On Wed, 9 Jun 2010 15:42:22 -0500, Alberto Passalacqua <albert.passalacqua@gmail.com> wrote:
2010/6/9 Trifle Menot <triflemenot@beewyz.com>:
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.
That's in part true that you have to go out of the comfort zone, but I don't see how this is related to developers being well paid. Being well paid to do something you like seems to me the perfect deal, and I really prefer to see well paid developers, than developers that have to deal with economic difficulties and be split between open source contributions and their work. Novell allowed SUSE developers to do this, with some compromise of course, but that's clearly something acceptable in the big picture. Remember one thing that you are forgetting: openSUSE would not exist without Novell. It is Novell that opened the project, and made all what we are talking about possible.
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?
Mark wants profit too. He says that clearly. He just invested waiting to have a return, and he also fixed a date for that.
Novell gave opensuse a bad reputation. A new corporate name may help change market perceptions. It seems likely that will happen soon.
Clearly we have different point of views. I think Novell made openSUSE possible, more open and accessible. Look at the facts for one minute instead than to the politics. Novell opened the whole SUSE, made YaST open source (it wasn't in SuSE), they offered the openSUSE buildservice to the community, opening it to all major distributions. They support, sometime alone, many open projects, and openSUSE has one of the best KDE and GNOME implementations of the Linux arena.
The bad reputation is not that bad. It is often due to what people reads on certain press, but when they know the community and try the distribution, they often change their mind, even in comparison to other more popular distributions (read ubuntu). I see that happen quite often.
What would be useful, is to stop considering Novell as a problem, and start looking at it as an advantage, because that's what it is. They surely made a lot of mistakes, especially at the beginning, but they also fixed many of them during these years. If you look at openSUSE today, you see a well built distribution, with a good user experience, a good hardware support, a cool look, and a friendly approach to Linux. I'm not saying it's perfect, and there surely is a lot of work to do, but it depends more on us (community) than on Novell.
To conclude, I think it is really unfair to look at Novell as a problem. There were communication problems at the beginning, there are different needs and perspectives, but it is clear things changed. Maybe the first required change in the community is to honestly acknowledge their merits, and then poke them when there is what we consider a problem.
I don't look at Novell as a problem. I think you are mistaking my arguments for an attack. I want Novell (and its successor) to grow and thrive. I want devs to earn nice salaries, so they can support their families while doing work they enjoy. But the reality is, if you're not growing, you're dying. You must take risks to compete with market leaders. If you don't, you will fall so far behind in terms of market share, that you can never catch up. And that will mean the eventual death of opensuse. Fully separating the opensuse infrastructure from the main sponsor is a risk. But I think it's the best way to attract new opensuse users and grow grassroots support of opensuse. If it works, the corporate sponsor will reap the rewards of improved public opinion and increasing market share. I think you must do it or die trying; if you don't try, you will surely die. -- Web mail, POP3, and SMTP http://www.beewyz.com/freeaccounts.php -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org