Thomas Hertweck
[...] It's fairly obvious that, say, a Novell employee who's being paid to work on openSUSE for 8h a day can contribute a lot more in terms of absolute value (for instance, number of RPM packages maintained) to the project. It's maybe also not really surprising that a student with lots of spare time (No offence! I've also studied at a university and I know it can be hard work) can maintain/change/create more Wiki pages than others, i.e. his contribution in absolute terms is easily measurable. However, if somebody has a 70h week at work (non Linux-related) but nevertheless is willing and able to spend 4h over the weekend on spreading the word, helping friends with openSUSE, maybe contributing a few good emails on a openSUSE mailing list, I think this contribution to the project is just as valuable and maybe even more impressive in relative terms - you are of course right that the absolute contribution in those 4h over the weekend might only be minor.
What I'd like to see is regular contribution - and not 4 hours and then disappearing for three years.
For me, the membership approach you took disregards these very valuable contributions of many people at the base of the openSUSE community. According to your criteria of absolute values of contribution, those people in principle aren't considered as members. That's what I don't like, and that's the reason why I feel that the current approach sets a wrong sign.
Is the above really the problem for you?
I appreciate your work and that the board comes up with ideas. Unfortunately, and that might have been caused by emails from board members on this list, there seem to be a problem in communicating your ideas. When a board member proposes a code of conduct which leads to a diverse discussion with pros and cons, and one week later without having a clear conclusion the code is published as adopted, then it doesn't sound as if the board listened to the community. I can see the same
Please reread the discussion again - we're back at the drawing board for the code of conduct. There's now a new proposal out. I do agree that we screwed up with the Code of Conduct discussion.
problem now here in the membership discussion. I am sorry if I misunderstand your ideas. I don't think I am against a membership per se, and I am certainly not considering it as evil, but as mentioned above it seems as if my criteria for "member" differ significantly from the board's criteria, and that's why I am not in favour of it at the moment.
Andreas -- Andreas Jaeger, Director Platform / openSUSE, aj@suse.de SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, GF: Markus Rex, HRB 16746 (AG Nürnberg) Maxfeldstr. 5, 90409 Nürnberg, Germany GPG fingerprint = 93A3 365E CE47 B889 DF7F FED1 389A 563C C272 A126