On 5/23/07, Cornelius Schumacher
Some members of the openSUSE team at Novell sat down and tried to write down the guiding principles of the openSUSE project. A first draft of the result is attached. It can also be found at http://en.opensuse.org/Guiding_Principles.
The guiding principles include sections about what the projects is, what its goals and values are and how the project is governed. Our intent was to capture what the project actually is and what is current practice, not to invent anything new. We hope that this document can help clarifying what openSUSE is all about within the community as well as within Novell.
The guiding principles contain the proposal of a board of maintainers for the openSUSE project. We see this board as another step to an open development model which includes the whole openSUSE community, inside and outside of Novell.
Please take the current document as a draft and let us know what you think about it and how it can be improved. In the end we would like to come to a version which has broad acceptance and is adopted by the community and Novell. We hope that this can serve as a solid base for the future of the project.
I'm very happy to hear about this: both the principles and the board. I fully agree with the intended scope of the board, as well: it should be for getting things done/sorted around the community, and this is something that I've been silently grumbling about for quite some time :). I'm hoping it will be able to eventually resolve a lot of issues like officialization of contributors (in some form), and areas. One question: * "Novell maintains and releases the openSUSE distribution." Wouldn't it be better to say the openSUSE community releases and maintains the distribution? Though I know in reality it's 99% Novell employees, I don't think it should imply that others -- non-Novell employees -- won't/can't be part of this maintainence and release process for the openSUSE distribution. One other point I think it's vital to stress about the board is that it should also work to have correspondence with all areas of the community, since this is one way of unifying it as I know some other areas in the community (namely, the forums) who fear of being unrepresented on such a council/board, which would result in them having unfavourable decisions enforced upon them without full communication and collaboration. I've also added some syntactical suggestions to the talk page http://en.opensuse.org/Talk:Guiding_Principles Kind thoughts, -- Francis Giannaros http://francis.giannaros.org --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org