On 2011-12-04 13:30:16 (+0100), Bruno Friedmann
On 12/04/2011 12:20 PM, Martin Schlander wrote: [...]
For me the main attraction of the foundation is that it could ideally provide some assurance to contributors that the openSUSE project wouldn't just wither and die, if (god forbid) something nasty (hostile acquisition, bankruptcy, insane management etc.) should happen to SUSE.
I think those types of concerns are holding quite some people back from using and contributing to openSUSE.
Sorry, forgot to reply on that point: yes, sure, I think we're all aware that in terms of image, having a non-for-profit foundation makes the project appear a lot more independent. But as I explained in my previous reply to your mail, that independence is relative. What we would need is a foundation which is kind of like the GNOME foundation, with many sponsors providing a lot of funding. But that does not protect the foundation board and, to some extent, the project from being taken over or influenced heavily by specific companies. How much influence the board can take on the project depends on what the board is allowed to do, and that's a very difficult balance to strike in the legal definition of the foundation: you want to avoid a hostile takeover (e.g. a single company dictating what can be done with the funds or not, which is a pretty good way to derail a project), but you also want to enable the foundation to actually do things. That's extremely difficult to define, and needs a lot of expertise from lawyers and experience from other projects that already went down that route. Note that the first thing you get to hear when you ask for advice on creating a foundation for an open source project like ours on the foundations list at freedesktop.org (which is a hub for many people/projects that are in that situation) is: "don't do it". It's really a lot more complicated that just "oh let's do a foundation", which is one of the reasons it's taking so much time :\
That's sound reasonable. But and there's a big one! Did that foundation able to enforce all the rights it will have to defend? Past as proved that Novell's Layers staff has done a good work on it (remember the SCO case)
Exactly.
Actually, now the deal is done with Attachmate, and the excellent relationship we (community) have with SuSE (business unit) and Attachmate (SuSE owner) calm down the need to be "independent".
The atmosphere is certainly a lot better for several reasons. The main point is that SUSE is a proper business unit of its own now, which it wasn't as part of Novell. That means that SUSE has more control over its own fate, funds, actions. And that means we can communicate more with people from SUSE for taking decisions and doing stuff, rather than with execs from Novell who, frankly have always been a bit disconnected from SUSE, which made that kind of dialogue a lot more difficult. I don't want to downright spit into the Novell soup either though, they did enable us to do a lot of great things as well, including openSUSE in the first place -- things are just never all black or all white :) cheers -- -o) Pascal Bleser /\\ http://opensuse.org -- we haz green _\_v http://fosdem.org -- we haz conf