On Friday 07 December 2012 11:42:23 Richard Brown wrote:
Do we need to define targets for our distribution or that is a role for deployers and third parties? In terms of actual development goals (eg. https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Goals_12.3) I think that's a place for our contributors to decide and the board to keep their noses out of
And who will represent those openSUSE users that are not contributors and not even Community members ? Wasn't this the reason why FATE was implemented ? As a platform where openSUSE users could request changes for their favorite distribution ? I agree that the board should not drive the actual development goals, however it should ensure the process itself. The current situation is that the contributor is making the call whether or not a change is implemented. I can take my own contribution as an example. Plymouth was an openFATE request, but despite several attempts nobody really picked it up. Together with some other community members, I managed to integrate it within the openSUSE boot process and submitted it to Factory. At that moment only me and the Release Manager decided to make Plymouth the default bootsplash and drop our old bootsplash. Where was the input from the community ? Let alone the input from our userbase. If we look around us, then we see that a majority of the users of linux distributions are talking about the fact that a small group of people are making decisions for them. We all know about these discussions and I feel strongly that we as the openSUSE distribution should prevent this kind of talk about us.
But aside from the day to day, practical goals, I do think we need to sit down as a project and do a much better job of communicating who we are, what we are setting out to achieve, and who we intend our distribution to be used by.
And how our users can contribute to or influence our goals. :-)
I personally think our greatest strength as a project and distribution is the fact we embrace 'Choice' The fact we explicitly don't define how you're meant to use openSUSE is a strength - Whether you're a user who wants a server, a KDE workstation, a GNOME workstation, an appliance, a tablet, a toaster, we build, we distribute, you decide
This would indeed be a great idea and an excellence goal for openSUSE. This is exactly what I am trying to emphasize on when it comes to our development goals. Our strength should be that we listen to our users and that we do not define what they can do with our distro. Maybe I have a too strong business background with regards to how I would like to see openSUSE to change to have a better communication and interaction with all its users. Regards Raymond -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org