Hi Jos, On Thursday, April 28, 2011 16:09:26 Jos Poortvliet wrote:
Now about the questions on openSLX contributions to openSUSE: they do contribute but have a tendency to do it in a hidden fashion.
"hidden fashion"? Our contributions take place in community context (IRC, ML, sprints as main communication channels for development), we're improving existing packages and building new ones in the KDE:Active repository. If you would like to be kept on track about that work, follow planetsuse, planetkde, watch commits and progress in the plasma-mobile repository on Git or the changes made to the KDE:Active repository.
The reason for that is unclear to me. I do know it's how they've worked with Novell in the past so I have a strong suspicion it's not just their choice but was actually requested by Novell from them. Not sure why.
I'm not aware of any such thing, and I'd probably find it quite ridiculous. We actually have a policy of working upstream, and I'm doing exactly that: the work I contribute always goes to the "most upstream" project (that's usually either KDE's Git or the OBS).
Whatever the reasons for doing it quietly or methods of contribution, yes, they contribute. They contributed to our wiki, sponsored our conference and have people working on and within openSUSE (like Sebas, Rupert and others). Of course they don't contribute as much as Novell but they're a small company so it's not a fair comparison imho...
Compared to company size, our we probably contribute much more than Novell does. Our contributions and investment in openSUSE and other upstream projects is actually growing, something that I'm not sure can be said about Novell. I agree though, the comparison is not very useful. =) Lies, damn lies and statistics...
And JDD has a very good point:
If any company use openSUSE as base, his vey interest is to help openSUSE
Exactly, there's a lot of common ground and interest. There's also different focus, different interest, and I think that's OK as long as we clearly define those and establish ways of working together. In order to get the most out of these common interests, we should look at those common interests and align our work there. Plasma Active, as you note below is I think a fine example. For open-slx, the main interest is the user experience so that's where we're trying to improve things in openSUSE. Our involvement with the Plasma Active project is one part of that.
anyway we should more focus on making openSUSE better than looking at the other people's dishes
Agree. :) I think it would also be very beneficial to the openSUSE community to support companies that are getting involved with openSUSE commercially (not just open-slx, but it's exemplary), especially if they contribute back. Which is what we (open-slx) do. Growing the ecosystem beyond Novell and Attachmate is very much in the interest of the openSUSE community as it reduces the risk of being dependent on one company. This lies at the heart of openSUSE becoming more independent from Novell, and turning into a real community-driven and - controlled project.
This is exactly how I feel. If openSLX wants to do this - fine. It is a bit sad they decided to rename their openSUSE box to Balsam Professional but that's their choice too.
The trademark guidelines *mandate* renaming our product if you do *any* modifications (we have been shipping additional packages for a long term, think of codecs for example). Also, the dependency on Novell's legal department for the trademark is a problem for us. Even if we didn't change anything about the past versions of the openSUSE box, it would not work under the new trademark guidelines. I've actually pointed this out to you before, so I'm not quite getting why you find this sad. It's clearly formulated in the trademark guidelines, which I suppose you know well.
They still build on openSUSE technology and work within our community - so that's all we need to cooperate, a common interest. And honestly I think the Plasma Active and Tablet stuff is really cool and I wish we would get over this and all work on that so we can talk about it as an openSUSE project...
Let's skip the politics and get back to work please!
Write a political email, then tell people to skip reacting to that, getting back to work. Lead by example, please. =) All the best, -- sebas Sebastian Kügler :: Open-SLX -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org