Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-project (930 mails)

[Trifle Menot <triflemenot@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 9 Jun 2010 19:31:10 +0100 (BST), Gerald Pfeifer <gp@xxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

> On Tue, 8 Jun 2010, Trifle Menot wrote:

> > If Novell pulls the power plug, your project infrastructure immediately
> > collapses.  The "community" is not strong enough to step in and turn the
> > power back on.  As long as that's true, you're still a fetus.
>
> Is this different for Fedora or Ubuntu?  I am not saying this cannot
> or should not be changed, the question is, what is the priority (and
> who is going to bear the cost)?

Depends on your point of view.  Novell developers earning nice salaries
are in a comfort zone where risk poses a threat to their paycheck.  But
outsiders with little or nothing to lose, may have different ideas about
goals.

You can't beat the market leader by working in a comfort zone. You must
take bold risks to grow grassroots support of opensuse. You need a much
larger population of opensuse users.  And that won't happen until Novell
devs shed their clique mentality and reach outside their comfort zone.



On Wed, 9 Jun 2010 21:23:58 +0200, Martin Schlander
<martin.schlander@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Tirsdag den 8. juni 2010 14:21:05 skrev Trifle Menot:

> > I hear rumors Novell is for sale.  Will opensuse get its own bugzilla
> > independent from Novell?  And what else needs to be done for opensuse to
> > gain full independence?

> Of course it would be desirable to have some form of "guarantee" that openSUSE 
> won't just go away. For Ubuntu this sense of security was achieved by Mark 
> Shuttleworth putting 20 million USD in a foundation. Maybe it would be worth 
> it for Novell to consider doing something similar when/if an openSUSE 
> foundation is formed.

Yes but Mark doesn't need board approval, he has his own money to spend.
It's different for a corporation, whose prime directive is profit.  How
can they justify it to shareholders?


> There has been some mention of the other sponsors, but open-slx wasn't 
> mentioned. Personally I find what open-slx are doing extremely interesting - 
> since they are actually trying to monetize openSUSE. Something Novell never 
> wanted to do, since Novell is greatly (and mistakenly so) underestimating the 
> relevance of the consumer market. Open-slx have been hiring some people, and 
> hopefully they'll be succesful and grow more influential - and hopefully other 
> companies will copy this model and try to monetize openSUSE too.
>
> Regarding the MS deal. There can be no doubt that it was extremely damaging to 
> openSUSE in terms of PR - and to some extent continues to be so even now, and 
> probably will be for years to come. That is true regardless of whether the 
> deal itself was "evil" or not - and is just something we have to live with. 
> I'm not sure openSUSE being formally independent would stop Novell actions 
> from affecting the way people perceive openSUSE.

Novell gave opensuse a bad reputation.  A new corporate name may help
change market perceptions.  It seems likely that will happen soon.


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