On Mon, 2012-06-18 at 12:07 -0700, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
I'm not an accountant or attorney, and I certainly have no clue how different the business environments are between Germany and the USA. We aren't a foundation like Debian or Gentoo as I understand it - we're a community supported by and supporting a corporation with some set of rules dictated by laws of various nations and by "gentlemens' agreements" on how the two entites co-operate. So are the other two most popular distros, Fedora and Ubuntu.
I'm not sure that's a 1-to-1 comparison. There are some unique differences between openSUSE and Fedora/Ubuntu. Mainly, while there are indeeed a number of SUSE employees who contribute to openSUSE Project, it isn't exactly dictated by them either, unlike the other two projects mentioned. openSUSE Project has one of the fewest barriers, in terms of regulation, of any operating system project out there. More often than not, employees creating de facto rules or whatever you'd like to call it, is more the result of them filling in the gaps. From a community standpoint, these folks are largely functioning as equal community members as the rest of us. Community participation is what drives the Project, and even lack of community participation is also what drives the Project. Not all of us are here because we have an inherent desire to support the Enterprise product. We're here because we support openSUSE. But presumably, we're all here with an inherent desire to make openSUSE the best damn distro out there. :-) That's not to diminish SUSE's role and contribution to the project. They're a major sponsor of the Project and we certainly are gratified with what they have contributed in terms of personnel (booster team), infrastructure, and whatnot. And I would certainly hope that for all their contributions, SUSE reaps good benefits from the existence of a community Project. But there are some folks here who contribute to openSUSE for their own projects/products. It's not an automatic assumption that what we are doing here is for the purpose of making a better Enterprise product. openSUSE is *upstream* rather than *basis* for SUSE. Yes its true that sometimes it is hard to distinguish between SUSE and openSUSE. But that's more the result of close collaboration rather than openSUSE being a "functional arm of SUSE." Bryen M Yunashko openSUSE Project -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-factory+owner@opensuse.org