On 12/04/2013 04:11 PM, Per Jessen wrote:
Susanne Oberhauser-Hirschoff wrote:
Per Jessen <per@computer.org> writes:
<snip>
Go ahead :)
This part more than anything is a community project of professionals around openSUSE. People like yourself.
Thanks, Susanne - if(!) it were up to me, I would propose we make decisions/changes such that we accomodate the following user-groups in order of priority:
1) "for a living"-users 2) admins of "for a living"-users 3) current users (developers, hobbyists, plain users. mediacenters ... 4) admins of the above. 5) new users.
I am myself in the top three/four groups, having grown from a 5 to a 3 to a 4 to a 1 to 2. (over twenty years).
I guess in one way or another this is were at least part of the rubber meets the road. Why would those that contribute, contribute primarily for a target audience that they are not part of? Yes, I am making the assumption that most of our contributors are not of the "for a living" kind or depend on openSUSE in their "for a living" time. If any particular group of contributors wants to chase the elusive group of "for a living" and believes there are contributors to be found there is nothing stopping this group from doing so. However having that as an overall direction for the majority of contributors appears out of place. In the open source world, and many articles and books have been written about this, contributors participate not with the goal to make someone else happy. Yes, having users for your stuff is great, but in the end most contributors are probably here to scratch their own itch. I will maintain my packages in the distribution if we have 1, 10, or 1,000,000 users. It's all the same to me. Further it is all the same to me if those users are of the "for a living" kind, or hobbyist, or school kids, poor or rich. I think I am not alone in this respect. If one wants people to care primarily about the needs of others than one has to pay them. That's what SUSE does with SLE. Slow down the pace of open source development enough to mostly meet the needs of even the most conservative business users. Currently this means one can get support for 10 years and if one's wallet is big enough one can probably squeeze out a few more years. 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