On Tue, 8 Jun 2010 15:32:28 -0500, Alberto Passalacqua <albert.passalacqua@gmail.com> wrote:
2010/6/8 Per Jessen <per@computer.org>:
Well AJ, I still don't know which place you occupy in the organigramm (if any) but that "Plonk" didn't earn you a lot of credits.
This has to be a joke, I hope, really. It doesn't take a lot to understand AJ's role at Novell, just use Google.
This said, what should AJ do? Should he accept the non-constructive criticism of someone that comes saying we should be absolutely independent from Novell just because:
- He does not like Novell - Novell signed a deal with Microsoft (seems to be the reason of the end of the world...) - One day, maybe, Novell could not support the project anymore (the same thing could be said of all the projects backed by companies: fedora, ubuntu, mandriva, openoffice, mysql, ...) ?
The last point might be valuable, but the way he puts things makes his point invalid. He suggested to completely change the nature of the project, in a manner that is not realistic and probably not even interesting for the openSUSE community.
The need for more independence has been clear for a while, and both Novell and the openSUSE board have been working to that trying to set up the openSUSE foundation. What is not clear is the request of being completely independent from Novell, as if Novell were the absolute evil. Until today, if you are using openSUSE, you can say thank you to Novell, which surely made mistakes as all of us, but also took almost all the effort and the risk of developing openSUSE. I honestly did not see an army of volunteers when the community was looking for them, and it is a bit childish to claim "it's due to the deal", because if a contributor is really motivated to do something, he tries to understand before judging, as we did.
About credit, I don't think AJ's merits are under discussion here, and in a moderated environment this discussion would have ended long before this. Who loses credit is who talks about the project without even knowing the basics, without having an idea of things that have been under his eyes for years (see sponsorship, to cite a simple example), and then suggests changes that he might like, but would simply risk to compromise the project much more than the potential risks he is talking about.
Your're wildly overreacting to my comments. As for sponsors, what percentage of the total budget do the non-Novell sponsors contribute? Is it more than 5%? If not, they don't help much, other than serving as poster children for project propaganda. The majority of opensuse development is done by salaried developers paid handsome sums by Novell. But the project calls for unpaid volunteers to do work too. Fine, I don't have a problem with that. But if you expect me to donate my time, the project needs a self sustaining infrastructure that can survive without a major corporate sponsor. I'm not wasting my time on a project that can go down the drain, because the major sponsor pulls out. Since you missed it, or refuse to read it, let me say it again. I'm not crusading against Novell, I don't care if the KGB sponsors opensuse. But as long as the project uses infrastructure which relies on a single major sponsor, the project is too fragile to attract a large community of unpaid developers. You can change that, but you will have to open your mind and change your provincial attitude first. -- Web mail, POP3, and SMTP http://www.beewyz.com/freeaccounts.php -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org