE.
Whether or not you have a signature at the end of your message is immaterial -- and besides, I at least, have never seen such a signature at the end of your posts. But, again, this is immaterial.
Not surprising, I use it sparingly, because most of the time I'm talking as an interested and involved community member, not as the formal mouthpiece of SUSE.
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
Ah, the old "I'm a contributor but you are not" crap argument.
I am a USER, repeat a USER, and therefore a contributor to the project.
For whom are people spending their time programming openSUSE? Have a guess....
If you say, "For openSUSE users who then check it out to see if what it contains is good enough to be used in the commercial version called SLE" then you get a cigar; but if you don't then you back to the back of the dummies queue.
As a USER I don't want to see my preferred operating system go down the proverbial gurgler just because some programmer(s) isn't able to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Basil, you cannot have this argument both ways. If you want your "I am a USER, repeat a USER, and therefore a contributor" argument to be considered credible by anyone reading it, you shouldn't be voicing it after suggesting to me that I should only talk about issues which are in my "main sphere of responsibility". I expressed myself in the way I have to highlight the absurdity of your suggestion that I should only talk about areas of my responsibility, you're just adding to absurdity with your response here.
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.
Ahem... You "... do not think ..." that Stephan's responsibilities extend to Build Targets of Repositories?!
Don't you think that it is about time that you found out what his responsibilities are? Afterall, you have been with SUSE for some 2 years now, as you state above -- not to mention that you are also the *Chairman* of the Board?
(Sheesh! SUSE owners appointed you as Chairman and you don't even know what Stephan's responsibilities are?! Sorry, but I sometimes fear for the future of openSUSE :'( .)
I am sorry for pointing this out but, just as you just stated what you did, others are quite in their rights to come to the conclusion that YOU don't have a bloody clue what YOUR job is all about. See my point or not?
I learned a long time ago that it is more effective when talking in public about open source contributors who volunteer a significant proportion of their time, effort, and dedication to not be presumptive about what they are doing or what they want to be doing. Anyone in this project, regardless of employment status, can (through time, effort, and dedication) acquire broad roles and responsibilities in areas of interest to them. In such a circumstance, and especially as Chairman, it's a lot more sensible for me to talk about what I 'think' and how I 'see' things Making sweeping declarations of what I 'know' should be other peoples jobs is not a productive way of conducting oneself in an open source project.. on that note..you seem to think you *know* what my job entails..maybe you should *think* a little more?
Debating and exchanging ideas is always most helpful. Doing so results in being educated.
That's the idea, yes.
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?
A silly question, wot? How would I, or anyone, know whether you did or did not work on them when you were at work? But I -- and I suspect others -- was confronted -- when I have never had heard of you -- by your "arguments" for your selection of fonts for Leap of Faith.
I started a discussion by provided my reasoning and my suggestions as to how we could improve the Default Fonts in openSUSE. I think this is exactly how large changes are meant to be proposed and discussed.
Who had given a tinker's cuss about the fonts until your posts at that time?
I can think of dozens of people who directly spoke to me about the 'bad fonts' in openSUSE in IRC, various Social Media platforms, and face to face at conferences and press interviews. It's also a recurring topic that came up on various forums and mailinglists, which normally ended up with discussion about anti-aliasing and such, but I wanted to direct the conversation towards selecting a default set of fonts that reduced the need for such technical workarounds. I think the community has achieved that, even though..no, especially though, the fonts the community eventually chose were different than the ones I originally proposed.
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?
OK, I'll bite. What about them?
They did more work than me and were the actual ones who actually implemented it in the packages, tested it, listened to feedback, tuned it, and continue to work on it.. I think you're not sufficiently respecting the work those others did to take my original font ideas and implement them effectively in our distributions.
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 immediate quote which comes to mind here is, "You might think that, I couldn't possibly comment.", Francis Urquhart, _House of Cards_, but no, stating this quote out loud would be ingenuous of me.
I am a member of the BROADER Community and not one of the members of the pseudo "community" 'club' artificially created for the purposes of simply having its members being allowed to vote for Board members and, therefore, have no influence over what the latter's preferences are. But as for me, personally, I would prefer you to stay as you seem to have taken onboard a few comments expressed in this thread -- not to mention that life may prove dull without you :-) .
If you can quantify your contributions to the openSUSE Project in a way that the Membership Officials can confirm that those contributions are sustained and substantial, then you can become an openSUSE Member and have a more active involvement in the governance of this Project. Since it's formation 10 years ago, this Project has always been clear and open about it's Governance model, how it is based on established successes such as in GNOME. If you do not like it, then the best way of influencing it is by embracing it and changing it from the inside. Critique from the sidelines, no matter how loudly it is shouted, should not have the kind of impacts I think you want to achieve. I think you've been here long enough now that you should realise that. - Richard -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org