Joerg Stephan wrote:
Hi folks,
Agreed. But there is a big and growing gap of missed opportunity between what openSUSE does and the way SLES is positioned and is used. Things that would make openSUSE more relevant to users and a more attractive investment target for SUSE.
I agree here with almost all your suggestions, with one caveat. Do not try and position openSUSE as a demo platform for ISVs. Don't get me wrong, I strongly believe we need to get more of the open source based ISVs to support openSUSE, but we should not switch the focus of the distro to support that goal. Having openSUSE as the premier platform for software development should be the goal.
To reach the goal to be a platform for something we really need to discuss the lifecycle of our distribution. When i talk to developers, they dont want to switch to newer upstream versions every 18 months. No application lifecycle can handle this.
Jane Bloggs doing back-office functions doesn't want to change either. Nor do server-admins want to upgrade their servers that frequently.
We should not forget the tools we already have. We have WebYaST and AutoYaST. we just need to combine the features and share them via an central webinterface. Such a solution is only attractive for companys. No homer user would use a toll like this, but openSUSE is far away from being a solution for any company (lifecycle, server version, etc)
Life-cycle is an issue, and openSUSE has been moving too fast. openSUSE is not too bad at the moment (as long as you don't mind being backlevel for a while).
I really like this upcomming discussion. Only sad point is that it always comes up on board election and steps back after that. We should never forget that we have a great distribution and we should learn how we can focus on our main goals. Maybe the biggest point is to identify these main goals.
A key part of this discussion is exactly what our main goals are. I'm not sure what goals, major or minor, we have today.
So somebody should make a list with main goals and maybe the community should vote on this.
How about what Agustin started out with -
* A desktop and a server oriented release that target end users that work everyday with their computers.
The Linux you work with, for a living.
This discussion goes between 10 people (maximum) on the project list, maybe we should aks our users what they want to see. Maybe we are totaly wrong, and we really miss the targets of our users.
It works the other way around. We make up our minds about which users we want, then we focus on creating a distro that attract those users.
We should support office and servers. This should be the rock solid base for anything else, like repos for gamers, designers and what so ever.
Big +1. -- Per Jessen, Zürich (0.2°C) http://www.hostsuisse.com/ - dedicated server rental in Switzerland. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org