On 03/07/18 15:04, hellcp@opensuse.org wrote:
So because you asked about this I can say that the board has been discussed the idea of having a separate bank account / foundation since the last face to face (Note this is very different from financial independence for reasons I will outline below)
The reasoning for this is completely different and stems from well before any of us knew about SUSE's change of ownership (we all found that out yesterday as well). Last year we had an issue where Google was unable to sponsor openSUSE to send some of its people to a google summer of code event, this was because SUSE's budget was frozen so they could not accept the money then spend it. We also have similar issues at times accepting monetary sponsorship for conferences etc. So yes it makes sense for openSUSE to have its own bank account and openSUSE already has the power to do this without needing to ask SUSE.
Whether we create a separate foundation or join with a larger project like Software In the Public Interest as Arch and Debian currently do is still something we are discussing. But at this stage the board is just considering being able to have some financial independence via a non SUSE bank account rather then wanting to move all our trademarks / Intellectual Property away from SUSE, currently they are doing a good job looking after that.
This wont change our relationship with SUSE, they will likely continue to contribute to openSUSE in the ways they always have as there budget is set up that way, we haven't even really spoken to them about it recently it will just mean that others can sponsor openSUSE as well, although we might end up with an issue of if people giving us money then having to figure out what we should actually spend it on, generally if openSUSE needs something badly it will ask SUSE for it and SUSE will sort it out.
Appreciated, would be nice if this kind of news reached community even though it might not be that important to everybody :D
Yep it would have got there but we are still only in the very early stages of looking into the various options, we were planning to wait until we had a more concrete idea of what we might do but you asked the right question so you can have an answer.
Having said all that with out SUSE, openSUSE could not function in the way it does to day, it would be near impossible to find another sponsor to cover the cost of things like the build service and to cover paying for a release management team that can keep up with our pace of development without even thinking about all the contributions coming from SUSE employees.
At the same time if SUSE was to part with openSUSE it would still need to maintain the equivalent of tumbleweed for future SLE releases and the reality is maintaining this internally without the help of openSUSE would almost certainly cost SUSE more and would result in a lower quality end product, SUSE's management is well aware of this on multiple levels, they have talked about it many times so personally I really wouldn't be worried about openSUSE's future with SUSE.
Wouldn't be the first time SUSE was influenced by a bunch of ignorant staff, considering Novell's management. This is not what is now, but what might be in the future. Announcing independence in case of being bought out by external entity is not really a victory (and seems more like transition period instead). There can be a lot of promises of independence, what counts are actions which neither SUSE nor openSUSE experienced yet.
Well one of the advantages of being owned by a investment fund rather then another software company such as Novell is they aren't going to be squeezing / shaping SUSE into a box to fit a hole in there product lineup, rather there going to be leaving SUSE's management team to take the company forward in the best direction possible. -- Simon Lees (Simotek) http://simotek.net Emergency Update Team keybase.io/simotek SUSE Linux Adelaide Australia, UTC+10:30 GPG Fingerprint: 5B87 DB9D 88DC F606 E489 CEC5 0922 C246 02F0 014B