On 11/28/2013 03:15 AM, Wolfgang Rosenauer wrote:
Hi,
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- The openSUSE user base needs to grow. We propose to be even more open to new niches.
Why? More users is never a bad thing, but why do we *need* to grow the users? We could be a distribution by our contributors, for our contributors. What's the case that makes it clear we *need* to grow the number of users?
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.
Relevant enough so people outside of the openSUSE community are seeing openSUSE as a relevant target to "integrate" with. If we just want to be "a distribution by our contributors, for our contributors" how many users will we have in a few years? More users will also increase the number of contributors.
I also believe that there is a correlation between users and contributors, thus I believe that growing the user base willhelp us grow the contributor base. However, I am not certain we need to make large directional shifts in order to grow our user base. Our contributor base has been growing on a reasonably steady pace, as indicated in the "statistics thread". Thus we appear to be doing something right. I'd rather grow slow and steady than chase the latest fads just to get a boost or jump in contributors in the short term but that will ultimately leave when the next fad comes around.
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* Technical governance model adapted to our new development processes: very few but clearer rules. Mentoring ecosystem.
This is certainly an area I'm interested in seeing what the rest of our community feels. Our current Governance body (The Board) is strictly forbidden from making Technical decisions.
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. For the most part I think we've had very little controversy in this area, which is great and thus things get more or less rubber stamped. There is also an escalation process that eventually leads to the board if there is strong controversy over a given submission to factory. But as I said, as far as I can remember we have not needed to go that route and I personally am very happy about that.
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? As mentioned above, I think the way things work right now we make technical decisions, maybe they are not explicit, but they do get made. With a technical steering committee the chances of politics entering the mechanism are higher, I think.
I also don't think that this task should be done by the board but by a different group of people. The 'those who do, decide' is basically something I support to an extend. But we had examples in the past that people who decided only "did it" halfway and put the burden onto the rest of of the community to fix their mess
Yes, that has happened and is definitely not nice behavior to the rest of the community. However I am not certain that a different decision making process would help here, it maybe that a few tweaks to the development model maybe better suited to address these cases. 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