On Thursday 17 June 2010 19:08:28 Martin Schlander wrote:
Torsdag den 17. juni 2010 17:45:34 skrev Stephan Kulow:
Am Donnerstag 17 Juni 2010 schrieb Pavol Rusnak:
On 06/17/2010 04:46 PM, Marcus Moeller wrote:
openSUSE - #1 KDE distribution
In the end we'll vote for the best strategy. I guess we will want to have at least 50% or maybe 66% of votes as a pass criteria (this is not decided yet). I guess this strategy will fail reaching that.
Hmm, why do you think that? I consider the chances of this strategy higher than "build derivatives which includes remote system administration". As a matter of fact, I wonder on what base the strategies were picked on
I have to agree with Coolo. Frankly I'm a little confused and disappointed by the three proposed strategies.
One thing that I thought was to be taken for granted from the beginning, is that openSUSE is supposed to be a general purpose operating system for server, desktop, laptop and netbook.
That is precisely what we didn't do. One main driver for the process we used to come up with proposals is that when you define a strategy, that strategy cannot be "everything and the kitchen sink", which is certainly what we are trying to do right now, because there are no clear objectives/goals (strategy? ;)). The question at the core of this is whether we believe that with the current contributor base, it is realistic to try to be everything to everyone. Now, I don't want to straw man here, and obviously we cannot _literally_ do everything. But, to come back to what you wrote: is it realistic to believe that with our current contributor base, we can make openSUSE "a general purpose operating system for server, desktop, laptop and netbook" ? Do we have enough contributors ? Sure, one way or another, we will heavily focus on trying to gain more contributors, as it is objectively something we're not particularly good at. There are many reasons to that. A very interesting and useful topic which we'll have to discuss, just not right now on these threads ;) (let's try to keep focused :)) Personally, I believe that we have a huge potential but that the amount of active contributors isn't all that great, as so many things stand on the shoulders of "a few" (relatively speaking, it ain't catastrophic either). It could be a much more enjoyable undertaking if we had more contributors doing more things, as well as spreading the load across more people. As we manage to attract more contributors, we could of course widen the scope of the distribution, through subprojects, more packages, spin-offs, etc.., whatever. But right now, and if we take as a valid presumption that we don't quite have enough contributors to do a "general purpose operating system for server, desktop, laptop and netbook", the only remaining option is to reduce the scope, and focus on certain domains. I hope that clarifies a bit why we proceeded that way.
What needed to be done was to decide how to diversify ourselves from other general purpose operating systems and define a target audience. But "developers", "derivate makers" or "cloud lovers" are all extremely narrow, niche target audiences. I can't support either one of those in their current form.
From our last survey, "developers" is the most prominent part of our current audience. Note that "derivative makers" isn't a target audience in that proposal. It is a strategy in order to attract more contributors and have many features, but all (and that's the most important part in that proposal) around a strong, well supported, stable "openSUSE core". As we believe that we currently don't have enough contributors to keep the complete set of stuff in our distro with the high level of quality we all value so much, one proposal is to reduce it.
My suggestion would have been something along the lines of: "openSUSE: The powerful distribution for the productive user"
That strategy would be so great because: 1) It's not too broad, but not too narrow either
Mmmm... to me, it's not very useful either, because it's so broad that it doesn't mean anything :)
2) It's in line with what SLE is about
Why would we care about SLE ?
3) It's pretty close to what SuSE has been historically
Yes, that's true. But we believe that it isn't really sustainable without sacrificing quality and innovation.
This "position" is available because Ubuntu targets the übern00bs and Fedora targets the geeks - no gratis/community distro really targets people that want to be productive and get things done, without things being either too experimental or too dumbed down.
Correct, but that level of quality, stability, applies to each of the proposals. cheers -- -o) Pascal Bleser <pascal.bleser@opensuse.org> /\\ http://opensuse.org -- I took the green pill _\_v FOSDEM::6+7 Feb 2010, Brussels, http://fosdem.org