* Andreas Jaeger <aj@suse.com> [2012-05-07 21:46]:
I'm liking that we're referring to openSUSE as upstream from SLEx rather than "basis of SLEx" as we have done in the past. The difference in message and intent between the single word "upstream" vs. "basis" is significant and upstream shows that openSUSE is truly meant to be a community project. The growing pervasiveness of referring to "upstream" is alone a big step forward for us.
I doubt that this has much practical significance due to the personnel overlap. The overwhelming majority of development work on the core distribution is already done by community members employed by SUSE, so this whole upstream - downstream distinction is more of a theoretical nature.
It has nothing to do with personnel overlap - the point is more the relationship between the two of them. While there might be many things that SLE engineers like to see in openSUSE, the openSUSE community might not like it and has IMHO the power to veto it.
For example, if grub2 is not working in time for openSUSE 12.2, we as openSUSE community should say it's not time to use it by default etc - even if further testing might be beneficial for SLE.
With personnel overlap I didn't only mean the cases where SLE personell maintains openSUSE packages but also that many of those who maintain the core distribution are employed by the same company that produces SLE.
But we have in 2011 more non-SUSE folks contributing - so if we vote, the non-SUSE folks would win ;)
True, there is a large wider community, but then generally we don't vote on technical matters or have a formal decision-making process on technical matters like e.g. Fedora.
[*] e.g. ~80% of all changes to all Factory packages in 2010 and 2011 are authored by SUSE employees
With my scripts I get 72 % for 2010 and 56 % for 2011 (checking single entries in .changes (and I know that some SUSE employees use a non-SUSE address there, so handled those specifically).
Just out of curiousity, do you have detailed statistics available somewhere? I have polished my script a bit and put the results up at http://heapoverflow.de/tmp/factory-changes-2009.txt http://heapoverflow.de/tmp/factory-changes-2010.txt http://heapoverflow.de/tmp/factory-changes-2011.txt These are of course just a rough indicator, contributions are almost impossible to quantify and above results are skewed e.g. by mass changes or excessive changelog entries of packages like kiwi. -- Guido Berhoerster -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org