Hi,

...

SHARE YOUR OWN PICTURE

Let me propose you some questions:

1.- What other variables we should put in place to create an accurate picture of the current state of the project?

Maybe take a look at simple stats that our ambassadors can gather.

Do we have them or is something we need to create?

...

2.- What is the perception you think others have from the project?

I believe many would think that openSUSE is a mature project with a great community. A distro that has its own administration tools and has the backing from SUSE. I think people also don’t really know where the software is headed or where it can excel. While we are a Linux distribution, I believe in many instances we are not clearly differentiated from other distros. This is not necessarily a bad thing, rather we are on par with other projects as far as experience and strength.

You are claiming for differentiation, did I understand correctly?

...

3.- What is your perception, your picture?

I believe openSUSE is a wonderful project filled with passionate people. My picture however is one that obscures itself with the passage of time. I think we have a smaller community now than what we had when I first joined. While numbers don’t always mean less quality, I believe that at least, we need to capture potential contribution and harness innovation.

Are you referring to non technical contributors and contributions? Saludos -- Agustin Benito Bethencourt openSUSE Team Lead at SUSE abebe@suse.com -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

Hi, On Wednesday 27 November 2013 09:16:20 Manuel Trujillo wrote:

On Tue, Nov 26, 2013 at 8:38 PM, agustin benito bethencourt

wrote:

...

Let me propose you some questions:

1.- What other variables we should put in place to create an accurate picture of the current state of the project?

In the world of Linux distributions to dispose of such numbers is very difficult, as you can only have approximations. But a good guide would be the amount of isos downs, the amount of 13.1 distributions made with suse live service, and also (to a lesser extent), the growth of creation of new packages in the OBS service and the update to the 13.1. (please, excuse me my bad english)

More of us are non native English speakers, so do not worry. The graphs referred show the .iso downloaded. Does the graph needs to be clearer? In which aspect? I will try to provide what we have about OBS and Studio.

...

2.- What is the perception you think others have from the project?

As you know openSUSE has a solid reputation about a heavy distro, and for "heavy" I'm thinking about to be a slow system. This is one. I'm using Linux since 1993 and I know more or less the Linux community. This perception is changing, but in a slowly way. By the way, openSUSE has a very strong reputation about to be a solid and stable distro.

And in terms of the project as a whole?

...

3.- What is your perception, your picture?

My picture is that openSUSE needs a Long Term Service (more than the 3 years that we can afford with the EverGreen program). I'm talking about 5 years. If we can penetrate in the server market like Ubuntu LTS (sorry for the comparisons but are inevitables), openSUSE will be a very used and strong distro.

So in your opinion, increasing the maintenance cycle would be enough to get a perception of being a competitor of Ubuntu LTS? Where (in which niches/areas/market) do you think we could compete?

Thank you for the great job done!

-- Agustin Benito Bethencourt openSUSE Team Lead at SUSE abebe@suse.com -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 10:55 AM, jdd wrote:

it's not a criticism. I can see ubuntu project because there is an ubuntu-fr very active group (I'm french). The most visible project part are the goodies. dvd where very appreciated, but there are no more (I try now to discuss this on the ambassador list). The project is something geeks can appreciate, not really the others.

I have a great and healthy envy by the Ubuntu community. We may have a better distribution in many respects, but they (ubuntu) supplement this deficiency very well with a great community. -- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Have a nice day ;-) TooManySecrets /"\ ASCII Ribbon Campaign | FreeBSD Since 4.1 \ / - NO HTML/RTF in e-mail | GNU/Linux Since 1993. X - NO Word docs in e-mail | openSUSE Member since 2008 / \ - http://blog.toomany.net | http://twitter.com/toomanysecrets --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

Le 27/11/2013 11:08, Axel Braun a écrit :

Indeed. For whatever reason, Ubuntu is much more hyped, although I feel that openSUSE is much more user friendly (YaST,...). This seems not to be communicated well enough.

ubuntu did give away cd's for several years and this made the inital trick, added to the fact that on the beginning it was just a debian but now, even downloading ubuntu for free is difficult and I see unbutuer going away unity :-( now many people go to Mint. but openSUSE is a good solution if somebody speaks server to you, answer "yast ncurse" truly unique jdd -- http://www.dodin.org -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

Hi, [just a little offtopic] Talking about Mr. Shuttleworth..... He sold many ideas to the whole Free Soft world. There are two relevant to the proposal I want to mention. The first one is the fixed and synchronous (a.k.a. 6 months) Release cycle (the timing is not original from him, as we know) and the second one is the Long Term Support concept. 1.- I already explained I believe Release Cycles are tools, not goals. For iterative improvements, fixed Release cycles are great. For disruptive changes? No. 6 months? Depends on many factors. I do not believe in the synchronization religion either. I am glad to work here when talking about this :-) 2.- Long Term Support.... Both, maintenance and support have a cost, no matter if it is SUSE (or any other players) or Evergreen who provided it. One of them, maintenance, is currently provided in openSUSE for free (as beer). The other one, support, not. SUSE do not provide support on openSUSE. Third parties might. Long Term Maintenance is the right concept, not Long Term Support. <Promo>Support is what SUSE does in SLES/SLED, and with success, by the way.</Promo> Let me ask for help to revert this harmful confusion for all of us, including Mr. Shuttleworth, now that he needs to make this project profitable. Let's differentiate between maintenance and support. Disclaimer: even myself make this error more often that I would like to. On Saturday 30 November 2013 06:06:50 Robert Schweikert wrote:

On 11/27/2013 05:08 AM, Axel Braun wrote:

...

Am Mittwoch, 27. November 2013, 11:01:20 schrieb Manuel Trujillo:

...

...

it's not a criticism. I can see ubuntu project because there is an ubuntu-fr very active group (I'm french). The most visible project part are the goodies. dvd where very appreciated, but there are no more (I try now to discuss this on the ambassador list). The project is something geeks can appreciate, not really the others.

I have a great and healthy envy by the Ubuntu community. We may have a better distribution in many respects, but they (ubuntu) supplement this deficiency very well with a great community.

Indeed. For whatever reason, Ubuntu is much more hyped,

Mark Shuttleworth is one of the best marketeers in the IT business today. Thus, the fact that everyone hears something about Ubuntu all the time is no surprise. Sometimes I think he follows the motto "No publicity is bad publicity". If you look over the Ubuntu news of the last years you will find possibly more negative press than positive things.

Unity, the search stuff, MIR, to name just a few. However, despite this "negative" attention Ubuntu retains much of their community, although I do think that internally things look much bleaker there than they appear from the outside.

Beside marketing they have managed to have a large answer set for "common linux problems" almost always when using Google and searching for some error message or problem resolution an Ubuntu link is in the top 10 search results. Although I think this is decreasing in the recent past. openSUSE answers are almost never to be found :( . This could imply that we do not have the same or similar problems in the distro, something I consider unlikely, that we do not post the answers to these questions, or that places where we do have the answers do not get indexed. or a number of other things.

Anyway, the bottom line is that to gain mindshare one needs to get the message out and not having a full time marketeer a la Shuttleworth, nor following the "lets just announce something" rule is a certain disadvantage in this respect.

I personally think the "shout it from the roof top" method is rather annoying and would not be surprised if many geekos feel the same way. Which is probably the reason that we do not employ these type of methods. In the area of marketing the same rules apply than for other parts of the project, someone has to step up and do the work and those that do the work end up deciding what gets done. THus there are plenty of opportunities for those interested to raise the profile of openSUSE. Hopefully in a "better" way than Shuttleworth is doing, but again those that do the work decide.

Later, Robert

-- Agustin Benito Bethencourt openSUSE Team Lead at SUSE abebe@suse.com -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

Le 27/11/2013 11:02, Manuel Trujillo (TooManySecrets) a écrit :

On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 10:55 AM, jdd wrote:

...

I'm pretty sure than a better *documentation* of the upgrade is the real better choice.

In a desktop environment maybe, but not in a database server, or web server, or XXX server. Trust me :)

not sure. I'm even sure of the contrary. I manage my own server hosted online and for the same reason I could not work for openSUSE I couldn't update the server, it's still on 11.4. and it works :-) but now the work of building the new server I began more than one month ago is tremendous: nearly all had changed! I try to document my work here: http://dodin.info/wiki/index.php?n=Doc.OpenSUSE-small-ThirdEdition the true solution should be an infinite rolling release (never have to change anything but updating), but I know it's impossible jdd -- http://www.dodin.org -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On 11/27/2013 04:58 AM, Manuel Trujillo (TooManySecrets) wrote:

On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 10:29 AM, agustin benito bethencourt wrote:

...

...

As you know openSUSE has a solid reputation about a heavy distro, and for "heavy" I'm thinking about to be a slow system. This is one. I'm using Linux since 1993 and I know more or less the Linux community. This perception is changing, but in a slowly way. By the way, openSUSE has a very strong reputation about to be a solid and stable distro.

And in terms of the project as a whole?

I think it's very unknown. There are other projects with much more community (like Fedora or Ubuntu, for example). But I'm confident that this will be changing in the future.

...

...

...

3.- What is your perception, your picture?

My picture is that openSUSE needs a Long Term Service (more than the 3 years that we can afford with the EverGreen program). I'm talking about 5 years. If we can penetrate in the server market like Ubuntu LTS (sorry for the comparisons but are inevitables), openSUSE will be a very used and strong distro.

So in your opinion, increasing the maintenance cycle would be enough to get a perception of being a competitor of Ubuntu LTS? Where (in which niches/areas/market) do you think we could compete?

We are very strong in the areas of desktop and workstations, but if all the system administrators could use openSUSE in the servers, the developers could use more openSUSE because it would be the same as used on servers. It may be stupid, but I have many years watching this dynamic.

I agree with the correlation you are trying to draw, more users pull more developers, but I disagree that it is related to Ubuntu LTS. I think: - mindshare and perception are huge factors in garnering not just user, but also developer attention. + for better or worse mindshare and perception is still mostly created by marketing and a constant loud noise of messages, Shuttleworth is good at that - for developers tools are important + we have great tools and lots of choice + there is a large contingent of Java developers and those are out of our reach, we do not have eclipse and comparatively our Java dev stack is not as complete as other distros - developers like to have the latest and greatest at their fingertips + I think developers want the latest incarnation of the tools in their area of interest, while they want everything around those tools to remain mostly stable and slow to change + I think openSUSE is perfectly positioned for this with our devel project model, where a developer working in Perl, Python, Go,.... can have that part of the distribution in flux with the latest and greatest from OBS while keeping the rest moving at an 8 month or so pace. Not having this well known is a marketing thing... ;) I agree with you that there is a strong correlation between users, or I should say perceived popularity of a distribution and the number of developers that use that distribution. I do not think that Ubuntu LTS is at the heart of creating the perception that Ubuntu is the leading distribution in terms of usage. Later, Robert -- Robert Schweikert MAY THE SOURCE BE WITH YOU SUSE-IBM Software Integration Center LINUX Tech Lead Public Cloud Architect rjschwei@suse.com rschweik@ca.ibm.com 781-464-8147 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On 11/30/2013 06:51 AM, jdd wrote:

Le 30/11/2013 12:25, Robert Schweikert a écrit :

...

developers that use that distribution. I do not think that Ubuntu LTS is at the heart of creating the perception that Ubuntu is the leading distribution in terms of usage.

don't forget ubuntu server is mostly debian. They have all the kind of developpers that are specially reluctant to work for a major sponsor like suse or red hat

I wouldn't say they have "developers reluctant to work for RH or SUSE", rather I'd say, Debian has contributors that a weary of working within a dependent community such as openSUSE or Fedora. We can have a separate discussion about this dependence, but that should be in a different thread and considering the importance of this and the follow on messages shold probably take place at another time as well.

ubuntu, Mint, many others, have foundations on free developpers and build upon them. This have (for ubuntu, for example) the disavantage than the user base is very fluid. I my vicinity, many ubuntu users went to Mint (and some to openSUSE :-)

I have to say than the ubuntu present problems makes it openSUSE life much easier. ubuntuers used to be very depreciatives againsts the other distros, this do not happen anymore

Yes, the are experiencing the side effects of being a dependent community. Later, Robert -- Robert Schweikert MAY THE SOURCE BE WITH YOU SUSE-IBM Software Integration Center LINUX Tech Lead Public Cloud Architect rjschwei@suse.com rschweik@ca.ibm.com 781-464-8147 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 12:45 PM, Stephan Kulow wrote:

Here you can see the creation dates of the current packages in OBS: http://stephan.kulow.org/obs-packages.png - we don't track deleted packages.

Oh my...!!! Thank you Stephan :) -- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Have a nice day ;-) TooManySecrets /"\ ASCII Ribbon Campaign | FreeBSD Since 4.1 \ / - NO HTML/RTF in e-mail | GNU/Linux Since 1993. X - NO Word docs in e-mail | openSUSE Member since 2008 / \ - http://blog.toomany.net | http://twitter.com/toomanysecrets --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

Le 27/11/2013 12:03, Bruno Friedmann a écrit :

On Wednesday 27 November 2013 11.26:40 Klaas Freitag wrote:

...

I have the impression that we lost too many people who actually _do_ stuff instead of talking. The ones who are here and do stuff need more support. Not numbers, not talking, just together: Get Shit Done! Have more fun!

regards, Klaas

Thanks Klaas, you describe nicely my pov on that topic.

but what fun? talking is fun :-) one of my concern is than on openSUSE list (users one) a small number of people always bash openSUSE and it's crews - you know who :-( that said only skilled developpers and skilled writers can really help a project *online* may be the openSUSE head people (desk, but also known people) should more *move to users* I mean physically, like FOSDEM but much more. Vincent Uns went to Capitole du Libre, some years ago, but as Gnome programmer, not as openSUSE. local ambassadors are not enough. If I could invite Jos as openSUSE speaker at some local event this could give some visibility, but even important local events like Capitole du Libre do not have budget to pay travel and accomodations something like a movable openSUSE booth that keep moving around all the time we lack also probably a main leader. Stallman come and people come to see him who is the openSUSE stalmann? thanks jdd -- http://www.dodin.org -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

Hi Klaas, I will answer you in general instead of in detail since I just sent a second mail that hopefully bring more light. I am totally aligned with this motto Get Shit Done! Have more fun!... if we know where we are going. And I think this the right time (for the openSUSE Team and SUSE) to stop working for a few weeks, raise our head and analyze the field. Believe me if I tell you that we do this to make sure we can concentrate the following months/years in executing in one direction. We want to be proactive, not reactive. The openSUSE Team has talked very little and worked a lot these past few months. After these process, it would be a good sign if we can go back again to that mode. It would mean that we all agree on the direction we will be taken so we can put our 100% in making it possible....or die trying :-) But we cannot and shouldn't do this alone. We both understand that. My team too. SUSE also believe it. I feel supported on this view. Alignment in essential. We cannot expect contributors and users to support us in this new journey (no matter the final direction taken) if we do not provide our motivations and full picture. This is an essential part, in my opinion, of transparency. Very soon we will be talking about concrete actions, don't worry ;-) I love to talk about strategies and directions...with a beer. Let's get one next week, by the way. On Wednesday 27 November 2013 11:26:40 Klaas Freitag wrote:

On 26.11.2013 20:38, agustin benito bethencourt wrote: Hi,

what is the purpose of this now? What is openSUSE "2016" now that haven't started with 2014?

It seems like the whole text is trying to interpret some numbers. Well, I know, people like to do that to congratulate themselves how cool they did in the past or also maybe that the situation is not so bad how people might think. Only a question of interpretation of course. I don't like that (my personal 'problem') but I also do not think that it is overly helpful for openSUSE. Numbers, wow, how exciting ;-)

A look in the future would mean for me that we come to concrete steps on how we can work towards our targets that we discussed already a couple of times like - We did again a very good distro 13.1 even with ARM support etc. Exciting! - We wanted to tell the world more about that, better marketing. Well, not so sure if we were perfect here. Steps to improve? - Our target group were defined as "experienced users", ie. developers etc. We came to that after long and exhausting discussions. What can we do to a) make 13.2 even better for these people and b) let them know that we're their project? - A lot of people think that we need LTS releases. Surprise, there is one, its called Evergreen! Do we have to do something to help/improve there, do we need better communication? - Make the project more fun, more exciting, so that people like to contribute.

...

SHARE YOUR OWN PICTURE

Let me propose you some questions:

1.- What other variables we should put in place to create an accurate picture of the current state of the project?

None from my POV (again, I know that might be wrong, but that's me.) Go away there. The current state is not so important for us that we should spend energy on that now, we rather should plan exciting stuff that moves us forward. IMO we know our status well enough.

...

2.- What is the perception you think others have from the project?

I don't want to discourage, but what I often hear is: "Oh yes, openSUSE, is it still existing?" Answer: "Yes, and it has everything in place for you, even more than you think, and it works really slick!" Q: "Yes, and what was exciting in the latest release apart from updates?" A: "Hrmmmm... There should be a Wiki page somewhere." Q: "How long is it supported than?" A: "18 month." Q: "Oh, why that short?" A: "Because you wanna update by than anyway and your crappy notebook will be dead than anyway." A: "Yes, but no, thanks, I stay with Ubuntu, that's cool!"

...

3.- What is your perception, your picture?

I have the impression that we lost too many people who actually _do_ stuff instead of talking. The ones who are here and do stuff need more support. Not numbers, not talking, just together: Get Shit Done! Have more fun!

regards, Klaas

-- Agustin Benito Bethencourt openSUSE Team Lead at SUSE abebe@suse.com -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On 11/27/2013 09:33 PM, Togan Muftuoglu wrote:

...

...

...

...

...

"agustin" == agustin benito bethencourt writes: agustin> SHARE YOUR OWN PICTURE

agustin> Let me propose you some questions:

agustin> 1.- What other variables we should put in place to create an agustin> accurate picture of the current state of the project?

Don't spend too much time with numbers and statistics as they both are like a bikini; the most important part is always hidden. Instead invest the time to make the project more known.

agustin> 2.- What is the perception you think others have from the agustin> project?

ubuntu and its derivatives are cool. But the issue is they do not think opensuse as a project yet just another distro.

agustin> 3.- What is your perception, your picture?

My feeling is we as the whole opensuse community are talking the talk but not willing to walk the talk. People want new packages, or updated packages, yet not many are willing to help. As a community we have to find ways to convince people not just complain but also place the hand under the stone.

The whole project is like a broken bucket of uncooked rice. There are too many bits and pieces around but they are not consolidated.

* There are too many wiki pages with no clear sense of organization, leading to the image of bad or lack of documentation. When pointed, "it's a wiki" is the common answer. Well maybe a wiki is not what we need .

* openSUSE should position itself as a leader in the opensource community, but it seems like we are just following Fedora. Of course one can argue the point that in this case we learn a lot from Fedora's mistakes and benefit from our follower position. I would like to see the other side of the story more, ie Fedora following our direction/approach.

I agree with a lot of this, as someone who has been maintaining packages (Enlightenment) for the last couple of years. In the last 3 weeks i have found 2 new ways that users can contact us one was the forums, that i seem to have missed for a couple of years and a talk function in the wiki. Along with these i've found connect, irc, mailinglists and standard social media sites like facebook. I think this all leads to a disconnected community, i'm not sure what connect is meant to do but i'm not sure it couldn't be done better with the forums. It would also be nice if the forums and the openSUSE mailing list could be merged in such a way that you could use either or but as a start it would be nice if when searching the forums it would also show results from a couple of the mailing list archives and possibly the wiki. I think wiki's work well when they are well structured arch and bodhi have great communities based around there wiki's. I don't think they are good for Q and A's though. I have also struggled to navigate the openSUSE wiki in the past thats possibly improvable by tidying up the front page a little. Simple things like providing a unified design and cross links between all the pages will probably help direct people to the right page, most users looking for help probably know the concepts of forums and wiki's and if they know both exist they will probably use them for the right things. The reason i started using openSUSE was because it seemed to be a good around distro i didn't want something that claimed to be the best distro for one particular thing i wanted something that treats everything equally and openSUSE does a good job of that. Open Build Service is another thing that helps with that it creates a equal opportunity for all packages and provides a place where anyone can help out. It would be nice if it was more intergrated with yast though. I think openSUSE is a good strong distro i also think it is good to constantly look at what can be done better. In terms of the numbers maybe the reason that there's alot of people sticking with older versions of openSUSE like 11.4 and 12.1 is because they were good stable releases and those users haven't felt the need to update. We have a openSUSE 10.3 box at work that's used as a build machine and its still used because it works and knowone has felt the need to upgrade it. I have always found upgrading to the next a simple straight forward process but people have described openSUSE as a mature distro and one side effect of that is people don't feel the need to upgrade to every release. On the talk of openSUSE being a "Heavier Weight" Distro, these days i don't think theres really a noticeable difference its more about the programs / window manager running rather then what the operating system used is. As much as i don't think the phoronix benchmarking is completely accurate most of the time it just shows distro's released around the same time with the same versions of software included generally perform about the same which should be kinda obvious these days. Anyway thats enough late night rambling for me. Simon --- Maintainer Enlightenment on openSUSE -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On 27 November 2013 21:11, agustin benito bethencourt wrote:

Hi,

just some clarifications about the discussion process.

We will try to answer as many comments as possible, obviously. The openSUSE Team will do this together with me. They will lead the most technical topics from our side. Since both, factory and this ML have several hundred subscribers we will apply some "management" to answer.

Sorry, are you not part of the openSUSE Team? Your signature certainly seems to say you are.

Max Lin (with help, I hope), will try to summarize and group (if required) the questions so myself or any other openSUSE Team member answer them. We will also try to make summaries and recap the most significant ideas/comments as overview.

Are the plans to publish the details on the wiki, maybe a read only page?

I am open to hear ideas to handle the process if become bigger. It would be ideal if it become our process.

Not sure I follow. Are you saying you would prefer that the community agree on _your_ proposed process?

For many of you the following information is known, but still...in order to clarify the scope of my words....

The following days you will read comments from me making references to the openSUSE Team from my position as Team Lead. You all are aware that sometimes being employees working in a Free Software project is not like contributing as volunteers or being sponsored. But SUSE is a Linux based company with a very open/participative culture. This is not the military. There is room for disagreement.... also in these discussions. ;-)

I disagree, I am employed to work almost entirely within open source, it is what you make of it. The tone of your emails do not come across as participative, you come across all dictatorial - You have decided this is what you want and you are telling us to fall in line. That may not be what you intend, but that is certainly how it comes across to me - sorry for being honest.

SUSE in openSUSE is way more than the openSUSE Team, as many of you know. Sysadmin team, OBS crew, maintenance/security..., I do not speak on behalf of them. My responsibilities are limited to the openSUSE Team.

But.......we (oS Team) will do our best to bring the needed answers and statements from the qualified people at SUSE if, for whatever reason, they cannot or do not want to participate directly in the debate. This task will be part of the communication management mentioned earlier when required.

Why would the openSUSE Team answer for the other teams? OBS/Security/Legal/Maintanence/Release are already very active within the community, so much so that their affiliation with SUSE is almost a secondary thought.

Thanks for participating.

On Tuesday 26 November 2013 20:38:11 agustin benito bethencourt wrote:

...

Hi,

Once openSUSE 13.1 has been released, it is time for the openSUSE Team to focus on the future. We want to share some ideas we have about the project in general and factory in particular. The topic is not easy. so this mail is a little long and dense, but hopefully worth it. It won't be the last one so let me know how to improve it.

INTRODUCTION/GOALS

This is the first of a series of mails we will publish the following days with different ideas. The process we are proposing has no intention of pointing at anybody, revisiting the past or enforce any situation within the community. Our goals are:

* Share a picture as a starting point of discussion. * Use the discussed picture as a reference to agree on actions we all can/want to execute.

FIRST STEP: PIECES OF THE PUZZLE

One of the first things we did was digging into numbers that provided us information about the status of the project. Data cannot be the only source to create a complete picture, but it is helpful as first step.

In order to better understand the rest of the mail, you probably want to look the following references:

* Alberto Planas talk at oSC13: openSUSE in Numbers[1] * Alberto Planas' slides from the above talk[2] * First openSUSE Team blog post: Numbers in openSUSE[3] * Second openSUSE Team blog post: More on statistics[4] * Jos post about numbers[5]

One important note about the numbers: since most of the behaviors of the variables reflected on the graphs were consolidated, at some point we decided to stop adding effort in collecting numbers until 13.1 was released. Once the Release is well established, we will update them and evaluate the influence of this Release in the global picture.

I won't try to go very deep in the analysis. It would be too long. There are many interpretations that can be done based on the graphs. I will just point out the most relevant for our purpose. Feel free to add others.

Following Alberto Planas' order from his slides[2]...

1.- Downloads

The number of downloads do not measure our user base, but provide hints about the impact of the work done every 8 months, the potential new users we might bring to the project and, looking at pre-release downloads, the number of testers.

Taking a look at the graphs, we can see that the overall number of downloads is growing at a slow path (slope). This behavior is not consistent in every release. For instance, 12.1 was more downloaded that 12.2 or 12.3. More and more people uses zypper for updating the distribution though.

2.- UUIDs (installations that update regularly)

* Looking at the number of machines that regularly update against openSUSE repositories (daily, weekly and monthly), we can easily conclude that the situation is very stable. The speed of growth (daily and weekly stats) or decline (monthly) is low.

* What the graph do not show is the acceleration. It has been negative (small in value) for quiet some time now.

* When looking at the architectures, we see that x86_64 is more popular than i586. This behavior is accelerating, as confirmed in the download numbers collected for 12.3

* When looking at the mediums where those installations come from, we clearly see three dominant ones: .iso (dvd version), ftp (net installs) and Live CD.

* There is a relevant detail that Alberto mentioned in his talk. More than half, almost 2/3, of openSUSE installations are not using the last version many weeks after Release date. There is also a significant amount of installations using unmaintained or Evergreen versions.

3.- Factory and Tumbleweed installations/"users"

Factory is our ongoing development effort. As you can see in the graph, the number of Factory installations is constant. Tumbleweed was very successful when it came out. Many developers and bleeding edge users liked it. Its popularity is decreasing though.

4.- Contributors to factory and devel projects

The numbers of users that are submitting request to factory/devel projects is increasing. Now we have more non SUSE contributors. SUSE ones remain constant. The overall growth is about 27 new contributors per year, a little bit more than 2 new contributors per month.

5.- Social media and comparison with Fedora

openSUSE is, in the social media channels evaluated, in the range of Fedora. Comparing our numbers, I guess we all agree with this general trend that states that openSUSE is a more user oriented distribution than Fedora is. We have less downloads but more users (installations updating regularly).

SOLVING THE PUZZLE

All the above pieces shows a stable picture. Every sign of growth or decline is, in absolute and/or relative numbers, small except social media, due to their explosion as communication channels (which I do not think is way different from what other Free Software communities are experiencing).

ADDING CONTEXT TO THE PICTURE

openSUSE coexist with other "coopetitors" (Free Software competitors + cooperators) and competitors (closed sources distributions). Touchscreens, cloud, big data, games...the Linux ecosystem is evolving and there are new users with new needs.

New players are consolidating their positions: Arch, Chakra, Mint... Ubuntu is moving to the mobile space, Debian is getting some attention back from previous Ubuntu users....

On the other hand, some distros that were relevant in the past have disappeared, our 13.1 has got more attention than previous ones, SUSE is healthy and willing to invest more in openSUSE in the future ...

In the above context, how is our "stable" situation perceived? How do we think it should be perceived?

INTERPRETING THE PICTURE

If we agree that the overall number of users of Linux based server + "traditional" desktop OS (let's remove the mobile/embedded space and cloud for now), is growing, not following the "market" growing trend might be perceived as a wake up call, a clear sign that improvements needs to be done.

But if we agree that we are playing in a risky and challenging field, stability can be perceived as a healthy sign.

After these months of analysis and discussions with both, contributors and users, I would like to ask you if you agree with the the idea that the first picture is more prominent than the second one. But, does the second one provide us a good platform to improve our current position?

SHARE YOUR OWN PICTURE

Let me propose you some questions:

1.- What other variables we should put in place to create an accurate picture of the current state of the project?

2.- What is the perception you think others have from the project?

3.- What is your perception, your picture?

To get some context you might want to take a look at the following contents:

* Current strategy[6] * Ralf Flaxa keynote at oSC'13[7] * Jos article: Strategy and Stable[8] * Jos article: Strategy and Factory[9]

REFERENCES:

Please point us to other relevant references:

[1] Alberto Planas talk at oSC13: openSUSE in Numbers: http://youtu.be/NwfohZ8RBd8 [2] Alberto Planas' slides from the above talk: https://github.com/aplanas/opensuse-data/tree/master/osc13 [3] First openSUSE at SUSE team blog post: Numbers in openSUSE http://lizards.opensuse.org/2013/07/04/numbers-is-opensuse/ [4] Second openSUSE at SUSE team blog post: More on statistics http://lizards.opensuse.org/2013/08/23/more-on-statistics/ [5] Jos article about numbers: http://blog.jospoortvliet.com/2013/08/on-distributions-numbers-and-breaking .html [6] Current strategy: http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Strategy [7] Ralf Flaxa keynote at oSC'13: http://youtu.be/fdroo2JZano [8] Jos article: Strategy and Factory: http://blog.jospoortvliet.com/2013/07/osc13-strategy-and-factory.html [9] Jos article: Strategy and Stable: http://blog.jospoortvliet.com/2013/08/osc13-strategy-and-stable.html

Saludos

-- Agustin Benito Bethencourt openSUSE Team Lead at SUSE abebe@suse.com -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

-- Andrew Wafaa IRC: FunkyPenguin GPG: 0x3A36312F -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

Am 28.11.2013 00:15, schrieb Kostas Koudaras:

Hi all First of all sorry for the top posting This whole thing is so wrong for so many reasons... Most of them were mentioned mostly by Klaas and Andrew. We are the community and openSUSE is a community project. It is another thing of having a team filing the gap that community (might) leave and another thing having a team doing things leaving the community out. My impression that streangthens day by day is that the openSUSE Team wants to lead openSUSE Project leaving the community out. We don't like that as you can see, so the question here given the fact that we can not dissagree forever is... Who has to change or step back or compromise(choose your favourite)? The openSUSE Team or all the others? We are volunteers to an FOSS project, right?

We are here now and we have a problem, realizing that is half a solution. Looking to 2016 ignoring all that... Certainly not a good idea.

Hi Kostas, I'm part of the openSUSE team and I have to say that I highly disagree with Agustins communication style - and I told him several times, but it's a good thing someone else tells him too. But at the end of it, all we proposing is a discussion of the future and just as you say, the openSUSE community has strengths and weaknesses and one of the latter is long term planning or general strategy discussions. Do you remember the last? I felt, it was a disaster. So I don't think there is a good way to present to the project the idea that what we're doing is leading nowhere - to noone. Add to that Agustin's way of saying things and it feels like another disaster. But the openSUSE team's duty towards SUSE is to make sure openSUSE is healthy and rocking - and for that we need to have a picture from time to time. We can't just keep having release, party, release, party, ... So there is more to this than "change". SUSE wants some things to happen within openSUSE, but just as Ralf said in the OSC13 keynote, SUSE does want the openSUSE to be in openSUSE's hands. So we want you to convince that the things SUSE wants are the right thing to do and it's only fair that we disagree and come up with a solution that works for everyone. One of these things we need to change IMO is the development process, but I'll write a more detailed mail later today. It's a bit complex to describe by email, so I want to make it right ;) Greetings, Stephan -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

Stephan Kulow wrote:

...

Am 28.11.2013 00:15, schrieb Kostas Koudaras:

...

Hi all First of all sorry for the top posting This whole thing is so wrong for so many reasons... Most of them were mentioned mostly by Klaas and Andrew. Oh, I did not really want to say that so much is wrong. I just would

On 28.11.2013 07:53, Andres Silva wrote: like to see more actions than words. But meanwhile I think maybe there is already action happening. But what I think what really is wrong is to talk and think of "them" and "us" (note that this works from both positions "in SUSE" and "free surfer"). We have been further away from that but somehow this came back. But this is nonsense. If we look in detail, we will find huge areas where targets all over the project match perfectly even if it sometimes does not seem so. An example is the LTS distro. Isn't that in our all interest because it makes openSUSE more interesting? Often there are fears in fractions of the community, lets construct for example: The SUSE company might think that LTS is not good for them because it could increase maintenance efforts. But this can be discussed and we all together can come up with solutions. That worked in the past, OBS is an example here. The role of the openSUSE team is key here in my opinion: It needs to serve both sides and moderate and explain: To the community what the company sees in openSUSE and what it can do and to "the company" what the abilities and interests of non employed contributors are. Everywhere are only humans which need explanations all the time to find solutions together. What the openSUSE team IMHO _not_ needs to do is what people call "Leadership" in the project. Maybe we need leadership, but that is not a task of the openSUSE team, there are other mechanisms for that in FOSS.

This would mean that I and SUSE, for example, are in equal footing as a contributor to the project. Just as I, or any other member, cannot impose, or decide on the rest of our contributors, SUSE's involvement would be treated likewise. They only contribute. As to how they decide to do that internally, it is up to their own organization.

I do not think you or me and SUSE are equal in openSUSE. SUSE has given a lot to our community and is investing constantly, we all know that. That is of course for the companies benefit (otherwise that will immediately end) but also to mine and yours and million others. We need not to be overly thankful but we should respect that, as we claim and get SUSEs respect. We should come over this discussion and rather think of how we use the strength each party is bringing in. Non can do alone. IMHO. regards, Klaas -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On 28.11.2013 09:47, Per Jessen wrote:

In one way, it would be nice to know what SUSE would like to see, in another we should be able to take responsibility and set some direction ourselves.

Ralf's keynote was pretty precise on that - I just rewatched the video yesterday. You can skip to the middle and leave out the history if you've been part of it ;) Greetings, Stephan -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On 28/11/13 10:47, jdd wrote:

Le 28/11/2013 09:47, Per Jessen a écrit :

...

In one way, it would be nice to know what SUSE would like to see, in another we should be able to take responsibility and set some direction ourselves.

don't forget the external load: personal computer are challenged by smartphones and tablets, this will hit us soon or later

This has already happened. Like a Wild West town after a gold rush, much of the population of community innovators around Linux has moved on to hacking alternative Android ROMs like CyanogenMod, electrickery with Raspberry Pis, writing indie games in Unity, or just chasing the long tail of app store revenue, leaving a remnant population of corporate employees, graybeards and (laggard) newbies to desktop/consumer Linux - but not the people that create growth and invent novel solutions to people's problems. I'm not bashing openSUSE specifically here, this evolution has hit every distribution and community FLOSS software projects like KDE and GNOME. I think openSUSE has suffered disproportionately as our community was not as large or independent as some others. The important question IMO is, do we accept that at age 20, the Linux distribution scene is no longer new and exciting and aim for a stable equilibrium with the adequate Free replacement for the operating systems of the 2000s that we've created, or do we try to become an exciting and relevant place to be once again? Will -- Will Stephenson SUSE LINUX GmbH, GF: Jeff Hawn, Jennifer Guild, Felix Imendörffer, HRB 21284 (AG Nürnberg) Maxfeldstraße 5 90409 Nürnberg Germany -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

jdd - 13:27 28.11.13 wrote:

Le 28/11/2013 13:17, Will Stephenson a écrit :

...

This has already happened. Like a Wild West town after a gold rush, much of the population of community innovators around Linux has moved on

is it as serious as this? the numbers about obs do not show decrease

...

The important question IMO is, do we accept that at age 20, the Linux distribution scene is no longer new and exciting and aim for a stable

I have seen this both in my lug - interest about linux decrease strongly, but now seems to have a stable small level and on the LDP (Linux Documentation Project - I was the leader/coordinator for some years - who don't see nearly any more interest and become more and more outof date...

if so the question will very soon: do we keep our rpm heritage or do we become an other debian clone?

And how would THAT help us? Anyway, I think that packaging format has nothing to do with the topic, more importantly I would consider debs as step back against RPM. There are better package formats out there, but deb is not one of them ;-)

how is red hat living?

Good. And SUSE is living good as well. These companies don't depend on what kids think nowadays that is cool, but on what people need to get work done ;-)

jdd (a bit scared :-()

-- Michal HRUSECKY SUSE LINUX, s.r.o. openSUSE Team Lihovarska 1060/12 PGP 0xFED656F6 19000 Praha 9 mhrusecky[at]suse.cz Czech Republic http://michal.hrusecky.net http://www.suse.cz -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

jdd - 13:49 28.11.13 wrote:

Le 28/11/2013 13:41, Michal Hrusecky a écrit :

...

jdd - 13:27 28.11.13 wrote:

...

...

how is red hat living?

Good. And SUSE is living good as well. These companies don't depend on what kids think nowadays that is cool, but on what people need to get work done ;-)

good news. but is this more than server market? is desktop still important enough as linux client?

My personal opinion - companies don't care about Linux desktop, money are in server, cloud... But where SUSE/RedHat is going is not necessarily the same direction as openSUSE, but we can share part of the way ;-)

this is not only to speak. it's to define our market we now target power users, but in this are geeckos, if geeks go away...

not sure all this tablet stuff is a real permanent thing, but I have to say I was pretty interested last saturday seeing a tablet running kde!!

what is fun? what is fun enough to attract new geeks and how can we have this in openSUSE?

jdd

-- Michal HRUSECKY SUSE LINUX, s.r.o. openSUSE Team Lihovarska 1060/12 PGP 0xFED656F6 19000 Praha 9 mhrusecky[at]suse.cz Czech Republic http://michal.hrusecky.net http://www.suse.cz -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On 28 November 2013 13:57, Will Stephenson wrote:

On 28/11/13 14:01, Michal Hrusecky wrote:

...

...

...

...

how is red hat living?

...

Good. And SUSE is living good as well. These companies don't depend on what kids think nowadays that is cool, but on what people need to get work done ;-)

good news. but is this more than server market? is desktop still important enough as linux client? My personal opinion - companies don't care about Linux desktop, money are in server, cloud... But where SUSE/RedHat is going is not necessarily the same direction as openSUSE, but we can share part of the way ;-)

Agreed. But there is a big and growing gap of missed opportunity between what openSUSE does and the way SLES is positioned and is used. Things that would make openSUSE more relevant to users and a more attractive investment target for SUSE.

I agree here with almost all your suggestions, with one caveat. Do not try and position openSUSE as a demo platform for ISVs. Don't get me wrong, I strongly believe we need to get more of the open source based ISVs to support openSUSE, but we should not switch the focus of the distro to support that goal. Having openSUSE as the premier platform for software development should be the goal.

* A way to make the Cloud hype-bandwagon useful to openSUSE. This might just be a low-hanging fruit YaST module to setup an OwnCloud server, a medium effort sponsoring a KDE dev and a GNOME dev for a few months to add cloudy storage for app settings and data to the desktops, or a full on effort to make openSUSE on SUSE Cloud and SUSE Cloud on openSUSE possible, visible and accessible.

* Huge gulf between the "DevOps" trend of setting up and maintaining servers and productive systems and openSUSE using the YaST installer and zypper. What if we used these to automate the boring dance of a new installation, of backing up customised settings and installed applications from an old install and putting them back in the right place on the newly installed system? What about marrying YaST and Vagrant to set up server VMs? That's an interesting task for many of the openSUSE power user base.

A good example would be to have Spacewalk packaged and available for openSUSE, it is after all the upstream project for SUSE Manager. SUSE can get some useful feedback on core functions from the community, and then further tailor the value add component on top.

* A reason for people to use little (and not so little) ARM boards running openSUSE. Right now we have the ARM builds, but how many of us have tried them on our Raspberry Pi? How do we make openSUSE more attractive than Raspbian?

Part of the issue with this is that there are not enough people contributing to the ARM port, I can count on one hand those that contribute here. I would like to see openSUSE as the go to platform for vendors when they release their SDKs rather than Ubuntu.

If you wonder why I mention these things, look at the official SUSE.com press release about openSUSE 13.1. The things that matter to SUSE about openSUSE are right there in the headline:

https://www.suse.com/company/press/2013/11/newest-opensuse-features-stabilit...

A very good point.

If we can find ways to make these things useful to the general openSUSE user too, we can turn this gap into an advantage for the project and the distro.

WIll

-- Will Stephenson SUSE LINUX GmbH, GF: Jeff Hawn, Jennifer Guild, Felix Imendörffer, HRB 21284 (AG Nürnberg) Maxfeldstraße 5 90409 Nürnberg Germany -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

-- Andrew Wafaa IRC: FunkyPenguin GPG: 0x3A36312F -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

Joerg Stephan wrote:

Hi folks,

...

...

Agreed. But there is a big and growing gap of missed opportunity between what openSUSE does and the way SLES is positioned and is used. Things that would make openSUSE more relevant to users and a more attractive investment target for SUSE.

I agree here with almost all your suggestions, with one caveat. Do not try and position openSUSE as a demo platform for ISVs. Don't get me wrong, I strongly believe we need to get more of the open source based ISVs to support openSUSE, but we should not switch the focus of the distro to support that goal. Having openSUSE as the premier platform for software development should be the goal.

To reach the goal to be a platform for something we really need to discuss the lifecycle of our distribution. When i talk to developers, they dont want to switch to newer upstream versions every 18 months. No application lifecycle can handle this.

Jane Bloggs doing back-office functions doesn't want to change either. Nor do server-admins want to upgrade their servers that frequently.

We should not forget the tools we already have. We have WebYaST and AutoYaST. we just need to combine the features and share them via an central webinterface. Such a solution is only attractive for companys. No homer user would use a toll like this, but openSUSE is far away from being a solution for any company (lifecycle, server version, etc)

Life-cycle is an issue, and openSUSE has been moving too fast. openSUSE is not too bad at the moment (as long as you don't mind being backlevel for a while).

I really like this upcomming discussion. Only sad point is that it always comes up on board election and steps back after that. We should never forget that we have a great distribution and we should learn how we can focus on our main goals. Maybe the biggest point is to identify these main goals.

A key part of this discussion is exactly what our main goals are. I'm not sure what goals, major or minor, we have today.

So somebody should make a list with main goals and maybe the community should vote on this.

How about what Agustin started out with -

...

* A desktop and a server oriented release that target end users that work everyday with their computers.

The Linux you work with, for a living.

This discussion goes between 10 people (maximum) on the project list, maybe we should aks our users what they want to see. Maybe we are totaly wrong, and we really miss the targets of our users.

It works the other way around. We make up our minds about which users we want, then we focus on creating a distro that attract those users.

We should support office and servers. This should be the rock solid base for anything else, like repos for gamers, designers and what so ever.

Big +1. -- Per Jessen, Zürich (0.2°C) http://www.hostsuisse.com/ - dedicated server rental in Switzerland. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

Le 29/11/2013 09:01, Joerg Stephan a écrit :

Sometimes is think its the uncontrolled growth of repos which makes openSUSE attractive, and "one click" installation of everything. If it would be that way, we could limit the base distribuition to... (see below :-).

incorporating this in YaST would be a great addition - even as a simple link in the beginning! it's certainly one of the major argument when discussing with newbies: "itunes and google play are copies of our system" :-) jdd -- http://www.dodin.org -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On 11/28/2013 09:42 AM, Joerg Stephan wrote:

Hi folks,

...

...

Agreed. But there is a big and growing gap of missed opportunity between what openSUSE does and the way SLES is positioned and is used. Things that would make openSUSE more relevant to users and a more attractive investment target for SUSE.

I agree here with almost all your suggestions, with one caveat. Do not try and position openSUSE as a demo platform for ISVs. Don't get me wrong, I strongly believe we need to get more of the open source based ISVs to support openSUSE, but we should not switch the focus of the distro to support that goal. Having openSUSE as the premier platform for software development should be the goal.

To reach the goal to be a platform for something we really need to discuss the lifecycle of our distribution.

Isn't that where this whole thing is leading? I bet in the follow on e-mails, which I have not yet had the chance to catch up on, the ulterior motives of the statistics collection will reveal themselves. As Klaas mentioned, numbers are generally collected for a few reasons - pat yourself on the back - try and understand some undesired symptoms/results in the present based on past stats - bring about a change thinly veiled in statistics with a "negative" trend.

When i talk to developers, they dont want to switch to newer upstream versions every 18 months. No application lifecycle can handle this.

But the question here is, are applications that we do not build in OBS part of our target? If those applications are open source, they possibly should be part of our target, then why are they not in OBS? What does it take to get those companies/developers to build their application in OBS? Once open source applications build in OBS the life cycle discussion goes away, for developers; and to a certain degree for users as well. For developers the app is build in OBS and is always integrated with the "latest and greatest", thus handling change, which is incremental but frequent becomes a small effort compared to handling the accumulated set of changes at every release. For users the life cycle becomes somewhat immaterial as the application has already been tested on the release as it was part of the development process. When it comes to proprietary applications I am not certain we should care. I do plenty of that w.r.t. my $DAYJOB and let me tell you, it's not pretty and no life cycle is slow enough for proprietary app developers not even the SLES life cycle of almost no changes for eternity.

...

A good example would be to have Spacewalk packaged and available for openSUSE, it is after all the upstream project for SUSE Manager. SUSE can get some useful feedback on core functions from the community, and then further tailor the value add component on top.

We should not forget the tools we already have. We have WebYaST and AutoYaST. we just need to combine the features and share them via an central webinterface. Such a solution is only attractive for companys. No homer user would use a toll like this, but openSUSE is far away from being a solution for any company (lifecycle, server version, etc)

Well, that is a bit too generic for my taste. openSUSE is not a solution for a company that needs proprietary applications. But than again neither is almost any other community distribution. One of the key ingredients here is commercial software support. Most companies will rely on some sort of proprietary applications and those generally do not support community distributions. For companies that do without proprietary apps or are willing to put up with a mixed environment I do not see the life cycle as a disadvantage. No one forces anyone to upgrade. Ubuntu LTS, that has been mentioned as an example, has a 24 month life cycle, we have 18, or 36 with Evergreen, thus I'd say we have the time frame covered and I refuse to believe that 2 years is some magic sweet spot that makes things work. I think the 2 year period is a number that was pulled out of somebodies.....

I really like this upcomming discussion. Only sad point is that it always comes up on board election and steps back after that. We should never forget that we have a great distribution and we should learn how we can focus on our main goals. Maybe the biggest point is to identify these main goals. For me as an administrator, there are several things i would like to see on opensuse, like a longer lifecycle and a server variant, or especially a team who works on this topic.

With the life cycle you might have a problem as that has a very wide ranging effect. However, if you'd like to see an openSUSE-server "distro" subset, there is nothing in your way to start the effort and get working on it today. The tools are there. This is nothing that can/will.should be decided by discussions or some "magic power group". Having a server profile or subset is a matter of someone doing the work and pushing it into factory and having a team of contributors from around the effort. Be free, go and do the work.

So somebody should make a list with main goals and maybe the community should vote on this.

Well, this is one of my problems, who is somebody? While I agree with Stephan, to a certain extend, that our strategy discussion was somewhat of a disaster, we did emerge with a document. This does describe the things a large part of the community agreed upon as our goals. I do not see where yet another list of goals created by the mystical "somebody" will make any difference.

This discussion goes between 10 people (maximum) on the project list,

Are you suggesting that we have a technical steering committee? Later, Robert -- Robert Schweikert MAY THE SOURCE BE WITH YOU SUSE-IBM Software Integration Center LINUX Tech Lead Public Cloud Architect rjschwei@suse.com rschweik@ca.ibm.com 781-464-8147 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On 11/30/2013 10:31 AM, Joerg Stephan wrote:

Am 30.11.2013 13:38, schrieb Robert Schweikert:

...

...

When i talk to developers, they dont want to switch to newer upstream versions every 18 months. No application lifecycle can handle this.

But the question here is, are applications that we do not build in OBS part of our target? If those applications are open source, they possibly should be part of our target, then why are they not in OBS? What does it take to get those companies/developers to build their application in OBS?

Well, i dont get the question! There are several things around which depends on software we provide. Any Apache,Nginx,PHP,Perl,Python,ruby Software can be developed and operated on our distribution, but maybe deprecated or needs review or redesign 18 months later.

Could be, but there is no solution to this problem. Even in the enterprise distribution world where release cycles are excruciatingly long we still get complains that things change too fast. At the same time of course we hear people tell us that we do not move fast enough. There will always be that part of the spectrum that wants "no change" and then there are those that want "change everyday" and we'll have everything in between. Therefore, I do not believe there is som magic number that creates a magic alignment of the starts such that more users would be interested in running openSUSE. Not in the current paradigm where people look to releases as being the basis of their operation.

While it takes several months to migrate it. Thats the point, i guess not that any company running a shop or a website will put it on obs, but maybe the want to run it on opensuse.

Yes and no. Yes, because the company that just runs the web site and gets the code from someone else is certainly not interested in the churn if there is a potential of the app they are running being broken. No, because the company that just runs the website should not have the concern of the app being broken. If the web application or other application were integrated in OBS, and the devs can certainly run their own instance without divulging their code to the public, than the developers deal with generally incremental changes rather than a big clump of changes at release time. Thus, at the end user the churn is not really visible becuse the app is not broken in the first place.

I dont talk about software itself, i talk about companys/user using software to run websites, office programs etc.

...

Once open source applications build in OBS the life cycle discussion goes away, for developers; and to a certain degree for users as well. For developers the app is build in OBS and is always integrated with the "latest and greatest", thus handling change, which is incremental but frequent becomes a small effort compared to handling the accumulated set of changes at every release. For users the life cycle becomes somewhat immaterial as the application has already been tested on the release as it was part of the development process.

When it comes to proprietary applications I am not certain we should care. I do plenty of that w.r.t. my $DAYJOB and let me tell you, it's not pretty and no life cycle is slow enough for proprietary app developers not even the SLES life cycle of almost no changes for eternity.

No, but 5 years support and another 2 years if you pay for it. Well, i can tell you from my $DAYJOB that companys care about that, the longer support the better.

Yes, that's why the enterprise linux business exists. People that cannot deal with changes pay to have old stuff maintained for eternity. And it is still cheaper than paying for AIX, Solaris, or HPUX.

Upgrading an operatingsystems costs a lot of time, which means a lot of money. Administration who runs the updates and developers who tests it, even if everything works fine it takes weeks.

Yes, I know.

...

Well, that is a bit too generic for my taste. openSUSE is not a solution for a company that needs proprietary applications. But than again neither is almost any other community distribution. One of the key ingredients here is commercial software support. Most companies will rely on some sort of proprietary applications and those generally do not support community distributions. For companies that do without proprietary apps or are willing to put up with a mixed environment I do not see the life cycle as a disadvantage. No one forces anyone to upgrade. Ubuntu LTS, that has been mentioned as an example, has a 24 month life cycle, we have 18, or 36 with Evergreen, thus I'd say we have the time frame covered and I refuse to believe that 2 years is some magic sweet spot that makes things work. I think the 2 year period is a number that was pulled out of somebodies.....

So we come to the point. So tell me, and if you read the other mails, what is openSUSE a solution for in your mind?

From my point of view openSUSE is a great development platform, unless one is a Java developer. It is solid, the pace of change is reasonable, upgrades from one version to the next mostly work without hiccups and with OBS I can pull in the latest an greatest in my area of interest, Python, Perl, etc. I have little insight into running servers for other people or being an admin of 50+ machine installs. However, if somone is running such installs on a distribution that is community supported, i.e. best effort with no one to blame than they are probably skilled enough to deal with the cycle we have. I don't see how adding 6 or 12 month make a difference. Again, there are people that complain that SLES moves too fast, thus increasing the length does not appear to be the answer.

Thats the question, thats the point you replied to earlier. What is it, whats the target user, what is this all about. Where do we stand and where do we wanne go. Servers, business, gamers, grand mothers who wants to write an email?

Grannies and email writers will eventually end up on Chromebooks, I think. The next time I am at my mothers I will probably move here to a Chromebook. Her computer is approaching 8 years and things are bound to fail before too long. But for the past 8 years she's been running openSUSE with upgrades on the 18 or so month cycle with no issues. Why switch? Simply for the reason that she doesn't need what we provide and the Chrombooks are a chunk cheaper than a laptop that does not carry the Windoze tax. Yes I vote with my wallet and have not bought a machine with a Windoze tax connected to it in almost 10 years. Every other category is probably fair game. However, all this categorization always makes me wonder why people are so interested in creating these artificial barriers and fences. That's not what Linux is about. If the kernel folks were only interested in running on servers we wouldn't have Android, Tizen, Automotive Linux etc. The beauty of it all is that it is adaptable and flexible. If we have people in the community that want to create a openSUSE-Server with 5 year "support" distribution let them do it, why are we even "arguing" about that? The point here is, and I suppose this is discussed in the related threads as well, that until now we have run the same release mill. This mill has required a lot of effort by the openSUSE team as they carry a lot of the final release burden. It is appreciated and has helped us to knock out some great releases. That team appears to be interested in trying something different, which is their prerogative. What the rest of us have to answer is if we have the means to step up and continue the cycle, if we want, if we need to ask the openSUSE Team to help with this cycle for another release or two until the community is fully prepared to shoulder the 8 month release cycle or if we even care enough to do releases. We do not all have to march to the same drum as Evergreen and Tumbleweed have already proven. It is a community effort and trademark approvals these days go through the board. Thus if there is a group of people that wants to create openSUSE-Server and release this as a distro I personally see no problem with that. Why would anyone stand in the way of such an effort? Maybe going forward there will no longer be "the one and only" openSUSE distribution, frankly with Tumbleweed and Evergreen that doesn't exist anymore already anyway.

...

With the life cycle you might have a problem as that has a very wide ranging effect. However, if you'd like to see an openSUSE-server "distro" subset, there is nothing in your way to start the effort and get working on it today. The tools are there. This is nothing that can/will.should be decided by discussions or some "magic power group". Having a server profile or subset is a matter of someone doing the work and pushing it into factory and having a team of contributors from around the effort. Be free, go and do the work.

Good answer to any upcoming question. "Go and do it yourself". It should be discussed by the community and at least by this mailinglist, if the discussion says we dont need it, why should i do it?

This is not a dictatorship. Just like things that were introduced in the kernel for mobile stuff turned out to be useful for the server eventually and vice versa (with multi core stuff showing up on mobile) there will be things that an openSUSE-Server team with a 5 year "support" plan will bring back to the community at large. That's how organic growth works.

Lets make a deal, board and project ML should discuss it, if we come to the conclusion we want a server subset, i will be the first one in the team and the last one who leaves it.

Well in this thread alone I'd say there were already 3 different people that said we need a longer more server oriented life cycle. I think that's a good start to get a server only team going. We have examples of this stuff right here in front of us. When the KDE team moved to develop and maintain KDE4 Illya decided he wanted to keep KDE3. So he did, or is doing the work, and I suppose there are users. I maintain OpenNebula repositories and we have openSUSE users that use OpenNebula instead of OpenStack. If I really wanted to I could probably get the OpenNebula packages into the main distro to live alongside the OpenStack packages. In most cases it really only takes someone or a few people to do the work. The answer of "do the work" is not a cop out, it took me a while to come to that conclusion when I first got involved oh so many years ago in open source. But as John "Maddog" Hall says, don't wait for a "letter of permission", it will not arrive.

...

Well, this is one of my problems, who is somebody? While I agree with Stephan, to a certain extend, that our strategy discussion was somewhat of a disaster, we did emerge with a document. This does describe the things a large part of the community agreed upon as our goals. I do not see where yet another list of goals created by the mystical "somebody" will make any difference.

Well, i hoped someone from the board, if i got it right http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Board seems to be part of the description. According to our speech it seems the mystical "somebody" will never be me and never be you.

This puts me in a bit of a difficult position, thus let me make certain there are no misunderstanding. The following paragraph is my opinion and I am NOT putting words in the mouth of my fellow board members. Correct, the board is not here to set technical direction, release cycle, target audience for the distribution etc. Those decisions need to come from within the community and if parts of the community decide that a 5 year release cycle of openSUSE server is the right way to go and others decide that the 8 month cycle is just fine than what can the board do? Forbid a group of volunteers to contribute to the project? I think not, that's certainly not going to go over very well. As Kostas said, people here volunteer their time and efforts. Presuming that the board could tell people what to do and how to spend their volunteer time is at least in my opinion over reaching. That we had 1 primary distribution for a long time is great but that does not necessarily imply it has to stay that way going forward. Later, Robert -- Robert Schweikert MAY THE SOURCE BE WITH YOU SUSE-IBM Software Integration Center LINUX Tech Lead Public Cloud Architect rjschwei@suse.com rschweik@ca.ibm.com 781-464-8147 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On 28/11/13 15:19, Andrew Wafaa wrote:

I agree here with almost all your suggestions, with one caveat. Do not try and position openSUSE as a demo platform for ISVs. Don't get me wrong, I strongly believe we need to get more of the open source based ISVs to support openSUSE, but we should not switch the focus of the distro to support that goal. Having openSUSE as the premier platform for software development should be the goal.

Not my intention at all - the idea was to find ways to make the technologies mentioned relevant to openSUSE's audience (and then profit!), not to make openSUSE relevant to a different audience. Will -- Will Stephenson SUSE LINUX GmbH, GF: Jeff Hawn, Jennifer Guild, Felix Imendörffer, HRB 21284 (AG Nürnberg) Maxfeldstraße 5 90409 Nürnberg Germany -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

Michal Hrusecky wrote:

jdd - 13:49 28.11.13 wrote:

...

Le 28/11/2013 13:41, Michal Hrusecky a écrit :

...

jdd - 13:27 28.11.13 wrote:

...

...

how is red hat living?

Good. And SUSE is living good as well. These companies don't depend on what kids think nowadays that is cool, but on what people need to get work done ;-)

good news. but is this more than server market? is desktop still important enough as linux client?

My personal opinion - companies don't care about Linux desktop, money are in server, cloud...

You're quite probably right, although we've been running Linux desktops on every desktop and laptop since 2006. -- Per Jessen, Zürich (0.2°C) http://www.hostsuisse.com/ - dedicated server rental in Switzerland. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

Le 28/11/2013 13:44, Will Stephenson a écrit :

Red Hat are doing fine. I'm looking at openSUSE here though. Do you mean Fedora?

we strongly both depends on our main sponsor, we know companies can merge when there is stress. If both red hat and SUSE are in good shape, this mean we have foundations to keep going. as of new distros, I see most being debian clones - think at mint, but it's not a technical move - I much prefere zypper than apt-get. so, if (as I hope), you are right, openSUSE is assured of a long living on it's own. Good. so now who are the clients? chance is the remaining ones are solid ones, we have to keep them. and what exciting goal can you find to attract more enthousiasts (may be it was in summary the first mail signification?) jdd -- http://www.dodin.org -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

Le 29/11/2013 01:09, Christian Boltz a écrit :

We should cooperate with other distributions whereever it is possible to avoid duplicate work.

may be this exists already, but some sort of obs API? kind of sharing between our system and fedora's (I know nothing of fedora)? jdd -- http://www.dodin.org -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On 11/28/2013 01:27 AM, Stephan Kulow wrote:

Am 28.11.2013 00:15, schrieb Kostas Koudaras:

...

Hi all First of all sorry for the top posting This whole thing is so wrong for so many reasons... Most of them were mentioned mostly by Klaas and Andrew. We are the community and openSUSE is a community project. It is another thing of having a team filing the gap that community (might) leave and another thing having a team doing things leaving the community out. My impression that streangthens day by day is that the openSUSE Team wants to lead openSUSE Project leaving the community out. We don't like that as you can see, so the question here given the fact that we can not dissagree forever is... Who has to change or step back or compromise(choose your favourite)? The openSUSE Team or all the others? We are volunteers to an FOSS project, right?

We are here now and we have a problem, realizing that is half a solution. Looking to 2016 ignoring all that... Certainly not a good idea.

Hi Kostas,

I'm part of the openSUSE team and I have to say that I highly disagree with Agustins communication style - and I told him several times, but it's a good thing someone else tells him too.

But at the end of it, all we proposing is a discussion of the future and just as you say,

Understood, unfortunately the approach taken does distract from the core of the matter.

the openSUSE community has strengths and weaknesses and one of the latter is long term planning or general strategy discussions. Do you remember the last? I felt, it was a disaster.

Partially agree, we did manage to produce the strategy document and I think we learned something about ourselves in the process, thus I would say there were a number of positive results from the last strategy discussion. Being a more free flowing community as compared to other distros/projects makes planning a bit more difficult and one has to be willing to accept the requirements of "advanced citizenship"; meaning one has to be willing to tolerate others screaming at the top of their lungs opposing any given viewpoint while preferably not loosing ones cool. At the same time one should always strive to find the best solution for all.

So I don't think there is a good way to present to the project the idea that what we're doing is leading nowhere - to noone.

Well I think there are ways, but that is a different discussion. I do agree that in light of the changes in the industry as a whole and the natural maturation process of our technology the "turn the crank and produce another release" wheel that we are on is not necessarily very exciting. However, I also believe it to be necessary to a certain degree. I believe that for the foreseeable future the mill of producing regular releases is necessary simply to appease people's expectations. Changing this will potentially require a paradigm shift that I do not believe many are ready for and thus push in that direction will ultimately have the opposite effect of what we desire. Let use an example from the car industry to illustrate this a bit. The technology to get rid of the car key to start your car has existed for probably 10 or more years. Yet we are only now beginning to see a shift away from having to turn the key to simply pushing a button. Introduced at the higher end of the spectrum. The "push the button" is now part of most peoples live as so many transactions occur by clicking/pushing a button. Also, now this is considered something cool. Had any car maker introduced a "push to start feature" 10 or so years ago they would not likely have succeeded. What's behind these shenanigans is that the car guys do what they have to do until their target audience is ready for what they really want to do. Having no key to start the car saves the car manufacturer money, it's as simple as that. But it only saves money when the solution is accepted, thus they have to wait until the "start align". I consider us to be in a similar boat. If we just turn over a new leave under the pretense that the statistics show us that we need to change or should change while not considering the paradigms (which are not expressed in numbers) under which the industry as a whole and our target audience operate we are bound to fail. So far I have not seen a discussion that takes existing paradigms into consideration or considers how these can be shifted in a gentle general way to more closely resemble what we may think is a better solution. Later, Robert -- Robert Schweikert MAY THE SOURCE BE WITH YOU SUSE-IBM Software Integration Center LINUX Tech Lead Public Cloud Architect rjschwei@suse.com rschweik@ca.ibm.com 781-464-8147 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

Am 30.11.2013 18:24, schrieb Robert Schweikert:

I believe that for the foreseeable future the mill of producing regular releases is necessary simply to appease people's expectations. Changing

People's expectations are as different as the people having them. So I wouldn't put too much weight on it. If we find something that pleases us, but breaks expectations I would favor it anytime over something that pleases "people" but leaves us unhappy. Greetings, Stephan -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On Saturday 30 November 2013 22.05:28 Stephan Kulow wrote:

Am 30.11.2013 18:24, schrieb Robert Schweikert:

...

I believe that for the foreseeable future the mill of producing regular releases is necessary simply to appease people's expectations. Changing

People's expectations are as different as the people having them. So I wouldn't put too much weight on it. If we find something that pleases us, but breaks expectations I would favor it anytime over something that pleases "people" but leaves us unhappy.

Greetings, Stephan

+100 -- Bruno Friedmann Ioda-Net Sàrl www.ioda-net.ch openSUSE Member GPG KEY : D5C9B751C4653227 irc: tigerfoot -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

Hi,

Can we do an 8 month release cycle if we do not have the resources the openSUSE Team @ SUSE has put forth to get 12.3 and 13.1 out the door?

Right now I think is doable if we make some internal changes and there is a solid workforce from the community side. It would need some assistance from our side. What I do not believe is that the current level of quality is reachable in one iteration or two. We would need to assume this. We are presenting the ideas. At some point (following days/weeks), we will need to talk about how to achieve them. I do believe that we can have a development rolling distribution without the openSUSE Team in the near future and a successful user oriented release having the current openSUSE Team/SUSE contributions focused in areas where we, as company, are heavily interested, allowing us to increase our overall contribution to the project.

What would that look like?

This is what the proposal is about. We have already a picture of the "new factory", which we have presented. We do not have it yet for the Release, since it will depend a lot on the results we get on the Development version and the discussions we are currently having. We would need some time to develop it at the level required to fit the puzzle pieces, in a way that a picture can be intuited.... so we can discuss it.[1] It is also unknown the process to be followed to create that picture. [1] Air sandwich: http://experiencinginformation.wordpress.com/2011/09/18/fighting-the-air-san... Saludos -- Agustin Benito Bethencourt openSUSE Team Lead at SUSE abebe@suse.com -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On 12/04/2013 09:32 AM, Henne Vogelsang wrote:

Hey,

On 30.11.2013 15:37, Robert Schweikert wrote:

...

The problem is that many things that need to be done to actually get a release out the door, one of our goals one would presume, are completed by the openSUSE Team.

They are done by the SUSE Team not because they have to be done by the SUSE team but because they chose to do them :-) If they stop doing them, someone else can.

According to progress.o.o there are 285 tasks to do, there are exactly 2 (very minor ones) that require action from SUSE.

http://bit.ly/1kat27q

BTW that there is this much involvement from SUSE in the openSUSE release is a very recent development. Nothing that has to continue...

I agree, that's why we need to answer the other questions I asked. Put in a different light one can postulate the following: Given that the openSUSE Team has a reduced interest in picking up many of the things they have done in the past to get the release out the door, - do we have the people in other parts of the community interested, willing, and able to pick up the slack? - do we feel comfortable with the continuation on an 8 month release cycle? - how do we distribute the work in a somewhat organized fashion, as in this case the "it'll happen" approach may not be our best bet? I can probably come up with more questions, but I think these give the general direction and somewhat frame the space of the things we need to think about. I agree with you, in the end what the openSUSE Team chooses to do or chooses not to do is in principle no different than any other team. It just happens that the team has done a lot of the release work and now if this will no longer be done by the openSUSE Team we have to find other people to do it. I did not want to imply that this work has to be done by people that happen to get paid by SUSE, if I did please accept my apologies for painting the wrong picture. Later, Robert -- Robert Schweikert MAY THE SOURCE BE WITH YOU SUSE-IBM Software Integration Center LINUX Tech Lead Public Cloud Architect rjschwei@suse.com rschweik@ca.ibm.com 781-464-8147 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

Am 04.12.2013 20:51, schrieb Per Jessen:

Appoint responsibilities? Basically, if something needs to be distributed in a working fashion, we need _something_ to distribute it. The Board doesn't get it's hands dirty, so a steering committee?

A committee can hardly assign tasks to people. And that's where I'm afraid this whole thing collapses. Just as we had people for 12.3 to distribute $LANGUAGE messages in twitter and then he was gone for 13.1, but registered openSUSE-$LANGUAGE.

...

I agree with you, in the end what the openSUSE Team chooses to do or chooses not to do is in principle no different than any other team. It just happens that the team has done a lot of the release work and now if this will no longer be done by the openSUSE Team we have to find other people to do it.

We have to start by understanding "the release work" first. Apart from that, I think we have plenty of capable people.

Being capable is one thing, having time another. I don't see tons of people standing around and asking what to do. Greetings, Stephan -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

Le 05/12/2013 10:27, Richard Brown a écrit :

However, if we had a list of 'stuff we need people to do', it informs the uninformed about the work being done, enables people to pick off

I think we already have a list, but this do not work. It needs a list regularly updated (the distribution task list published is a very nice example) and a handfull of people active to popularize this list on various medias (mailing lists, forums, even twitter or facebook). for example, the membership commity have to be called for work from time to time, else he don't works we should be proactive there: if we see somebody answering on lists, we should ask him some more work for this to be really effective, we needs also various tasks, specially the simpler. many people for simpler tasks make the basement of volunteers jdd -- http://www.dodin.org -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

Stephan Kulow wrote:

Am 04.12.2013 20:51, schrieb Per Jessen:

...

...

I agree with you, in the end what the openSUSE Team chooses to do or chooses not to do is in principle no different than any other team. It just happens that the team has done a lot of the release work and now if this will no longer be done by the openSUSE Team we have to find other people to do it.

We have to start by understanding "the release work" first. Apart from that, I think we have plenty of capable people.

Being capable is one thing, having time another. I don't see tons of people standing around and asking what to do.

Perhaps because they've volunteered in the past and been turned away? Unless we ask for someone to help with specific tasks, I don't think we can expect people to just stand in line waiting. They wouldn't even know where the line begins. -- Per Jessen, Zürich (3.1°C) http://www.hostsuisse.com/ - dedicated server rental in Switzerland. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On 12/05/2013 01:30 AM, Stephan Kulow wrote:

Am 04.12.2013 20:51, schrieb Per Jessen:

...

Appoint responsibilities? Basically, if something needs to be distributed in a working fashion, we need _something_ to distribute it. The Board doesn't get it's hands dirty, so a steering committee?

A committee can hardly assign tasks to people. And that's where I'm afraid this whole thing collapses.

Just as we had people for 12.3 to distribute $LANGUAGE messages in twitter and then he was gone for 13.1, but registered openSUSE-$LANGUAGE.

...

...

I agree with you, in the end what the openSUSE Team chooses to do or chooses not to do is in principle no different than any other team. It just happens that the team has done a lot of the release work and now if this will no longer be done by the openSUSE Team we have to find other people to do it.

We have to start by understanding "the release work" first. Apart from that, I think we have plenty of capable people.

Being capable is one thing, having time another. I don't see tons of people standing around and asking what to do.

Yup. Considering this a good chunk of our discussions can be boiled down to a simple question: If we go with the multi integration branch model that is being discussed, where/how are we going to find the necessary chaperone's to manage all these staging branches? If we end up with 10, 20, you name it staging trees, and we still only have the "factory maintainers" looking over things, how is that any better than the 1 integration branch we have today? The over all workload for factory maintainers would only go up with multiple staging trees because things get way more complicated. And yes, anyone who thinks they can assign work to someone volunteering their time is IMHO barking up the wrong tree, it's not going to happen. Later, Robert -- Robert Schweikert MAY THE SOURCE BE WITH YOU SUSE-IBM Software Integration Center LINUX Tech Lead Public Cloud Architect rjschwei@suse.com rschweik@ca.ibm.com 781-464-8147 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On 12/05/2013 12:08 PM, Greg Freemyer wrote:

On Thu, Dec 5, 2013 at 11:41 AM, Robert Schweikert wrote:

...

If we end up with 10, 20, you name it staging trees, and we still only have the "factory maintainers" looking over things, how is that any better than the 1 integration branch we have today?

Ignoring any supposed reduction in workload, it makes Factory a more valuable tool. ie. If the dependency breakage can be kept in staging projects, then factory is more usable and thus is more likely to be used and that means more testing is happening as a simple consequence of it being used.

That's fine, an if it materializes is a great secondary benefit. The primary question that still needs to be answered, where are the chaperones for the "new" staging trees , if we go that route going to come from? If we have staging trees and the same people than the work load goes up. That's not condusive to better anything. Later, Robert -- Robert Schweikert MAY THE SOURCE BE WITH YOU SUSE-IBM Software Integration Center LINUX Tech Lead Public Cloud Architect rjschwei@suse.com rschweik@ca.ibm.com 781-464-8147 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On 12/06/2013 02:48 AM, Stephan Kulow wrote:

On 05.12.2013 19:11, Robert Schweikert wrote:

...

If we have staging trees and the same people than the work load goes up. That's not condusive to better anything. This won't happen. If someone wants something in Factory, he needs to finish it. Factory maintainers will support, but they won't do the work.

If you feel something is important, then you have to prove it - not throw it at factory and let others prove it's wrong.

I agree with you! Dump and run sucks! I just get the feeling that to some extend we do not account for the harsh reality of the "outside" world. Let me try to frame the problem space that I see with an example: The premise is that a new version of gcc is being introduced. (Arguably this is important) In our "new ideal picture" Richard gets a staging tree and he is also responsible for managing it to make certain everything builds and everyone is happy with the change. Two things happened here: - factory maintainers work got reduced, yeah that's great and what we want - Richard got "promoted" from package maintainer to stage project manager My concern is that: a.) Richard is not really fond of that promotion because it entails a boatload of extra work b.) Richard by himself does not have the "cloud" that factory maintainers has, thus a call for help from Richard will be much less effective and he is left mostly to his own devices We can probably dream up a number of solutions to these, as Michal had pointed out one possible option would be to block everything that compiles from entering Factory until the gcc staging branch is fixed. Tooling for this is necessary etc. I am not certain that we have found a good solution to this problem and I think the "nothing goes until...." solution is a bit draconian. I think my issues raised earlier remain valid: - How do we prevent the model of "promoting package maintainers to staging project managers" from stalling progress? The natural reaction of many package maintainers to the newly acquired responsibility will probably be "I didn't ask for this, I don't want to do it". Now we are stuck. I'd like to avoid this as this would spell trouble. From my point of view if we go in this direction we want broad support from package maintainers that they are OK with receiving this kind of "promotion". Secondly I would urge that we find a team of "dedicated stage tree managers" that can help out wherever necessary. Later, Robert -- Robert Schweikert MAY THE SOURCE BE WITH YOU SUSE-IBM Software Integration Center LINUX Tech Lead Public Cloud Architect rjschwei@suse.com rschweik@ca.ibm.com 781-464-8147 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

Robert Schweikert - 11:41 5.12.13 wrote:

...

If we go with the multi integration branch model that is being discussed, where/how are we going to find the necessary chaperone's to manage all these staging branches?

As uncle Ben says - with great power comes great responsibility. Anybody can mess around with Factory, but they should also be responsible enough to make sure they don't break other peoples work.

If we end up with 10, 20, you name it staging trees, and we still only have the "factory maintainers" looking over things, how is that any better than the 1 integration branch we have today?

No, everybody should clean up their own mess, factory-maintainers shouldn't act as caring mommy cleaning up everybody who ... creates a mess around them. People should cleanup their own mess.

The over all workload for factory maintainers would only go up with multiple staging trees because things get way more complicated.

No, they are there to provide guidance and help, not to fix other people stuff.

And yes, anyone who thinks they can assign work to someone volunteering their time is IMHO barking up the wrong tree, it's not going to happen.

Yep, that goes both ways though. Don't expect factory-maintainers to fix a mess you created. -- Michal HRUSECKY SUSE LINUX, s.r.o. openSUSE Team Lihovarska 1060/12 PGP 0xFED656F6 19000 Praha 9 mhrusecky[at]suse.cz Czech Republic http://michal.hrusecky.net http://www.suse.cz -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

Stephan Kulow - 10:30 6.12.13 wrote:

On 06.12.2013 10:27, Michal Hrusecky wrote:

...

Robert Schweikert - 11:41 5.12.13 wrote:

...

...

If we go with the multi integration branch model that is being discussed, where/how are we going to find the necessary chaperone's to manage all these staging branches?

As uncle Ben says - with great power comes great responsibility. Anybody can mess around with Factory, but they should also be responsible enough to make sure they don't break other peoples work.

...

If we end up with 10, 20, you name it staging trees, and we still only have the "factory maintainers" looking over things, how is that any better than the 1 integration branch we have today?

No, everybody should clean up their own mess, factory-maintainers shouldn't act as caring mommy cleaning up everybody who ... creates a mess around them. People should cleanup their own mess.

Now that's unfair to Richard. Introduction a new gcc is not Richard's "own mess". Basically we will have staging projects where we share the load because the goal of having a new gcc in factory is the higher goal than a personal preference.

Yes, I made myself unclear. It is NOT the mess of the guy who submitted the package but his and AND people depending on him. So THEY ALL should work TOGETHER to fix stuff. Not wait for some coolo to come and make everything work together. -- Michal HRUSECKY SUSE LINUX, s.r.o. openSUSE Team Lihovarska 1060/12 PGP 0xFED656F6 19000 Praha 9 mhrusecky[at]suse.cz Czech Republic http://michal.hrusecky.net http://www.suse.cz -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

Robert Schweikert - 8:36 6.12.13 wrote:

... plenty of work in the final integration branch. The idea of having everything cross build against each other such that there are no issues in the final integration branch, factory, appears far fetched to me.

Well, let's try and see :-) It might not be perfect, but I believe that it will reduce the problems we are having now heavily. -- Michal HRUSECKY SUSE LINUX, s.r.o. openSUSE Team Lihovarska 1060/12 PGP 0xFED656F6 19000 Praha 9 mhrusecky[at]suse.cz Czech Republic http://michal.hrusecky.net http://www.suse.cz -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

On Fri, Dec 6, 2013 at 8:46 AM, Michal Hrusecky wrote:

...

Robert Schweikert - 8:36 6.12.13 wrote:

...

... plenty of work in the final integration branch. The idea of having everything cross build against each other such that there are no issues in the final integration branch, factory, appears far fetched to me. Well, let's try and see :-) It might not be perfect, but I believe that it will reduce the problems we are having now heavily.

Based on experience I'm sure there are projects / packages that the factory-maintainers think should always be staged. What is the already known list? Could a few permanent staging projects be established?

Build tools could surely share a single permanent staging project: GCC RPM autotools perl python

DEs should possible share one: Gnome was mentioned as needing staging KDE was ruled out, so maybe the rest of the DEs can bypass staging? Not sure if enlightenment counts as a DE yet but as all the packages

On 12/07/2013 03:09 AM, Greg Freemyer wrote: that use it and its libraries are maintained from the same repository it essentially gets its own staging anyway. Cheers Simon

A boot process staging project: Kernel? initrd / grub2 / etc. ? systemd?

If the process is started with a relative handful of projects/packages, then it can be expanded as the concept proves itself.

Greg

-- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

Hey, On 04.12.2013 16:22, Agustin Benito Bethencourt wrote:

On Wednesday, December 04, 2013 03:32:45 PM Henne Vogelsang wrote:

...

On 30.11.2013 15:37, Robert Schweikert wrote:

...

The problem is that many things that need to be done to actually get a release out the door, one of our goals one would presume, are completed by the openSUSE Team.

They are done by the SUSE Team not because they have to be done by the SUSE team but because they chose to do them :-) If they stop doing them, someone else can.

I do not agree with this view completely. In 12.2 we had to do it and 12.3 too. In 13.1 I can consider it was partially a decision, yes.

Okay, doesn't matter to my argument. You do it, but someone else could.

...

According to progress.o.o there are 285 tasks to do, there are exactly 2 (very minor ones) that require action from SUSE.

All the ones related with infrastructure are currently done by SUSE. Legal ones too. The Release Team is SUSE.....

Again, this is the case because your team chose (or where forced by what/whomever doesn't matter) to do it, not because nobody else can do it. That some people that participate in this process are employed by SUSE is a distinction you are very keen to point out, it's not a distinction that traditionally mattered in this project. It's a distinction we have fought very hard to get rid of. So if Lars updates mirrorbrain or Ciaran checks package submission it's because they are part of the openSUSE community, not because they are employed by SUSE.

We have worked on documenting the process, publishing the tasks around it and opening some tasks to the community.

And for that I applaud you :-)

As I said some months ago, there is a lot to do in this direction. But the process is set up in a way that is very hard to handle it if you are not working full time on it. It is to great extend a product focus process based on what SUSE used to do.

Like I've said, once we have handled this with a way bigger percentage of not-full-time community members. It's a recent change that we don't anymore.

One goal of Factory proposal is to open the process....in a way that is affordable on volunteer basis, removing the "product component", clarifying distributing and reducing the "work packages" so it is easier to manage on volunteer basis.

No matter the development process in factory, as long as we release a Linux distribution the amount of tasks involved to pull this off will be roughly the same. Please just look at your own task list in progress and see what you can leave be after you have changed factory...

Part of the success of this Release version will be: a.- To set up the process in a way that volunteers can participate in short/extensive periods of time. There is no need to apply intensive work with time pressure.

See above...

b.- Put paid developers in those less attractive tasks that still needs to be done, at least initially.

We don't "put" developers anywhere and we don't care if they get salary and most of all we don't care who pays their salary if they get some. We are an open source project, not a company. Please get this into your head :-) Henne -- Henne Vogelsang http://www.opensuse.org Everybody has a plan, until they get hit. - Mike Tyson -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

Hi, On Wednesday 04 December 2013 17:07:06 Henne Vogelsang wrote:

Hey,

On 04.12.2013 16:22, Agustin Benito Bethencourt wrote:

...

On Wednesday, December 04, 2013 03:32:45 PM Henne Vogelsang wrote:

...

On 30.11.2013 15:37, Robert Schweikert wrote:

...

The problem is that many things that need to be done to actually get a release out the door, one of our goals one would presume, are completed by the openSUSE Team.

They are done by the SUSE Team not because they have to be done by the SUSE team but because they chose to do them :-) If they stop doing them, someone else can.

I do not agree with this view completely. In 12.2 we had to do it and 12.3 too. In 13.1 I can consider it was partially a decision, yes.

Okay, doesn't matter to my argument. You do it, but someone else could.

...

...

According to progress.o.o there are 285 tasks to do, there are exactly 2 (very minor ones) that require action from SUSE.

All the ones related with infrastructure are currently done by SUSE. Legal ones too. The Release Team is SUSE.....

Again, this is the case because your team chose (or where forced by what/whomever doesn't matter) to do it, not because nobody else can do it.

Please remember that in the tool is not everything that is done for the Release, but everything we do or want to check/follow. There are tasks not present there that requires some access to infrastructure or authorization that only SUSE employees have. They are just a few though. Most of the current tasks can be done by other people that is not us, yes. I personally think that the current process is not designed to be done by external contributors under volunteers basis. This is why we are trying to change it. But possible in normal conditions? Yes of course.... like many other jobs done in the open.

That some people that participate in this process are employed by SUSE is a distinction you are very keen to point out, it's not a distinction that traditionally mattered in this project. It's a distinction we have fought very hard to get rid of.

So if Lars updates mirrorbrain or Ciaran checks package submission it's because they are part of the openSUSE community, not because they are employed by SUSE.

The good thing about working at SUSE is that they do it, no matter how they see themselves: community members, sponsored community members, employees working in openSUSE, employees with freedom to work in any Free Software project so they choose openSUSE.... I assume there was a time in which this fight you mention was relevant. I am open to have this discussion about who we are, how do we see ourselves and how other see us in oSC14.... with beers. It seems it is very important for some of you. I respect it so let's talk about it in person.

...

We have worked on documenting the process, publishing the tasks around it and opening some tasks to the community.

And for that I applaud you :-)

...

As I said some months ago, there is a lot to do in this direction. But the process is set up in a way that is very hard to handle it if you are not working full time on it. It is to great extend a product focus process based on what SUSE used to do.

Like I've said, once we have handled this with a way bigger percentage of not-full-time community members. It's a recent change that we don't anymore.

I do not understand this fully. Are you saying that the current set up in the distribution is a regression compared to how the distro was released in the past in terms on community involvement?

...

One goal of Factory proposal is to open the process....in a way that is affordable on volunteer basis, removing the "product component", clarifying distributing and reducing the "work packages" so it is easier to manage on volunteer basis.

No matter the development process in factory, as long as we release a Linux distribution the amount of tasks involved to pull this off will be roughly the same. Please just look at your own task list in progress and see what you can leave be after you have changed factory...

Many of what we do now in the Release is because the distro is also for developers. In the future Release those tasks will change. Might be less or more but will change. Examples: * The current feature page is very "power users" oriented. It is a big task by the way. * We test features and software that would not be present in the "new release". There are many more ..... I think that your assumption is, at least, risky. [offtopic] I am glad to see that progress is used as base for discussing aspects of the release.

...

Part of the success of this Release version will be: a.- To set up the process in a way that volunteers can participate in short/extensive periods of time. There is no need to apply intensive work with time pressure.

See above...

...

b.- Put paid developers in those less attractive tasks that still needs to be done, at least initially.

We don't "put" developers anywhere and we don't care if they get salary and most of all we don't care who pays their salary if they get some. We are an open source project, not a company. Please get this into your head :-)

I will try to remember your principles. Please consider that not everybody must share them, they must respect them. People with different ones can also contribute and enjoy the project being good citizens. The word "open" is there for good reasons ;-)

Henne

Saludos -- Agustin Benito Bethencourt openSUSE Team Lead at SUSE abebe@suse.com -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

...

...

...

...

"Henne" == Henne Vogelsang writes:

Henne> These are not my principles, these are some of the guiding Henne> principles of the openSUSE project. The most common understanding Henne> on how this project works. The basis for everything we do here. >> People with different ones can also contribute and enjoy the project >> being good citizens. The word "open" is there for good reasons ;-) Henne> No one is stopping you from doing anything. If you want a server Henne> and a desktop version, go ahead create them. If you want to have Henne> more openQA in the development process, go ahead integrate it. If Henne> you want to go after professional users, go ahead do that. You're Henne> even in the prime position that you have payed resources at hand Henne> that you can direct. Henne> But you can't change the direction and the goal we all work for. We Henne> are not about optimizing our resources, we are about choice. We are Henne> not about market share, we are about collaboration. We are not Henne> about profit, we are about respect. Thank you Henne for explaining who we are and what we want, maybe before making any proposals it would be better people accustom to what has been done over the years, regarding guiding principles and adjust their approach accordingly. As to me we are going back to square 1 to rediscuss everything that was already agreed. It's time to move forward Togan -- Life is endless possibilities -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

Hi, On Thursday 28 November 2013 08:26:54 Andrew Wafaa wrote:

...

Hi,

Once openSUSE 13.1 has been released, it is time for the openSUSE Team to focus on the future. We want to share some ideas we have about the project in general and factory in particular. The topic is not easy. so this mail is a little long and dense, but hopefully worth it. It won't be the last one so let me know how to improve it.

INTRODUCTION/GOALS

This is the first of a series of mails we will publish the following days with different ideas. The process we are proposing has no intention of pointing at anybody, revisiting the past or enforce any situation within the community. Our goals are:

* Share a picture as a starting point of discussion. * Use the discussed picture as a reference to agree on actions we all can/want to execute.

FIRST STEP: PIECES OF THE PUZZLE

One of the first things we did was digging into numbers that provided us information about the status of the project. Data cannot be the only source to create a complete picture, but it is helpful as first step.

In order to better understand the rest of the mail, you probably want to look the following references:

* Alberto Planas talk at oSC13: openSUSE in Numbers[1] * Alberto Planas' slides from the above talk[2] * First openSUSE Team blog post: Numbers in openSUSE[3] * Second openSUSE Team blog post: More on statistics[4] * Jos post about numbers[5]

One important note about the numbers: since most of the behaviors of the variables reflected on the graphs were consolidated, at some point we decided to stop adding effort in collecting numbers until 13.1 was released. Once the Release is well established, we will update them and evaluate the influence of this Release in the global picture.

I won't try to go very deep in the analysis. It would be too long. There are many interpretations that can be done based on the graphs. I will just point out the most relevant for our purpose. Feel free to add others. Statistics are a marketing tool, and generally everyone acknowledges

On 26 November 2013 19:38, agustin benito bethencourt wrote: they can mean whatever you want them to mean and as such are realisticly useless. We (openSUSE) have been making a lot of noise about how we have more users than Fedora. I don't really believe that stat, but I'll go along with it for now; one thing that we m,ost certainly do NOT have is more developers using openSUSE compared to Fedora.

This is confirmed by our data. As mentioned by Alberto in his keynote, I think, we used Fedora as reference because the rest of the distros do not publish their numbers together with the methodology and the technical info required for us to compare it.

Ultimately this is what we should be looking at doing growing openSUSE as a good developer platform, not just as a good end user platform (Windows desktop replacement).

I think both are deeply linked. We cannot have one without the other. We need to work on both rather than the current compromise we have. That is a relevant point of the proposal.

...

Following Alberto Planas' order from his slides[2]...

1.- Downloads

The number of downloads do not measure our user base, but provide hints about the impact of the work done every 8 months, the potential new users we might bring to the project and, looking at pre-release downloads, the number of testers.

Taking a look at the graphs, we can see that the overall number of downloads is growing at a slow path (slope). This behavior is not consistent in every release. For instance, 12.1 was more downloaded that 12.2 or 12.3. More and more people uses zypper for updating the distribution though.

Not sure I understand what you're trying to get at here. Sure, keep an eye on trends, but that's all what they are. Don't fixate on it.

The overall number of downloads grow if you take the full time window shown on the graph. If you count the number of downloads per release, you would see many variations from release to release. @Alberto, am I correct? I am sure you can explain better.

...

2.- UUIDs (installations that update regularly)

* Looking at the number of machines that regularly update against openSUSE repositories (daily, weekly and monthly), we can easily conclude that the situation is very stable. The speed of growth (daily and weekly stats) or decline (monthly) is low.

* What the graph do not show is the acceleration. It has been negative (small in value) for quiet some time now.

Your stats don't take into account people that update from local/on-site mirrors, this is a very common thing in areas with slow/un-reliable internet.

True. On the other hand we are counting people that have several virtual machines in the same iron. It is the best we can do for now. This is why we approach the numbers looking for trends and consolidate behaviors, not looking for details.

...

* When looking at the architectures, we see that x86_64 is more popular than i586. This behavior is accelerating, as confirmed in the download numbers collected for 12.3

* When looking at the mediums where those installations come from, we clearly see three dominant ones: .iso (dvd version), ftp (net installs) and Live CD. This is nothing new, and was known before. We already knew the trend was in x86_64's favour, and we adjusted the media available as a result to reflect the three you mentioned.

The shift in the downloads of openSUSE happened in 12.3, not so long ago.

...

* There is a relevant detail that Alberto mentioned in his talk. More than half, almost 2/3, of openSUSE installations are not using the last version many weeks after Release date. There is also a significant amount of installations using unmaintained or Evergreen versions.

3.- Factory and Tumbleweed installations/"users"

Factory is our ongoing development effort. As you can see in the graph, the number of Factory installations is constant. Tumbleweed was very successful when it came out. Many developers and bleeding edge users liked it. Its popularity is decreasing though.

Factory is almost always a constant percentage of installs vs the number of contributors. We haven't been making much noise about Tumbleweed so it's only natural that its usage will drop if it isn't known about. Many new users know about the wealth of repos on OBS so they just add the repos they want, also Tumbleweed isn't suited to those with proprietary driver needs, which unfortunately is a fairly high number.

There are several possible explanations for Tumbleweed number of users behavior. I am not qualified to provide a solution here. I think this is one of those points for discussion at the Tumbleweed mailing list, for instance. I am interested on the conclusions of such a debate.

...

4.- Contributors to factory and devel projects

The numbers of users that are submitting request to factory/devel projects is increasing. Now we have more non SUSE contributors. SUSE ones remain constant. The overall growth is about 27 new contributors per year, a little bit more than 2 new contributors per month.

Why have the contributions from SUSE remained constant? Surely we should see a growth across the contribution base?

Ralf Flaxa pointed reasons in his keynote and what is his intention in this regard. It is a challenge all the Free Software companies (also close ones) face. They need to maintain code for a long time for their customers while the development area moves fast and you have limited chances to control that speed. The success or failure of a software company in a long term depends also in how they face this challenge.

...

5.- Social media and comparison with Fedora

openSUSE is, in the social media channels evaluated, in the range of Fedora. Comparing our numbers, I guess we all agree with this general trend that states that openSUSE is a more user oriented distribution than Fedora is. We have less downloads but more users (installations updating regularly). This is a pointless metric. Yes we need to evaluate our standing with our peers, fixating on it is going to do nothing good and will detract from stuff that needs to be done.

The compassion is what we think is valuable. Maybe it should be extended to other distros. We are afraid we might not like some of the results ;-)

...

SOLVING THE PUZZLE

All the above pieces shows a stable picture. Every sign of growth or decline is, in absolute and/or relative numbers, small except social media, due to their explosion as communication channels (which I do not think is way different from what other Free Software communities are experiencing). I disagree, I genuinely think the picture is positive and not stable. We have more growth than you make out, this was pointed out to you at oSC13 but you chose to dismiss it.

Can we agree at least on the idea that we have much more potential that what we are delivering right now? Can we agree that this is a good time, from the internal and external perspective, to make a move that allow us to increase our relevance as a distribution? If we do, disagreeing on the current picture is not optimal, but we can share the ride.

...

ADDING CONTEXT TO THE PICTURE

openSUSE coexist with other "coopetitors" (Free Software competitors + cooperators) and competitors (closed sources distributions). Touchscreens, cloud, big data, games...the Linux ecosystem is evolving and there are new users with new needs.

New players are consolidating their positions: Arch, Chakra, Mint... Ubuntu is moving to the mobile space, Debian is getting some attention back from previous Ubuntu users....

On the other hand, some distros that were relevant in the past have disappeared, our 13.1 has got more attention than previous ones, SUSE is healthy and willing to invest more in openSUSE in the future ...

In the above context, how is our "stable" situation perceived? How do we think it should be perceived?

The perception is positive, they see good improvements with only minor niggles. Many peers regularly look at what we are doing and feed off of that. I don't think we should worry about what X perceives about us. We know who/what we are and what we stand for.

Worry...not. I agree. By putting an eye in what others are doing and how they are solving similar problems, what results they get..... that is something that I am interested by default.

...

INTERPRETING THE PICTURE

If we agree that the overall number of users of Linux based server + "traditional" desktop OS (let's remove the mobile/embedded space and cloud for now), is growing, not following the "market" growing trend might be perceived as a wake up call, a clear sign that improvements needs to be done.

But if we agree that we are playing in a risky and challenging field, stability can be perceived as a healthy sign.

After these months of analysis and discussions with both, contributors and users, I would like to ask you if you agree with the the idea that the first picture is more prominent than the second one. But, does the second one provide us a good platform to improve our current position?

We need to be in both "pictures". SUSE and openSUSE used to be innovators, we need to get that innovation streak back. We are growing and we are stable, we now need to spice things up and become a disruptor.

I agree with you. This is not about fixing our problems, it is about deprecate them.

...

SHARE YOUR OWN PICTURE

Let me propose you some questions:

1.- What other variables we should put in place to create an accurate picture of the current state of the project?

An easy way would be to actually talk to people at events, FOSDEM/oSC/SCALE/etc and listen to them. Don't try and put words in people's mouths. Take a notepad and write down everything you hear.

...

2.- What is the perception you think others have from the project?

What does it matter what I think others think of openSUSE? I'm not insecure about openSUSE, sure I sometimes wonder WTF is going on at SUSE but openSUSE gives me no concern as I have a lot of trust in those that actually call the shots and are willing to stick their neck on the line.

...

3.- What is your perception, your picture?

As I said, we are strong, stable and growing. We now need to capitalise on that and start shaking things up.

...

To get some context you might want to take a look at the following contents:

* Current strategy[6] * Ralf Flaxa keynote at oSC'13[7] * Jos article: Strategy and Stable[8] * Jos article: Strategy and Factory[9]

REFERENCES:

Please point us to other relevant references:

[1] Alberto Planas talk at oSC13: openSUSE in Numbers: http://youtu.be/NwfohZ8RBd8 [2] Alberto Planas' slides from the above talk: https://github.com/aplanas/opensuse-data/tree/master/osc13 [3] First openSUSE at SUSE team blog post: Numbers in openSUSE http://lizards.opensuse.org/2013/07/04/numbers-is-opensuse/ [4] Second openSUSE at SUSE team blog post: More on statistics http://lizards.opensuse.org/2013/08/23/more-on-statistics/ [5] Jos article about numbers: http://blog.jospoortvliet.com/2013/08/on-distributions-numbers-and-breaki ng.html [6] Current strategy: http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Strategy [7] Ralf Flaxa keynote at oSC'13: http://youtu.be/fdroo2JZano [8] Jos article: Strategy and Factory: http://blog.jospoortvliet.com/2013/07/osc13-strategy-and-factory.html [9] Jos article: Strategy and Stable: http://blog.jospoortvliet.com/2013/08/osc13-strategy-and-stable.html

Saludos -- Agustin Benito Bethencourt openSUSE Team Lead at SUSE abebe@suse.com -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

Saludos -- Agustin Benito Bethencourt openSUSE Team Lead at SUSE abebe@suse.com -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org