Robert Schweikert wrote:
On 11/28/2013 01:27 AM, Stephan Kulow wrote:
Am 28.11.2013 00:15, schrieb Kostas Koudaras:
Hi all First of all sorry for the top posting This whole thing is so wrong for so many reasons... Most of them were mentioned mostly by Klaas and Andrew. We are the community and openSUSE is a community project. It is another thing of having a team filing the gap that community (might) leave and another thing having a team doing things leaving the community out. My impression that streangthens day by day is that the openSUSE Team wants to lead openSUSE Project leaving the community out. We don't like that as you can see, so the question here given the fact that we can not dissagree forever is... Who has to change or step back or compromise(choose your favourite)? The openSUSE Team or all the others? We are volunteers to an FOSS project, right?
We are here now and we have a problem, realizing that is half a solution. Looking to 2016 ignoring all that... Certainly not a good idea.
Hi Kostas,
I'm part of the openSUSE team and I have to say that I highly disagree with Agustins communication style - and I told him several times, but it's a good thing someone else tells him too.
But at the end of it, all we proposing is a discussion of the future and just as you say,
Understood, unfortunately the approach taken does distract from the core of the matter.
the openSUSE community has strengths and weaknesses and one of the latter is long term planning or general strategy discussions. Do you remember the last? I felt, it was a disaster.
Partially agree, we did manage to produce the strategy document and I think we learned something about ourselves in the process, thus I would say there were a number of positive results from the last strategy discussion.
Being a more free flowing community as compared to other distros/projects makes planning a bit more difficult and one has to be willing to accept the requirements of "advanced citizenship"; meaning one has to be willing to tolerate others screaming at the top of their lungs opposing any given viewpoint while preferably not loosing ones cool. At the same time one should always strive to find the best solution for all.
So I don't think there is a good way to present to the project the idea that what we're doing is leading nowhere - to noone.
Well I think there are ways, but that is a different discussion. I do agree that in light of the changes in the industry as a whole and the natural maturation process of our technology the "turn the crank and produce another release" wheel that we are on is not necessarily very exciting. However, I also believe it to be necessary to a certain degree.
I believe that for the foreseeable future the mill of producing regular releases is necessary simply to appease people's expectations. Changing this will potentially require a paradigm shift that I do not believe many are ready for and thus push in that direction will ultimately have the opposite effect of what we desire.
Let use an example from the car industry to illustrate this a bit. The technology to get rid of the car key to start your car has existed for probably 10 or more years. Yet we are only now beginning to see a shift away from having to turn the key to simply pushing a button. Introduced at the higher end of the spectrum. The "push the button" is now part of most peoples live as so many transactions occur by clicking/pushing a button. Also, now this is considered something cool. Had any car maker introduced a "push to start feature" 10 or so years ago they would not likely have succeeded.
What's behind these shenanigans is that the car guys do what they have to do until their target audience is ready for what they really want to do. Having no key to start the car saves the car manufacturer money, it's as simple as that. But it only saves money when the solution is accepted, thus they have to wait until the "start align".
I consider us to be in a similar boat. If we just turn over a new leave under the pretense that the statistics show us that we need to change or should change while not considering the paradigms (which are not expressed in numbers) under which the industry as a whole and our target audience operate we are bound to fail. So far I have not seen a discussion that takes existing paradigms into consideration or considers how these can be shifted in a gentle general way to more closely resemble what we may think is a better solution.
Later, Robert
What Rob is saying is very right. While our community can analyze its stand against a changing market, there has to be a place where these stats mean something. Meaning, that if there is no willing body to work on changes reflected in stats and marketing, then there is no change to be made. Most of us think of change as a "radical turn." Things that need to steer 180 degrees in order to work on a specific market. However, truth of the matter is that as we speak of change, evidenced by stats, we don't have to make a radical turn, rather we need only to steer a few degrees in the directions presented by data. Many of us would like to think that to show change we have to stop what we are doing and move on to something else. Rather, the ideas evidenced by everyone's comments is that the community needs elasticity not deviation. Our team develops in many areas of software, probably the widest of any distribution I have seen. That is a good thing! We are inviting and open. We welcome innovation. Yet, this could also lead to loss of direction. We all steer our own way which could mean that we steer in no particular way. Maybe we should evaluate this discussion not thinking that they are a radical change, but rather steering a couple of degrees more towards a focused user. As Rob points out, there is also much of the "US and THEM" problem. Moreover, it is also true that while many of us think of SUSE as trying to change the community we think that we could make SUSE change towards a more community-based approach. Something they don't have to do for the simple reason that we don't let them change us. I go back to my suggestion, if SUSE is willing to put a team to steer efforts in the community, then let them organize themselves accordingly. No government changes can be imposed by SUSE on the community, but neither can the community impose a governance model on their openSUSE team. Let us all be contributors. Andy (anditosan) -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org