On Sun, Jun 17, 2012 at 3:57 AM, Robert Schweikert <rjschwei@suse.com> wrote:
This, as you state requires planing, which is what we have avoided/ignored so far. To this point our releases have mostly grown organically and this has put us into hot water w.r.t. the time based release schedule every now and then, more so now than previously.
Following the "planning" argument would lead to another discussion thread.
"Do we as a community want a feature planned release?"
I'm going to state some opinions here. They're biased and I haven't done much data gathering, so my assumptions about the "state of the world" are probably off, but here goes: 1. There are two classes of Linux distros - commercially-supported (commercial) and community-supported (community). RHEL, SLES/SLED, Ubuntu and Oracle are the four best-known commercial ones. I personally can't name another, but I'm sure there are some. 2. Of the community distros, the best known are Mint, Fedora, Debian and openSUSE. There are hundreds of others, as a visit to Distrowatch will show. Fedora is supported in part by Red Hat and openSUSE is supported in part by SUSE/Attachmate. 3. Here's where my knowledge is hazy, but I'm going to take a stab at it. I think the most commonly used *community* distros in server deployment are CentOS, a respin from source RPMs of RHEL, and Debian. There are a lot of servers running Ubuntu but I'm calling that a commercial distro, not a community one. My impression is that there are few servers running openSUSE; most Linux servers are either running a supported commercial distro, CentOS or Debian. If someone can point me to recent and accurate survey data on Linux server usage, I'd be eternally grateful. ;-) 4. Linux on desktops / laptops is essentially irrelevant. Again, I haven't seen recent figures, but my impression is that at *most* Linux represents three percent of the market, with the rest split somewhere in the 85:15 ratio between Windows and MacOS X. Linux netbooks were not commercially viable. The general principles of strategic marketing are fairly well known and I don't want to go into a lecture here. Briefly, you want to invest in *growing* markets and capture market share of *paying customers*, not *users*. The markets that I see growing are cloud / IaaS / PaaS, "big data / data science / business intelligence / text analytics", and "social / local / mobile". That's where Red Hat / Fedora are investing, and that's where Canonical / Ubuntu is investing. And that's where I think SUSE/openSUSE needs to invest. 1. I think we need an openSUSE PaaS. Red Hat/Fedora has OpenShift, and Ubuntu is the core of VMware's Cloud Foundry. Both Fedora and Ubuntu ship with OpenStack Essex. I think 12.2 should ship with OpenStack Essex, not Diablo, but that's not going to happen. I can live with the B1 Systems repositories for now. 2. I think we need to package the major "big data" infrastructure tools. Hadoop for sure, but probably damn near everything the Apache Foundation maintains - Mahout, Cassandra, the UIMA natural language processing infrastructure, etc. There's a fair amount of yak shaving there; in particular making all the Apache magic run with OpenJDK is a bit of effort, but somebody needs to do it. OBS is the logical place to do that. NoSQL: we've got MongoDB and CouchDB and Node.js and Redis already, but Riak is in and out because of build failures, and I don't think Neo4J has ever been packaged. 3. Ubuntu is absolutely crushing the rest of the distros in social / local / mobile. They've got docking with Androids, an app store, music services, ... Fedora doesn't seem to care about this at all, and perhaps Red Hat made a conscious business decision based on hard data. We need to get some hard data and make the conscious business decisions - can SUSE/openSUSE *win business* in social / local / mobile, and how do we do it? Partner with Intel / Samsung / Tizen? In case you missed it, Nokia dropped Meego, HP flushed WebOS and RIM is on the ropes. I think there's an opportunity here. -- Twitter: http://twitter.com/znmeb Computational Journalism Server http://j.mp/compjournoserver Data is the new coal - abundant, dirty and difficult to mine. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-factory+owner@opensuse.org