On 16/12/15 01:01, Richard Brown wrote:
On 15 December 2015 at 14:09, Basil Chupin <blchupin@iinet.net.au> wrote:
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quote
It goes against what I think is best for the Project
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And there's the rub.
You are not elected by the Community members to the Board.
You are an unelected appointee by SUSE to the OpenSUSE Community Board and as such represent in the first instance SUSE's interests. You are correct that I am appointed to my position as Chairman of the openSUSE Board by SUSE
But you seem to forget the fact that I was an elected member of the Board since 2013 - first stepping in after Pascal stepped down as the next highest candidate in the previous elections, then directly elected to the Board by the community at the end of 2013.
Thank you for this piece of information. Unfortunately I have never heard of you being an elected member of the Board until you just mentioned it. (Goes to show what an impact your presence caused in that period :-) .)
My 'interests' are, have been, and will continue to be, first and foremost openSUSEs.
My role as Chairman includes communicating those interests to SUSE, and communicating SUSE's interests to the community.
Beyond that, I'm still a contributor to this project with 10 years of experience with this project, and I think it's perfectly reasonable for me to contribute in all the ways available to me.
But of course.
There are other Board members who are elected, and have been elected, and yet you seem to have usurped the task of them speaking for themselves. Do you speak on all of their behalves? I (?we) do not know. If it is the case -- that you have been chosen to speak on all their behalves -- then it would be very nice to know that this is the case and you should have begun by stating -- or at this stage, which is not too late, to advise here -- that you speak on behalf of all the members of the Board. When I speak on behalf of the openSUSE Board, I make sure my signature says 'on behalf of the openSUSE Board'
When I speak 'as Chairman' (ie. when I am conveying SUSE's interests in my formal role as Chairman), I make sure my email says 'Chairman of the openSUSE Board'
So, as Chairman of the Board you convey SUSE's interests re openSUSE. Whether or not you have a signature at the end of your message is immaterial -- and besides, I at least, have never seen such a signature at the end of your posts. But, again, this is immaterial.
Otherwise, I'm Richard, the openSUSE contributor.
Right ... "... Richard, the openSUSE contributor".
However, if I recall correctly, you did mention in one of your posts that you were expressing your own opinion - and on matters which appear to be out of your main sphere of responsibility (apart that is from representing SUSE's interests): the latest wiki (https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Board) states that you are, ".... involved as a maintainer of GNOME and the openSUSE branding packages, and working on packaging Spacewalk for openSUSE. ".
While you are quite welcome to express your opinions as an ordinary user of openSUSE you nevertheless have referred to yourself as the chairman of the Board (see above) which throws a totally different perspective on what you express and therefore what people conclude from your utterings. If people are only allowed to talk about what is 'among their main sphere of responsibility'.. then I think there would be a dramatically reduced selection of topics which you would be entitled to talk about Basil..
I'm a contributor, I'm interested in the future of this Project and a great many aspects of it.. It's probably one reason why the community elected me to the Board and why SUSE appointed me as Chairman
Ah, the old "I'm a contributor but you are not" crap argument. I am a USER, repeat a USER, and therefore a contributor to the project. For whom are people spending their time programming openSUSE? Have a guess.... If you say, "For openSUSE users who then check it out to see if what it contains is good enough to be used in the commercial version called SLE" then you get a cigar; but if you don't then you back to the back of the dummies queue. As a USER I don't want to see my preferred operating system go down the proverbial gurgler just because some programmer(s) isn't able to separate the wheat from the chaff.
I work hard to coordinate and collaborate with those already working in those areas, learn from them, try to help them out (like I did in this thread conveying Wolfgangs intention to give up Ownership of Evergreen in November). I'd like to see more community members take a similar approach, rather than the somewhat limiting mindset of 'oh, someone else is already taking care of/will take care of that'
I will repeat what I stated earlier: this doesn't appear to have been a problem in the past when everyone worked harmoniously with everyone else.
Now, I do not have an intimate -- or otherwise -- knowledge of the workings of openSUSE or its relationship with SUSE and how the distro is "put together" and to date I, or anyone else I suspect, have not had to ask about this relationship because the progress of openSUSE has been harmonious until now, but to me it seems that your job description with SUSE, that of being employed as SUSE's "QA Engineer", confines you to worrying about quality assurance -- the pre-activity to quality control -- but not to how, say, repositories are managed and whether openSUSE 13.2 should be followed by openSUSE 13.3 or whether fonts used in openSUSE should be XXXX or YYYY. My job as QA Engineer at SUSE has little to do with my contributions to openSUSE - besides that my experience in openSUSE has helped me push for adoption of openQA inside SUSE for testing of SLE, which is now leading to an increase in contributions from SUSE to openQA, which is also benefiting openSUSE
Since joining SUSE 2 years ago, as a QA Engineer, I have had the pleasure of learning a LOT about how a distribution is put together. I don't consider myself an 'expert' on the topic, but I do consider myself knowledgeable, and I don't see any reason why I should keep that knowledge to myself just because I learnt it working for SUSE.
Besides that, my work on filing bugs, dealing with the branding package, helping the GNOME team, attempting (and failing) to package Spacewalk were all started long before I joined SUSE 2 years ago.
And I intend to continue contributing in as many different means as I can..just last week for example me and a few others were building JeOS images for Leap..
I suggest that you make a copy of this to be included in your CV to be used at some later date -- "By Christ that sounds impressive!" as a friend of mine (an estate agent) would say when reading the description of a property which was advertised for sale :-) .
To me the wherefore of, say, how repositories should be managed is the responsibility of Stephan Kulow and Stephan alone. Stephan Kulow is the Release Manager of openSUSE. He has broad responsibilities, but I do not think they extend to the Build Targets of Repositories managed by other Teams.
Ahem... You "... do not think ..." that Stephan's responsibilities extend to Build Targets of Repositories?! Don't you think that it is about time that you found out what his responsibilities are? Afterall, you have been with SUSE for some 2 years now, as you state above -- not to mention that you are also the *Chairman* of the Board? (Sheesh! SUSE owners appointed you as Chairman and you don't even know what Stephan's responsibilities are?! Sorry, but I sometimes fear for the future of openSUSE :'( .) I am sorry for pointing this out but, just as you just stated what you did, others are quite in their rights to come to the conclusion that YOU don't have a bloody clue what YOUR job is all about. See my point or not?
This kind of thing can, and will always be, down to the individual choices of the maintainers in question - but as a Project we can talk about such things here, because it's a good place to debate, get a feel for the Projects opinion, consider a broader perspective..and maybe even form consensuses out of it
Debating and exchanging ideas is always most helpful. Doing so results in being educated.
What fonts should be used in openSUSE is a matter for the Community to decide and not for SUSE's appointee to the Board to waste time on as the "QA engineer". It's a good thing I didn't work on the Fonts topic during my work hours then, isn't it?
A silly question, wot? How would I, or anyone, know whether you did or did not work on them when you were at work? But I -- and I suspect others -- was confronted -- when I have never had heard of you -- by your "arguments" for your selection of fonts for Leap of Faith. Who had given a tinker's cuss about the fonts until your posts at that time? Looking up the Wikipedia about fonts produced results which showed that fonts were split -- for want of a better description -- into 2 groups: those which worked fine in newspaper/printed hardcopy and those which were to be reproduced on a computer screen. But then suddenly along came Richard with his "selection"....... But anyway.....
What about all the other people (who happen to work for SUSE or not) who actually finished the Font revamp after I started the discussion?
OK, I'll bite. What about them?
The community did decide, and I'm part of that community; Or is your intention to suggest I should contribute to the openSUSE Project less now that I happen to work for SUSE than I have for the past 10 years?
The immediate quote which comes to mind here is, "You might think that, I couldn't possibly comment.", Francis Urquhart, _House of Cards_, but no, stating this quote out loud would be ingenuous of me. I am a member of the BROADER Community and not one of the members of the pseudo "community" 'club' artificially created for the purposes of simply having its members being allowed to vote for Board members and, therefore, have no influence over what the latter's preferences are. But as for me, personally, I would prefer you to stay as you seem to have taken onboard a few comments expressed in this thread -- not to mention that life may prove dull without you :-) .
The above, of course, is based on my own experience gained some years ago when working with computer programmers and computer programs designed to achieve an effective and gainful result but things may have changed in most recent years and so I can only state that what I just expressed is my opinion and is not meant to be offensive, discourteous, impertinent, rude or offending. And of course, you're entitled to your opinion, and perhaps with this additional information you realise that much of what you say seems to be based on incorrect information or assumptions.
Every day of my life is a new learning experience and which I always looks forward to when I wake in the morning. To this point I have learnt a few things and considering that enough time has passed (4 days) since my response for people to comment on what has been written in this thread I find that the only succinct statement was made 4 days ago by Michal Kubecek: quote As long as I'm concerned about _how_ you are doing your job, I'm going to criticize it. And given the way you are communicating recently, I'm concerned a lot. So I'm going to criticize you, learn to live with it. Or, better, try to learn from the feedback you get. unquote Interesting that none of your Board member colleagues have bothered to comment -- but then it is an election period afterall. I have also been asked in private messages why am I wasting my time commenting on what you write. An excellent question to which my answer would have to be: there are some matters which just have to be commented on :-) . But having considered those privately expressed comments I find that there is little or no profit in continuing with commenting. BC -- Using openSUSE 13.2, KDE 4.14.9 & kernel 4.3.3-2 on a system with- AMD FX 8-core 3.6/4.2GHz processor 16GB PC14900/1866MHz Quad Channel RAM Gigabyte AMD3+ m/board; Gigabyte nVidia GTX660 GPU -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org