On Tue, 15 May 2012 12:10:29 -0500, Bryen M Yunashko wrote:
That's apples and oranges in my opinion. There's a big difference between a user who uses and simply is dissatisfied and goes somewhere else. That's "our fault" so to speak if we didn't create something that the end user is happy with. I say that, of course, to only some extent because we are obviously not in the business of appeasing every user out there.
What we're talking about here is how the complaint (or yelling) is conveyed. "I can't believe this doesn't work! Don't you people ever test anything?!? SUSE pays all these people and it is broken?!?" That kind of complaint is not useful because the expectation they have for openSUSE is unrealistic. openSUSE != SUSE. openSUSE != "The free version of SLE." openSUSE belongs to everyone, including users. And thus it is wrong to always assume that something broken is the fault of SUSE.
Yes and no, I think. While openSUSE is definitely not SLE, it's often confused for that. We see this in the forums regularly (had a question yesterday from someone with "SUSE 10.4" - given that openSUSE went to 10.3, I assume they meant SLES 10 SP4), but this is something we'll have a problem with as long as the names are so close (and I'm not going to propose rebranding at this stage of the game, nor do I think that would be even considered by the project as a whole). This is something that RedHat did well by naming their community project "Fedora" - the name is different enough that there's no ambiguity for those who are new to RedHat. That was a smart move. But some of those who complain/yell are new to OSS and don't /know/ that they're (potentially) part of the testing team. I think in some ways we have a visibility problem when it comes to key pieces of the puzzle when it comes to "new to OSS" users. This is something that /might/ be addressed by having a good "new user" portal that a default installation of the web browsers point to. It may be a matter of just tweaking the existing default home page to include a link to a page that explains the project, OSS, and how the community needs to be involved in order for things to be better. (Maybe that's already there and I've not seen it - that could be because it's been a while since I've done a clean installation and opened the browser, or it could be because it isn't as prominent as it should/could be). Jim -- Jim Henderson Please keep on-topic replies on the list so everyone benefits -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org