Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-project (349 mails)

[Martin Schlander <martin.schlander@xxxxxxxxx>]

Torsdag den 5. august 2010 12:06:16 skrev Jan Engelhardt:
> On Thursday 2010-08-05 11:23, Martin Schlander wrote:
> > Novell systematically dropping investment in openSUSE. Naturally this
> > results in a product that is quite different from what it used to be.
> >
> > * firing developers
> > * making the ones that weren't fired work on webyast, susestudio etc.
> > * dropping sax2 and yast modules
> > * dropping 24 month support
> > * outsourcing the boxset completely
> > * dropping ppc
> > * I heard rumours that jimmac won't be replaced and artwork will be fully
> > dependant on volunteers going forward.
> >
> > And all these resources being taken away from openSUSE are not re-applied
> > elsewhere in the project. They're just freed up so we can barely maintain
> > the status quo.
>
> You seem to be wanting to dictate where a company has to put its
> manpower 

You asked me to expand on my statement about openSUSE straying from its roots 
and that's all I did.

And I'm not having any illusions about improving the way Novell treats 
openSUSE. I'm doing the opposite, I'm just stating the facts and accepting 
them. So we can build our strategy around what is realistic under the current  
circumstances - which are very different than they were 5 years ago.

 
> > > Effective marketing is downright impossible
> >
> > Some will say "openSUSE is great for n00bs" others will say "openSUSE is
> > cool, innovative bleeding edge stuff" and some will say "openSUSE is just
> > so stable and powerful and high-tech", etc.
> >
> > When everybody is conveying different (and mutually exclusive) messages -
> > and most of the time the message is out of sync with the reality of the
> > distro, marketing is extremely ineffective - often damaging even.
>
> I don't see why a distro could not be appalling to more than one type
> of user. "Given enough manpower", you surely can link both factory-edge
> with stability and impress that class of users.

That's just how it is. You can't succesfully market anything if you don't have 
a consistent message which additionally at least has _some_ connection with 
reality.

> > > development is all over the place
> openSUSE's strength could just be _not_ to be specialized, but to
> have a little bit of everything. 

We've already tried that in the last 3-4 years, it's not working very well :-)
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