On Saturday 09 February 2008 00:47:29 Pascal Bleser wrote:
The idea behind it is really to vanish the border between Novell employees and non-Novell employees who are contributing to the openSUSE project at large.
That's completely to the point. You don't have to be a Novell employee to be a contributor to openSUSE. Whatever we can do to stress that and tear down walls between inside and outside of Novell improves the openSUSE community and will bring the project forward. That we now have a mechanism to give opensuse.org mail addresses to Novell-external people is one great step.
But clearly, to take your example above, "only" installing openSUSE on a friend's PC can't really be seen as an active contribution in the light of what a lot of other people are doing -- I mean, sure, cool thing, but it doesn't equally weigh into the balance as someone who contributes code or artwork to openSUSE tools, builds and maintains packages, writes and/or translates pages on the openSUSE wiki, helps and/or moderates users on mailing-lists/web forums/IRC channels, organizes openSUSE events or local openSUSE groups, etc... I hope you see the pattern.
I think installing openSUSE on a friend's PC and so getting a new user for openSUSE is a fantastic contribution to openSUSE. I would consider everybody who does that as part of the community and member of the project. Of course other contributions might consume more time, require more skills, or might be more relevant in terms of the overall project. This should be recognized and this also certainly can be the criteria for giving somebody an opensuse.org mail address or not. But in my view it's really important that there is not the slightest doubt that the openSUSE community is welcoming everybody who is contributing, even if the contribution might be tiny at first. The board should not decide who is in and who is out. This impression would be very wrong and I know that the board doesn't want to create this impression. But that's the reason why we should try to communicate this in the best possible way. -- Cornelius Schumacher <cschum@suse.de> --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org