Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-project (930 mails)
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Re: [opensuse-project] What's wrong with independence?
- From: "Bryen M. Yunashko" <suserocks@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 08 Jun 2010 14:14:03 -0500
- Message-id: <1276024443.4515.9443.camel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
On Tue, 2010-06-08 at 20:44 +0200, Per Jessen wrote:
His original item was about what happens in the case of a possible sale.
And it was a fair and legitimate question in my opinion, one that we
quickly tried to reassure him that no changes were imminent. He then
changed the discussion to a referendum against Novell for its dealings
with Microsoft. These were two completely separate and unrelated
topics.
Either a) we're worried about Novell's relationship/sponsorship of
openSUSE and how it will change once a sale is approved or b) we don't
want Novell now period and should seek to break away from Novell
regardless of sale. But hey, if Novell gets sold, we'll break away from
Novell anyway, right?
It became a two-pronged discussion that took away from AJ's original
posting and in effect trashed AJ's original posting. Which is a shame.
Because he was bringing up a legitimate discussion about how WE, the
community, work to give ourselves more independence and autonomy.
We are an upstream project for Novell. We are not the product of
Novell. Even if we split away one hundred percent away from Novell and
said "No thank you, we never want to talk to you again... goodbye!"
Novell would still use us as upstream basis for their SLE products. And
people around the world won't make the distinction that we're
independent as long as Novell uses our creations. So it becomes moot.
No one is arguing against self-reliance. Self-reliance and
independence are a different topic than split from Novell. We can
still be sponsored by Novell and be independent. In fact we gave
several points about how we, as a Project, have worked towards this
self-reliance in the last year. Maybe you missed that part of the
thread? But in any case, if we want more independence, we need to
learn to walk the walk. More in the community need to step up and do.
It's as simple as that.
Any arguments for independence are completely derailed when the very
same person who says we need to be independent says he refuses to do
anything to work towards that independence. It simply doesn't make
sense. you can't have one and not the other. What I keep seeing over
and over again around here is we put out lots of calls for help on this
or that project and no one steps up, but everyone comments freely on
broad discussions like this.
There is always a risk of infrastructure "suddenly going away." Novell
could do that, although AJ himself stated Novell will not do that (and
thus this is unfounded conjecture to even bring it up), whoever buys
Novell and continues to sponsor us could pull the plug. Or we could
seek out sponsors of our own who donate their services to host our
infrastructure, and then one day they could pull the plug. Or we could
pay for our own infrastructure and host it on servers and our hosting
service suddenly goes out of business without notice and *poof* one day
our infrastructure is missing. That has happened to a lot of customers
out there, as you know.
The argument we, on the Board, as well as others in the community have
made is not that we should self-host everything, but that we should have
greater access and control over how that infrastructure is managed. And
that is in fact something we are all moving towards and I am very
impressed with Novell's efforts so far in the past year.
So again, to summarize, there is no argument against independence
because we're already working towards that. Infrastructure control is
slowly changing over, a Foundation will be established in the near
future, we will be able to solicit sponsorships on our own, we are
influencing our own governance, we are organizing the openSUSE
Conference ourselves, not by Novell. (All Novell is doing is giving us
a check and letting us do whatever we want for the Conference.) The
Booster Team was created specifically to boost community involvement and
help us all to be able to do more ourselves. So there's no point in
arguing against independence when we're clearly all moving forward to
that goal anyway. The only argument is whether you consider
independence to mean with or without Novell's partnership. I consider
Novell's partnership to be vital.
Bryen M Yunashko
openSUSE Board Member
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I couldn't find a suitable place to add this in the running thread, so
I'm starting this one
- whilst there seems to be lots of arguments against TrifleMeNots main
arguments (possible sale, the MS deal etc),
His original item was about what happens in the case of a possible sale.
And it was a fair and legitimate question in my opinion, one that we
quickly tried to reassure him that no changes were imminent. He then
changed the discussion to a referendum against Novell for its dealings
with Microsoft. These were two completely separate and unrelated
topics.
Either a) we're worried about Novell's relationship/sponsorship of
openSUSE and how it will change once a sale is approved or b) we don't
want Novell now period and should seek to break away from Novell
regardless of sale. But hey, if Novell gets sold, we'll break away from
Novell anyway, right?
It became a two-pronged discussion that took away from AJ's original
posting and in effect trashed AJ's original posting. Which is a shame.
Because he was bringing up a legitimate discussion about how WE, the
community, work to give ourselves more independence and autonomy.
We are an upstream project for Novell. We are not the product of
Novell. Even if we split away one hundred percent away from Novell and
said "No thank you, we never want to talk to you again... goodbye!"
Novell would still use us as upstream basis for their SLE products. And
people around the world won't make the distinction that we're
independent as long as Novell uses our creations. So it becomes moot.
as far as I can tell,
no-one has actually argued against the independence in itself.
No one is arguing against self-reliance. Self-reliance and
independence are a different topic than split from Novell. We can
still be sponsored by Novell and be independent. In fact we gave
several points about how we, as a Project, have worked towards this
self-reliance in the last year. Maybe you missed that part of the
thread? But in any case, if we want more independence, we need to
learn to walk the walk. More in the community need to step up and do.
It's as simple as that.
Any arguments for independence are completely derailed when the very
same person who says we need to be independent says he refuses to do
anything to work towards that independence. It simply doesn't make
sense. you can't have one and not the other. What I keep seeing over
and over again around here is we put out lots of calls for help on this
or that project and no one steps up, but everyone comments freely on
broad discussions like this.
It
seems to me that TrifleMeNot has a point - IF the current
infrastructure DID suddenly go away, we would have a very serious
issue.
There is always a risk of infrastructure "suddenly going away." Novell
could do that, although AJ himself stated Novell will not do that (and
thus this is unfounded conjecture to even bring it up), whoever buys
Novell and continues to sponsor us could pull the plug. Or we could
seek out sponsors of our own who donate their services to host our
infrastructure, and then one day they could pull the plug. Or we could
pay for our own infrastructure and host it on servers and our hosting
service suddenly goes out of business without notice and *poof* one day
our infrastructure is missing. That has happened to a lot of customers
out there, as you know.
The argument we, on the Board, as well as others in the community have
made is not that we should self-host everything, but that we should have
greater access and control over how that infrastructure is managed. And
that is in fact something we are all moving towards and I am very
impressed with Novell's efforts so far in the past year.
Whether or not that is a real risk or not, being more
independent wouldn't be that bad, would it? Seeking infrastructure
contributions could even go quite well with a strategy of attracting
more developers and contributors (if that is the strategy).
So again, to summarize, there is no argument against independence
because we're already working towards that. Infrastructure control is
slowly changing over, a Foundation will be established in the near
future, we will be able to solicit sponsorships on our own, we are
influencing our own governance, we are organizing the openSUSE
Conference ourselves, not by Novell. (All Novell is doing is giving us
a check and letting us do whatever we want for the Conference.) The
Booster Team was created specifically to boost community involvement and
help us all to be able to do more ourselves. So there's no point in
arguing against independence when we're clearly all moving forward to
that goal anyway. The only argument is whether you consider
independence to mean with or without Novell's partnership. I consider
Novell's partnership to be vital.
/Per Jessen, Zürich
Bryen M Yunashko
openSUSE Board Member
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