* Charles Wight
On 09/16/2010 06:20 AM, Bryen M. Yunashko wrote:
Truth be told, the stronger we make ourselves as an important "upstream" project of the SLE family, the more Novell, or its successor, or anyone, will take notice of us and recognize that we're here to stay and we do something very important here.
So, keep your heads focused on the prize -- openSUSE Project, and don't let the activities of our partners deter from what we are doing.
Bryen M Yunashko openSUSE Board Member
While I don't necessarily agree or disagree with DenverD, his post reflects a clear reality: the OpenSUSE "community" could effectively disappear in the course of a day. It just happened with Open Solaris. Read some of the blogs by former Open Solaris contributors! I think they provide some valuable lessons-learned.
Apart from the fact that OpenSolaris never was as open or community-based as openSUSE has become already, it is a good example how the end of such a (open-source) project can be the beginning of something new which has the potential to become something even better in terms of openness and community-focus.
I suspect that whether or not OpenSUSE is or is not important to SLE (I've heard both sides of the argument here) is of no relevance. It's unlikely that the folk making the decisions will know anything about the project other than projected cost.
The only way OpenSUSE can ever be safe from the whims of the accountants and financiers is to become independent of any single large corporate sponser. I don't see it happening ... so uncertainty is the prevalent reality ....
Nothing is ever 100% certain, you could say the same about Canonical which apparently still depends on the funding of a single individual. Given the community interest in openSUSE you can be fairly certain that it will be continued in one way or another should a possible new owner discontinue sponsorship. And this probably applies to Ubuntu, or Fedora as well. That is not to say that more diverse funding wouldn't be a good thing. Why is there till no foundation? P.S. If your interested in a replacement for OpenSolaris, join us at http://openindiana.org/ -- Guido Berhoerster -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org