Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-project (235 mails)

[Thomas Hertweck <Thomas.Hertweck@xxxxxx>]

On 27/09/10 11:30, Henne Vogelsang wrote:
> [...]
> I don't. He has contributed since he got hired right? That's the only
> thing that counts. Who cares if he get's payed, by whom, as long as he
> contributes right?

Sorry, Henne, I appreciate all the work you do and you have my utmost
respect for all the contributions you make to openSUSE, but I disagree
with you on that one here. Karsten and others have summarized it nicely.

If it was all that easy to come up with good ideas and so on, everybody
would be able to do it. However, obviously it isn't easy in reality,
that's why companies like Apple can make a fortune with their innovations.
I fully agree with you that we need people doing the actual work that
needs to be done, but excluding opinions and not allowing people to voice
their ideas and critics is going the wrong way. After all, a lot of ideas
are born through discussions. To give a little example: A society couldn't
live with academics only, you definitely need some workers, too. However,
a society would also have problems to evolve if there were only workers,
and no academics. That's why my personal opinion is that you probably need
both. At the moment, we seem to have a clash in the openSUSE community
between these two parts. Workers probably don't count the contributions of
academics as valuable (I would probably put you in that category), and
academics perhaps think the workers' contributions are somewhat overrated.
At the end of the day, we need both, it's as simple as that.

Many people may not have the time to contribute in form of packaging RPMs,
writing software, writing Wiki articles etc. But their daily life as
programmer, manager, software engineer, you name it, in a commercial or
non-commercial environment may help all of us to see what might work in
openSUSE or not. If developers who don't contribute to openSUSE come and
say, "oooh, I would be careful making those changes, we have done
something similar in our company and you may run into certain problems",
then I would say that's very valuable input to openSUSE and we should
definitely listen, even if those developers don't actually contribute to
openSUSE in the way you define it. That's also how I see some of the
discussions regarding the "community transition" - I am sure not all of us
like these discussions, some may think they are completely useless, but
maybe something good will come out at the end. It's the project mailing
list here, and if some people are worried about certain things, they
should be allowed to mention it. If people are unhappy that mailing lists
etc are unreliable in America or so (I think I saw a statement like that
somewhere), then you shouldn't take this personal and as an affront
against Novell, a company providing this service for free, but as an
inquiry to see what could perhaps be improved. Behind all the critics is
usually a valid point - it may be hard to find at times, but that doesn't
mean silencing all critics (as your current approach seems to be from my
perspective) is the best way forward. We just need to find the right balance.

I pointed out two distinct problems I had with Jos statement. He stated
that leaders within a group usually evolve through the work they do and
through their contributions to the group and that only such people have a
right to voice their opinions. If you can't see my point that this is a
strange statement from somebody who hasn't been part of that group in the
past and who was appointed this job and who gets paid for it... well, then
I can't really help. It seems as if others got that point. The second
statement he made I took personally. I cite the statement again: "We're
not a company - where managers get appointed to a position because they
had the right papers and contacts and get paid well - here, those who
actually KNOW what they are talking about are in charge." What he's saying
here is that (project) managers in the industry have no clue how things
work, they are only in charge because they had the necessary network of
people to support them and the right references and a lot of money was
involved. As a representative of that group (Head of Research &
Development in a large company) who works very hard to stay on top of all
research and development aspects in order to make the best decisions, you
didn't expect me to sit back and just swallow such an offence, did you? I
think the openSUSE project could definitely learn a couple of things from
the commercial environment.

Regards,
Thomas
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