On Tue, 2010-06-08 at 13:20 +0000, Trifle Menot wrote:
On Tue, 8 Jun 2010 14:32:32 +0200, Andreas Jaeger <aj@novell.com> wrote:
Novell is a public traded company and it received an unfriendly offer for buy- out that was rejected. Let's not speculate what will or could happen but instead look where we want openSUSE to go.
* Own bugzilla: Does it make sense to have a separate bugzilla that we need to administrate as part of the project? For me right now the benefits of using the Novell bugzilla outweight the limitations we have. My main concerns with moving bugzillas are: - engineers will hate to have to look into another bugzilla. So, Novell engineers will look first for enterprise bugs into the Novell ones and then later into the openSUSE one.
Yes that's a downside. But having opensuse bugzilla relying on Novell's login infrastructure is an impediment to independence. When Novell "goes away" you have a new problem to cope with. I think that's only a matter of time.
You're assuming that when Novell gets bought, its present state will go away. We have no idea of this as we don't even know who will buy Novell. This is just pure wild speculation and the last thing we need right now.
What do you understand with full independence?
Like debian. They rely on corporate donations to provide their mirror and download infrastructure.
IMO "independend from Novell" is the wrong question. I'd like to see Novell as main sponsor (it hosts lots more than bugzilla in our datacenter, nearly the whole opensuse.org infrastructure) and treated as such - but not as dictator that everybody bows in front of and gets scared by it.
It does not worry me that corporate might act like a dictator. But I believe it's only a matter of time before Novell "goes away" and morphs into something else. Best to plan for that now and anticipate how to keep opensuse alive.
I've heard the "goes away" line so many times in the last 10 years that I've learned to just phase it out of my mind.
Under the present arrangement, opensuse is like a fetus. If the mother dies, the baby dies with it. opensuse needs to be born and get its own life.
Where have you been lately? The Community already has significant influence on the Project as it stands. It was the community that requested an extension of KDE 3.5 and got it. It was the community that took over the leads on various projects within the openSUSE Community. Novell has invested heavily in building community independence with its Booster team. KDE and GNOME are now largely packaged by community members. The openSUSE Board is an elected body of the Community, and has added an additional seat to reduce Novell's power on the board. Teams are being led by openSUSE community members. When I work, I often remind myself of what fellow board member Henne Vogelsang mentioned at last year's openSUSE Conference. "Novell wants the community to claim openSUSE." And Henne constantly reminds the community that if you want something done, JUST DO IT! We can go on and on and on about independence and Novell's powerful hold (which I don't believe is true), but the most important question remains: If Novell and openSUSE broke off ties today, what would we do? Have we done enough to step up as a Community to manage and influence openSUSE? Are we prepared for the kind of independence you're advocating? You say its time for openSUSE to not be a fetus and be born. I say its time for us to move into adolescence. We were already born a few years ago. Bryen M Yunashko openSUSE Board Member
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