On 03/07/18 01:02, hellcp@opensuse.org wrote:
Hi,
Wouldn't it be wise to consider both the best and the worst scenario that might come out of this aquisition?
Best case scenario, nothing changes.
Worst case scenario, SUSE turns back on openSUSE financially and in terms of contributions, because *financial incentive of some sort*
This morning we all learned the news that the openSUSE projects main sponsor, SUSE, currently owned by MicroFocus, intends to be acquired by EQT Partners in Sweden.
Currently you Richard are speaking of openSUSE as legaly and financially independent entity, which it isn't. We wouldn't need this reassurance if this was the case.
This will be the third acquisition of SUSE since the creation of openSUSE, the second under the leadership of Nils and his team. Just as happened in that case, SUSE will be making no changes in its relationship between the company and the openSUSE Project.
Considering how dependent openSUSE is on SUSE, every single changing hands will worry both users and developers. That happened with every single aquisition before. Maybe by this point people start to care less about the whole thing, but here I am worried.
SUSE remains committed to supporting the openSUSE community, who play a key role in helping SUSEs success, which is expected to continue under their new partnership with EQT.
So what are the options to ensure stable development if SUSE turns its back to us?
Well, idea in 2010/2011 was to create openSUSE Foundation (which at that point was seemingly just a move to calm down people that wanted to fork openSUSE away from Novell's openSUSE).
https://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Foundation
I doubt currently SUSE would oppose such a move, considering good relations, but it's always good to have ensurance in case something doesn't go right in the future.
If anyone has any questions, concerns, or feedback, please feel free to discuss them on this list or email me directly.
So maybe it's time again to open up discussion about Foundation, but this time have it result in something more substancial than before.
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. 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. Cheers -- 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