On 11/30/2013 05:46 PM, Wolfgang Rosenauer wrote:
Am 30.11.2013 22:22, schrieb Robert Schweikert:
I would like openSUSE to stay relevant. For example relevant to stay (or get) supported from third party (yes, even closed source) software vendors.
This is extremely difficult.SUSE has a whole team dedicated to get support for SLES from ISVs. Every time an ISVs states supprt for a distribution it costs the ISV a large chunk of money. I am not certain that we can pedal fast and hard enough to make it worth the while of an ISV to state support for openSUSE. There is not necessarily a direct correlation to relevance.
hmm, some examples I have in mind: SpiderOak Spotify Crossover Office
That's not the sort of ISV you are used to probably but none of them has packages for openSUSE but they have for Fedora and Ubuntu at least. And there are probably many more similar to those. And yes I'm pretty sure that the size of the user base is relevant to get their attention.
Hmmm, possibly the user base is important to get their attention. I should say the perception of the size of the user base may be important. According to the stats we have a larger user base than Fedora. Thus I think it is probably more of a mindshare thing and that's where your expressed desire of "remaining. being more relevant as a distribution" comes in. Many people I have worked with in the ISV world pick Fedora, CentOS, or Ubuntu as the starting point for new projects because they are the "defaults", there's no research into user base or "market share". Those distros are "defaults" because of mindshare. The second thing I have seen and that may actually be the dominant case is that the supported distro is picked because there is one enthusiast for a particular distribution working at the company. Thus I think the question goes back to: - How do we create more openSUSE enthusiasts? (this is equivalent to increasing the user base, but we know this is not sufficient onto its own.) - How do we increase the openSUSE mindshare?
I would really prefer someone to be able to make technical decisions if needed. The status quo seems to be that coolo is the one because someone needs to keep Factory working. So we will always need someone to decide and even when I basically trust coolo I think this is not the right approach.
Well, coolo is not the only one making the decisions. We do have a process of getting stuff into factory. This is mostly being followed I think. The process includes publicly proclaiming the intentions of getting a package into factory. When this happens everyone has the opportunity to pipe up and state their case why a given package should or should not be in factory. Not responding as is the case in most cases is also a decision and indicates that people are OK with the submission.
The process is only for new additions to Factory. I'm thinking more about changes done to components already in openSUSE. I'm not aware there is a process (and I couldn't imagine a process for it anyway).
I understand the philosophy for Technical Governance to date has largely been 'those who do, decide'. If changes are made in this area, I'd like to think they can keep that spirit, the idea anyone can get involved and that changes are made on their technical merits, not political ones (eg. does the submitter sit on the right steering group? who is their employer?)
Yes, no politics please. Just technical decisions to the best of the project.
Is this a vote/argument for a technical steering committee?
Yes. In some situations in the past I would have liked a group of persons to take technical decisions (based on different input) if there are conflicts in the community about certain things.
This I can follow, a team, that advertizes and makes ultimate decisions about things like the systemd transition. I guess Wayland will be the next decision like that. As such this team is not a "steering committee" committee per se, we'd have to come up with some different name. I do see the usefulness having heard many times over that the systemd transition was "properly advertized". I think this is worth a separate discussion at some other time as we have big fish to fry right now and should possibly not explore all avenues that get opened up by the bigger discussion. 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