Hello, Am Dienstag, 9. Juli 2024, 12:48:45 MESZ schrieb Patrick Fitzgerald:
The foundation finally came about because of fears re the funding of future community events. There were a lot less events sponsored by SUSE in the last couple of years, and who knows, for whatever reason that may continue.
The foundation exists to allow for the collection of donations, because openSUSE cannot have a bank account, because it is not a legal entity - just a name.
You might say, well SUSE can take the donations themselves; but then most people would think "why am I donating to a company that sells it's software for a profit?" (Hence the naming issue as well - because outsiders do not understand the difference).
Agreed, the foundation makes lots of sense for handling donations. I remember cases when serious hardware donations didn't happen because SUSE would technically have become the owner back then, even with a contract saying that the hardware has to be used only for openSUSE. And that's just one example. Therefore, I'm very happy that we finally have a foundation. However, I doubt that the name "openSUSE" is a problem. I'm sure that people and companies who consider to donate to openSUSE _do_ know and understand the difference between SUSE and openSUSE.
But then in the absolute worst case scenario, imagine what would happen if a larger, hostile competitor bought all of the shares of SUSE (say, when it was public), took the customer base, hired the core dev teams, integrated the software into their own, and killed the brand.
Then there would be no SUSE, and by definition, no openSUSE either - because openSUSE is a trademark of SUSE.
When I was a board member years ago, we had some discussions with a SUSE manager. IIRC (I might mis-remember after all these years) we also discussed the worst-case scenario and got an offer to have a contract between SUSE and the foundation that - should SUSE ever stop supporting openSUSE, become evil etc. - the foundation would get the openSUSE trademark, and would be allowed to continue using it. I'm sure that as long as SUSE has a sane management, it should be possible to setup this safeguard to protect openSUSE against such a future desaster scenario. Setting up such a safeguard would be much easier and cheaper than a rebranding [1]. And, most important, it would avoid all the risks that come with a rebrand. That said - if SUSE would really stop all the contributions to openSUSE (being it SUSE employees working on openSUSE, providing and running infrastructure etc.), we'd probably have more serious problems than the trademark. At the same time, SUSE and the hostile buyer would probably also run into serious problems because they also benefit from the work all the openSUSE contributors do. I have some hope that this makes the worst-case scenario less likely ;-) Regards, Christian Boltz [1] I'd guess some 4-digit amount for lawyers to draft the contract, while a serious rebrand marketing campaign would probably need a 5- or even 6-digit budget + lots of time and effort from lots of community members (who often have better things to do). -- Last I checked, developers were still human [Bryen M Yunashko in opensuse-project]