Gesendet: Sonntag, 14. Mai 2023 um 13:51 Uhr Von: "Richard Brown" <rbrown@suse.de> An: factory@lists.opensuse.org Betreff: Re: openSUSE Release Engineering meeting 03.05.2023 - MicroOS KDE
On 2023-05-13 09:40, Eric Schirra wrote:
A user base, as the name suggests, lays a foundation for the commercial product. Microsoft has mastered this like no other company. So if the developers keep to themselves and don't focus on increasing the user base, sooner or later the commercial sector will feel the effects. So, the more openSUSE users, the less users who support SLES at work. Thus SLES has sometime no more e relevance. I have made the experience that if you want SLES products, you have to fight for it. That used to be different. ... Again, the statistics suggest there is no such relationship. SUSE's SLE sales have grown many, many times larger than openSUSE's userbase, at rates much faster than any growth openSUSE's userbase may have seen.
Wow! The number of SLE users have been growing after the recognition, that it is wrong to reject possible customers and partners? That is no surprise. Many escalations were required to achieve a better open source community feeling in your headquarter town. Sometimes I pitied your crisis Manager. In the same time you did your default "marketing only" presentations with the goal to keep all the knowledge. I can say, that you can not receive any new Contributors on this way. The reason is, that nobody knows the background and how to develop on your software until you give some hints. The SUSE user base would be bigger, if you all would be allowed to represent your knowledge and your products. Your competitors have received more new customers than SUSE - or better said - they have received your rejected customers. I can be happy, that I have received a point of contact within SUSE, if such a situation would happen again.
This has included SLE sales growing when openSUSE's userbase has not. Talking to SLE customers, very few cite openSUSE as a reason they chose to buy SLE. And, very few customers have used the new Leap > SLE migration path.
Yesterday I thought a little bit about your principles, that Developers should be the users. If you transfer your statements from yesterday to SLE sales statements, then your growing number of SLE Developers have to be your customers. I know only one company, who has paid their own products for their own employees, that they can be paid afterwards. But that can only work with additional external customers.
So really, no, you cannot make a strong argument that SUSE needs to invest in openSUSE's userbase for it's business. SUSE will invest in it's userbase. openSUSE needs to invest in it's contributor base to keep itself sustainable.
If you do not invest "knowledge" and code sharing into the openSUSE user base or any other community for receiving new Contributors, then you are the single Contributor and you can call your code closed (open) source. I think back to a time, where you said, that openSUSE Developers should fix their own found bugs and develop their own wished features. After following this thread, I can say, that you are in exactly this wished situation now. You have received a reputation and you are the Developer without sharing the required knowledge. Then you have to fix all for your own. Best regards, Sarah