Torsdag den 5. august 2010 12:06:16 skrev Jan Engelhardt:
On Thursday 2010-08-05 11:23, Martin Schlander wrote:
Novell systematically dropping investment in openSUSE. Naturally this results in a product that is quite different from what it used to be.
* firing developers * making the ones that weren't fired work on webyast, susestudio etc. * dropping sax2 and yast modules * dropping 24 month support * outsourcing the boxset completely * dropping ppc * I heard rumours that jimmac won't be replaced and artwork will be fully dependant on volunteers going forward.
And all these resources being taken away from openSUSE are not re-applied elsewhere in the project. They're just freed up so we can barely maintain the status quo.
You seem to be wanting to dictate where a company has to put its manpower
You asked me to expand on my statement about openSUSE straying from its roots and that's all I did. And I'm not having any illusions about improving the way Novell treats openSUSE. I'm doing the opposite, I'm just stating the facts and accepting them. So we can build our strategy around what is realistic under the current circumstances - which are very different than they were 5 years ago.
Effective marketing is downright impossible
Some will say "openSUSE is great for n00bs" others will say "openSUSE is cool, innovative bleeding edge stuff" and some will say "openSUSE is just so stable and powerful and high-tech", etc.
When everybody is conveying different (and mutually exclusive) messages - and most of the time the message is out of sync with the reality of the distro, marketing is extremely ineffective - often damaging even.
I don't see why a distro could not be appalling to more than one type of user. "Given enough manpower", you surely can link both factory-edge with stability and impress that class of users.
That's just how it is. You can't succesfully market anything if you don't have a consistent message which additionally at least has _some_ connection with reality.
development is all over the place
openSUSE's strength could just be _not_ to be specialized, but to have a little bit of everything.
We've already tried that in the last 3-4 years, it's not working very well :-) -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org