As in michl's post announced a the openSUSE Board and some other
community members met the past weekend in Nürnberg to have a
comprehensive 2.5 days face to face meeting . The meeting was attended
by Bryen Yunashko, Andreas Jaeger, Jan Weber, Pascal Bleser, Michael
Loeffler and Pavol Rusnak (Hendrik Vogelsang and Rupert Horsttkötter
were unfortunately unable to join) and lead and facilitated by Kurt
Garloff.We'd like to tell you what we've done, what the outcome is and
what the next steps should look alike. We had tons of very fruitful
discussions and are much clearer about the strengths of openSUSE and
how to create a strategy around those.
Beside of the usual meeting things (introduction, ground rules, goals
of the meeting) we wrapped up the stuff we did over the last months
during our weekly IRC meetings. So we concentrated on our users, the
strength and weakness openSUSE has, the competition we face and our
expectations for future changes in the way we use computers. When
building a strategy, you acknowledge that you can't be the best
everywhere, you can't be everything to everybody, if you want to be
successful, so you need to choose your focus - the already existing
strength might be a good start to focus on. Therefor we went through
the SWOT analysis and summarized the the strengths we do have:
* openSUSE distro works out of the box, comes with good hardware
support and is known for good quality (stable and usable but not
outdated)
* openSUSE distro has areas in which we stand out such as YaST,
zypper, tool chain etc.
* openSUSE offers an ecosystem of tools around the distro such as
openSUSE Build Service, openFATE, Bugzialla, Hermes etc.
* we have and attract a technical savvy audience
* high market share in Central Europe
* Stable funding by Novell
* Boosters team with their mantra: Grow community by enabling community
* We're the only distribution out there supporting multiple
desktops out of the box
* Linux is a growing market
To go down the path of a strategy we brain stormed competitive
advantages which are things you can do better then your competition or
things making you unique. After the brain storming we had around 40
single competitive advantages which we then grouped to clusters to
find a focus. We found 6 clusters and a number of competitive
advantages we couldn't put into one cluster or which had relations to
more then one cluster. We then tried to name them and create strategy
statement around them. A strategy is a sentence or two describing what
you want to achieve by excelling at what to serve whom. We can tell
you that's a tough task and we had a long discussion if such a
statement isn't too narrow for the openSUSE project. As the strategy
statement only highlights the competitive advantages (and some of the
most important activities directly connected to them), it is not a
good description of all the things we do in such a broad project and
with such a broad community. We thus decided not to use such narrow
statements as the primary description of our proposed future strategy,
but to come up with more descriptive and elaborate proposals.
Where did we end up? We ended up having 3 possible strategies which
should be worked out to our community in smaller groups during this
week and be published on June 8 for further discussion. The strategies
are currently in a very raw format but we'd like to share the
headlines already with you:
* openSUSE the home for developers (distro, tools, apps)
* openSUSE the base for derivatives of any kind (eg. openSUSE
Education, openSUSE XYZ)
* openSUSE for the mobile world (be the glue between mobile
services (clouds) and mobile consumers)
After we've published the proposals we'd like to have this discussion
open for 30 days, use the feedback to enhance or possibly change the
proposals s and then having a vote by openSUSE members which strategy
is the right one to go with. For that the openSUSE Board will define a
pass criteria so we have a clear winner.
That's it for today. We had an exhausting weekend but the outcome is
pretty good and more stuff, way more detail will be there soon to
define together the path openSUSE should take in the future.
Please stay tuned to June 8 when we will present our proposals to the
community and open up for 30 days of public discussion.
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