On 2012-12-07 11:24:18 (-0500), Robert Schweikert <rjschwei@suse.com> wrote:
On 12/07/2012 04:01 AM, Agustin Benito Bethencourt wrote:
Hi,
these statements reflect issues that I would like to work on:
1.- 15:50:13 <lupinstein> without it, the money would go to SUSE like the money from Google Summer of Code, but I could be wrong.
2.- 15:50:58 <manugupt1> lupinstein: Last time heard, Jos telling in a mailing list that we do get money.. so thats great.. :) but we need some transparency there.. I believe.. which should be a role for the next board
3.- 15:52:37 <lupinstein> it would be hard for me to give to SUSE, because I am not sure if it would all go to openSUSE.
4.- 15:53:22 <lupinstein> anyway foundation would be a plus for transparency in my opinion.
It seems that two topics, transparency and increasing income are linked to the creation of the Foundation. This is a wrong approach to me. They are separate and not neccesarily linked topics.
I agree that following the path to a Foundation to force greater transparency w.r.t. finances is not necessarily the most direct approach. I believe, that it is perfectly reasonable for the members of the openSUSE project to have insight into the financial status of the project. I also believe that the sought after transparency is possible without having a Foundation. The topic of financial transparency has been raised in the past outside of the context of an election and thus is obviously important to openSUSE members. Therefore, this should be an action item for the board.
Well, rather an action item for SUSE, as SUSE currently has the monies for openSUSE (including GSoC and oSC). Sure, it can be tracked as an action item for the board, where board members would be in charge of asking the same questions over and over again to the same people at SUSE, getting an answer or not. Actually, the right person to ask should be Jos, from my understanding.
The Foundation is, in any case, the consequence of a wider and more complex process.
As I mentioned during the debate, the idea of the Foundation was born at a time where there was serious friction between the steward of the project (Novell at the time) and the openSUSE community. The same mismanagement that gave rise to these tensions ultimately led to the sale of Novell. Since SUSE has been established as an independent business unit the stewardship of the project has improved significantly, IMHO. Therefore, it would be warranted to take stock in the current situation and evaluate the many aspects that flow into this topic. The board should take this as an action item, prepare a report that contains pros and cons, addresses issues such as trademarks, infrastructure and other areas people may not necessarily think about when speaking about a Foundation. The report should be presented to the community for discussion. I can very well imagine that at the end of a given discussion period the members of the project would vote on the topic. From there the board then has a mandate to either move forward with the pursuit of a Foundation or not.
Note that that has been done already. It was under the Novell regime, but the difficulties of setting up a foundation are still the same. It's just even less compelling now, IMHO, due to what you explained above.
The report needs to be factual based and as much as possible needs to be free of opinions of the people preparing the report. Beyond that I would encourage each board member to compose an opinion piece that provides insight into the thought process of the individual's.
The goal of all of this is to put the discussion about the Foundation to rest in one way or another. Despite the hard work that many people have put forward on the topic we are more or less still in limbo. There is no real mandate from the project members to go one way or the other and the only way, IMHO, to create this mandate is by following a process as outlined above.
Well, yeah, I guess we need to rehash the same stuff all over again and, obviously, as most people bring up the same questions again, communicate better about the results. We indeed need to very clearly explain the pros and cons, because most people probably have a pretty naive and optimistic view of what going with a foundation would mean, and aren't aware of all the drawbacks and difficulties.
Having a company like SUSE should allow openSUSE to, in the case a foundation is created, to start it in a very mature and susteinable state. We are far from there at this point.
We can and should increase transparency in the economic area and we have to find ways for the project to become economically susteinable, so creating a Foundation could be a topic to discuss because it has a clear mid term future.
5.- 16:09:54 <tittiatcoke> The KDE area didn't loose any members to open-slx, but the loss was more due to the reorganization of the boosters team
open-slx is an example of the opportunities openSUSE has to become "business friendly" Open Source Press is another example. Transforming openSUSE into a business friendly ecosystem will be a major topic in the coming new action plan.
open-slx is an example of why "business friendly" is a waste of time and doesn't bring anything positive to the project. No one should believe that improving the "business friendliness" would automagically mean more contributors or more funding for the project. It doesn't. It only does in the rarest situations (B1 systems is a good example of something that works, open-slx is an example of the worst.) It shouldn't be portrayed as such either. Needs finding the right contributors. Is it worth investing time, manpower, efforts into that ? IMHO the return is extremely low as compared to concentrating on mentoring, making the project better known, improve marketing, improve funding on public infrastructure services such as OBS, etc... I believe doing *that* would provide a much better turnaround in terms of contributors. [...] cheers -- -o) Pascal Bleser /\\ http://opensuse.org -- we haz green _\_v http://fosdem.org -- we haz conf