Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-project (441 mails)

[Alberto Passalacqua <alberto.passalacqua@xxxxxx>]

> One good rule of OSS, release good and release often because it will be
> good marketing.

I think it is quite proven that six months are too short to deliver a
good quality distribution (make a comparison between 11.0 and 11.1, for
example). Plus six months put too much pressure on the developers, with
the obvious consequences. 

Eight months seem a good deal to me. Releasing every six is really "for
geeks and cutting edge people", which is not what I would consider
openSUSE goal. We should try to reach something different, geeks already
have fedora, with all the cutting edge stuff of this world. OpenSUSE,
for it's nature of user-friendly distribution, should target home and
desktop users, experienced and not, that don't want to mess with the
details of their system and want something that works. 
As long as this condition is satisfied, I don't think users will be
disappointed for two months of difference.
OpenSUSE is not far from this goal, all what we need is a plan to make
consistently nice releases, and it seems to me what Coolo proposed goes
in that direction.

About marketing, well, I think there are better strategies to market
openSUSE than just releasing often. Make your users happy and they will
spread the word faster than announcing releases everywhere on the net,
and you'll also gain on another front: they will stay and eventually
help. With an eight month release cycle we don't risk, if this is your
doubt, to have an obsolete distribution while others have an updated
one. The build service can easily fill the gap for the major
applications, without requiring users to upgrade so often (another
advantage to market).

Regards,
Alberto

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