Post-12.2 Market Research / Planning (was Re: [opensuse-factory] Calling for a new openSUSE development model)
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
Hey, On 17.06.2012 22:02, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
Briefly, you want to invest in *growing* markets and capture market share of *paying customers*, not *users*.
How do you pay for openSUSE? :) Henne -- Henne Vogelsang http://www.opensuse.org Everybody has a plan, until they get hit. - Mike Tyson -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-factory+owner@opensuse.org
On Mon, Jun 18, 2012 at 1:47 AM, Henne Vogelsang <hvogel@opensuse.org> wrote:
Hey,
On 17.06.2012 22:02, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
Briefly, you want to invest in *growing* markets and capture market share of *paying customers*, not *users*.
How do you pay for openSUSE? :)
Henne
I'm guessing ultimately the paychecks for non-volunteers come from the corporate side. And if openSUSE makes a major advance in a growing market and achieves wider use, ultimately that advance will make it into SUSE Linux Enterprise. 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. -- 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
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
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.
Dude, come back to the real world... if SUSE officially removes support from openSUSE, it's dead stick... How many packages do you maintain? It's all about maintaining packages... You do see a lot of Arch Linux publicity, Sabayon and friends... and you are being eaten alive by them... We don't have capable skills to keep our users loyal to openSUSE, unless they are long time users or SuSE Linux legacy users... We have no arguments to attract new users because we're just like Fedora and other 'pure upstream' distros... You are blind if you haven't seen it, specially as former Marketing Team Leader...
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 quite a nice eufemism :)
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.
Like I said before... If you remove the SUSE personal from the project, you don't have a community... :)
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.
Speaking for myself, it's all a matter of know-how and experience in areas in which are not the areas of our expertise (being mine Marketing Management). Screw the community, screw the users, screw everyone... Real nice things come out of pure selfish actions... Doing stuff for the others doesn't really lead you to nice results, unless you are talking about the kind of bonds that are only built in combat between blood brothers. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-factory+owner@opensuse.org
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. ;-)
I would dare to say that my employer alone (the Group) has more RHEL machines than there are CentOS and Ubuntu's together on the country! None of our machines are visible on the internet, none of them are accounted for.
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.
Why are they irrelevant? Using national numbers, Linux Desktop usage is around 1.13%; now in my country thats like 113.000 ? (if my math is good); Numbers from a conference last year sponsored by Novell and Microsoft ;)
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.
Before someone decides about strategies (we all remember the last fiasco), how about available CAPEX? Before CAPEX numbers are known, there's no strategy, just FUD. I don't believe the community has public number on available funds or even how they are used... ;) And we will never will... most likely... I'll leave my original questions that I left in OSC2010: * Where are we ? * Where do we want to go? * How do we get there? * How do we ensure a good 'arrival'? * How do we measure stuff up ? There's no strategy before you have a clear answer to those questions... and that's where it all begins... Good luck handling the trolls and marketing wannabes (there a lot of them around)
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.
A pair of extra monkeys under Coolo's charge would probably help more... It's clear to us that Coolo's days have now 36 hours... The guy is gonna burn out if no one helps him out...
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.
We need manpower...
3. Ubuntu is absolutely crushing the rest of the distros in social / local / mobile. They've got docking with Androids, an app store, music
No you are wrong... Android is crushing everyone... +900.000 activations per day... Ubuntu is far from that... When Ubuntu entered the war, it was won already a long time by Google... Wait 5 years and then let me know ;)
services, ... Fedora doesn't seem to care about this at all, and perhaps Red Hat made a conscious business decision based on hard data.
Red Hat has a far different model from openSUSE; The only thing Red Hat and SUSE share is that they both have people who can code and fix things if needed (unlike Canonical). We can't compare openSUSE with Fedora... We maintain packages and very few code... Fedora mantains real code. Though we publish faster ;) We are good at distribution of software... but the real problem is that our user base is shy... This doesn't change without a full bald approach and a real 'crush the enemy' strategy... People don't want to wage war... no pain... no gain... quite simple.
We need to get some hard data and make the conscious business decisions - can SUSE/openSUSE *win business* in social / local /
Wrong... what openSUSE needs is a direct investment on a niche and specilization on that niche (may it be Desktop ? ;) ). We can be everywhere, we have no manpower... and by being everywhere without manpower to cover it, we are loosing credibility... Forget mobile, that's iOS and Android... Even Nokia got bulldozed there... ;) What do you think can do? (Even if openSUSE or SUSE isn't run by an idiot with allegiance to Microsoft)
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.
For partnerships you need something to offer... what can you offer to Samsung? :) Honestly, openSUSE isn't going to change in the future, unless you get a real psycho in charge who is crazy enough to change radically it's direction and moves openSUSE into a specialized area... be it Desktop, software distribution, Server, etc... openSUSE suffers from an identity crisis... :) -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-factory+owner@opensuse.org
Nelson Marques <nmo.marques@gmail.com> writes:
I'll leave my original questions that I left in OSC2010:
* Where are we ? * Where do we want to go? * How do we get there? * How do we ensure a good 'arrival'? * How do we measure stuff up ?
Wrong ML. -- Karl Eichwalder -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-factory+owner@opensuse.org
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
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.
For what? -- Ed, is that your line of work, and do you think it's important because you know it? -- How large do you think the "market" is for that kind of distribution? -- You recognize that openSUSE is not a distribution that caters for that market now, do you? So you argue for a change of audience? Do you want to see your wishes fulfilled, for a "perfect" openSUSE distro for you -- or do you really argue for change that will be good for the rest of the user community, too? It's my line of work, FTR. None of my customers, which happen to be big German banks and Telcos, would ever dream to run this on openSUSE, hell would freeze over before that happens. (And all of "big data" infrastructure is enterprise systems, I hope we agree to that.) And -- all those Apache stuff is not well packagable anyhow, since data center environments have so many different demands that openSUSE won't fulfill them properly (audit-related) anyhow. Maven 3 goes to a model where every dependency is explicitly versioned for a reason, not for joke. Joachim -- =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Joachim Schrod, Roedermark, Germany Email: jschrod@acm.org -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-factory+owner@opensuse.org
On Sunday 17 June 2012 13:02:26 M. Edward Borasky wrote:
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.
As Karl said - this really is the wrong list for this. If you want to discuss strategy, come to a meeting (oSC or Summit, I'd say). This is hard to do over the web. And not something for a development list at all.
participants (7)
-
Bryen M Yunashko -
Henne Vogelsang -
Joachim Schrod -
Jos Poortvliet -
Karl Eichwalder -
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky -
Nelson Marques