On 04/07/18 08:36, Peter Linnell wrote:
On Tue, 03 Jul 2018 15:02:51 +0200 "Knurpht@openSUSE" <knurpht@opensuse.org> wrote:
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I'm with Ana here. And I like the idea of consulting previous board members. I've been around since S.u.S.E. and from 2005 on, this discussion has come up over and over again, with peaks around the various sales of SUSE. Becoming an independent foundation is not that easy, specially not now after the coming to effect of GDPR. With former board members joining us in the discussion, we might get some info/points we haven't thought about yet. No idea how this could relate to something like SPI though.
Hi all,
Ex-board member and ex-SUSE employee.
I was part of some of the discussions about setting up an independent foundation type org for openSUSE. I'm happy to chime in where I can.
Recalling from memory, the effort was abandoned for several good reasons, including the thought that this could be a big distraction for the community and no clear vision by anyone on the governing structure etc.
Every time, SUSE has changed ownership, this kind of discussion pops up with some mild paranoia IMO, about SUSE dropping or weakening support for openSUSE.
Having had the luck, perhaps more than other folks at my level at SUSE, I had quite a bit of sustained interaction with the SUSE leadership team and got to know them on a personal, as well as, a professional level.
From this, I can say, Nils and the team are very well respected internally, not just on the sales side, but the engineering side too. Nils operates in a very transparent manner, compared to other CEO's. During one trip to Nuremburg, I was surprised to see Nils with an open door. I knocked and was invited in for a free form chat for more than half an hour.
Before the MicroFocus purchase, the all-hands calls could be a free for all, in that tough questions were posed to leadership and they were as forthright as you could ask for. It was telling that MF all-hands were a completely different experience. Not criticizing, just noting the cultural difference.
Moreover, I _know_ SUSE's leadership cares a _lot_ about having a healthy independent openSUSE community. They see it as important strategically and the benefits go both ways.
Hence, the fact that Rich Brown, got a reassurance call from Nils, so early in the day, is completely in character to me.
When MicroFocus bought Attachmate, it was mostly a positive thing for SUSE. Attachmate wisely IMO split out SUSE and this allowed SUSE to rebuild its brand separate from legacy Novell days.
Along with this, especially the ability to have investment resources, which SUSE never had before allowed SUSE to grow steadily and in some quarters, pretty dramatically.
This has become important over time, as SUSE is not just a Linux company, but more an open source infrastructure company. Being able to make strategic technology investments, like openATTIC, lets SUSE be a stronger competitor in the market. Imagine if SUSE bought Inktank(CEPH) or CoreOS before RH ? Now SUSE can and that only helps openSUSE as well. Things like Openstack, Kubic and Software Storage are multi-million dollar investments.
That said, I also worked under Attachmate's ownership and there _are_ advantages to being a private company, especially the ability to focus on long term organic growth.
My take from the outside now is SUSE, splitting from MF is a good thing for both companies. SUSE can concentrate on long term growth and MF can concentrate on integrating the HPE merger.
As for openSUSE, I see nothing that should distract the community from continuing with business as usual.
Just IMO,
Peter
Just to make it clear the discussion of this issue is in no way related to SUSE's change in ownership, we as the board started discussing this Idea and decided that we needed some form of solution in this area at our face to face meeting in May, Various travel and catching up on things after travel have meant that I only had time to start actively looking at options in this space the day before the change of ownership was announced. Prior to this week no one on the board had knowledge of the plans to change SUSE's ownership. -- Simon Lees (Simotek) http://simotek.net Emergency Update Team keybase.io/simotek SUSE Linux Adelaide Australia, UTC+10:30 GPG Fingerprint: 5B87 DB9D 88DC F606 E489 CEC5 0922 C246 02F0 014B