On 11/28/2013 05:58 AM, agustin benito bethencourt wrote:
Hi Richard,
it is a pleasure to face these discussions when the tone is like yours. Thank you. Please read below.
On Wednesday 27 November 2013 18:47:11 Richard Brown wrote:
Thanks for your email Agustin, below are my thoughts, responses, and further questions:
On Wed, 2013-11-27 at 17:40 +0100, agustin benito bethencourt wrote:
What do we want to achieve? Goals =================================
1) Add focus to increase alignment among contributors.
Why? for what purpose and to what end? Does that alignment include finding ways to make openSUSE and SLE more aligned such as introduced by Ralf Flaxa at oSC 14?
How do we address the obvious concern that adding 'focus' might disenfranchise contributors who do not agree with the chosen direction for that focus?
There are many examples that reflects what I refer to when talking about alignment. One could be the oSC'13. The other one the relation between KDE and GNOME within factory.
Alignment can mean many things. The GNOME team is aligned to work on GNOME packages, the KDE team is aligned to work on KDE, and the list goes on. For oSC13 we had a temporary team aligned to pull the event together with a few very dedicated people that put their heart and soul into the event to pull everything together. The way you are speaking of alignment implies a greater scope, potentially project wide, and thus people are weary. As Kostas pointed out in the other thread, people volunteer their time. This implies that they get to decide how to spend their time and how to contribute. This makes an overall alignment unlikely. The continued harping on focus is a bit of a nuisance. Maybe the absence of an overall grand plan causes us to try to be too many things to all people and be not "focused" on any given group. However, it has also served us well. We have lots of choices, Tumbleweed, Evergreen, 5 DEs, mysql, mariadb,..... and that also makes it fun to participate and contribute to openSUSE. And I am certain this flexibility has helped us gaining new contributors and users. No I have no statistics to bakc that up ;) . I am with Richard, pointing out a specific target area and tailoring the distribution after that has the potential to disenfranchise those that may not want to focus in that area and I see no reason why we would want to kick those contributors to the curb. If we end up with a grand plan and a "focus" area we have even less to differentiate ourselves from Ubuntu or Fedora, where in one case you have a dictatorship by Mark and in another you have to appease a committee. I believe that our model very closely resembles the spirit of the open source community, come contribute scratch your own itch and be recognized for it.
Yes, as Ralf, pointed in the keynote, we are also looking for ways to contribute more in the project and, at the same time, make that contribution valuable for us. SUSE is not a big corporate, but a healthy medium size company.
But focus also refers to our target.
Many of us contribute for ourselves and for someone else (use cases said Wolfgang ). We would like to work on getting a common picture, if possible, of who are those "someone else". Any step in that direction would help the project in my opinion.
Developing that picture is a completely separate undertaking than making proposals about structures, process, procedures, changing the development model etc. Intermingling these just causes confusion and discussions with lack of clarity.
<snip>
* Clarify roles and responsibilities. Redesign processes so we increase the
community participation in key areas. Teams instead of champions.
Sounds good, but how about we aim for increasing community participation in *all* areas?
I think we need focus to become more successful. Pick up a few, put energy on them, be successful and then go for other ones.
"More successful", what does this mean? Do we have shareholders/stakeholders to report to on how we become more successful? What is the motivation here? Who in the community is complaining that we are not successful enough and we need to be more successful? Are our users complaining that we are not successful enough? Who is driving the "we need to be more successful" train?
* More stability and QA. Testing before submitting. Factory should be usable.
* Rolling distribution based on release early/release often principle.
This proposal will be more in depth described tomorrow on Factory mailing list where we will expand the bullet points mentioned here.
Sounds good, I'm looking forward to it
Overhauled openSUSE Release ===========================
All sounds very ambitious. I'm interested in hearing more
Open Governance Model =====================
While I think I get where you're coming from and don't disagree with some of the specifics you're proposing (The evolution of SUSE from Owner to eventual Patron), I strongly believe that the Governance of the openSUSE Project is an issue for the openSUSE Board and our openSUSE Membership.
Nobody has questioned that. We are good citizens. And if there are areas in which we can improve, please point them. We will analyze what happen.
I don't want the changes you've proposed to be seen as SUSE imposing its will on the Project.
I hope your proposals will be seen by our members as food for thought, a starting point for discussion, which might possibly lead to changes down the road from here.
I want to stop a little in this point because I have also read a couple other comments pointing some fears about SUSE not acting like a good citizen in openSUSE in the future.
Neils Brauckman, President and General Manager at SUSE[1], in his opening keynote at SUSECon'13[2], Ralf Flaxa, VicePresident of Engineering at SUSE[1], in his keynote at oSC'13[3] or Michael Miller, Vice President of Global Alliances & Marketing[1], in previous events, has provided their view about openSUSE from SUSE perspective. From their words, there are no reasons to fear anything. I thnk it is exactly the other way around.
Since we are an independent business unit from the Attachment Group, can you point at any relevant action that might justify those fears?
Well this list is long and I'd rather not get into the specifics as this will probably turn ugly, which I will try to avoid. What I am going to point out is that based on the approaches taken over the past year or so the perception of an ever growing "us and them" rift has developed in the community. This is evidenced by responses from Kostas in the "statistics thread", responses from Dominique and others in the discussion we had about the development process a while back and if we dig through the mailing list many more examples can probably be found. The fears originate with the observed behavior patterns of what is perceived to be separating groups of people as being "different or special". Those seeds have been sown and it will take more than announcements by SUSE leadership to alleviate the concerns that have been stirred by the observed behavior. Change has to occur where the rubber meets the road, not by proclamation of commitment. Later, Robert -- Robert Schweikert MAY THE SOURCE BE WITH YOU SUSE-IBM Software Integration Center LINUX Tech Lead Public Cloud Architect rjschwei@suse.com rschweik@ca.ibm.com 781-464-8147 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org