On Wed, 9 Jun 2010 19:31:10 +0100 (BST), Gerald Pfeifer <gp@novell.com> wrote:
On Tue, 8 Jun 2010, Trifle Menot wrote:
If Novell pulls the power plug, your project infrastructure immediately collapses. The "community" is not strong enough to step in and turn the power back on. As long as that's true, you're still a fetus.
Is this different for Fedora or Ubuntu? I am not saying this cannot or should not be changed, the question is, what is the priority (and who is going to bear the cost)?
Depends on your point of view. Novell developers earning nice salaries are in a comfort zone where risk poses a threat to their paycheck. But outsiders with little or nothing to lose, may have different ideas about goals. You can't beat the market leader by working in a comfort zone. You must take bold risks to grow grassroots support of opensuse. You need a much larger population of opensuse users. And that won't happen until Novell devs shed their clique mentality and reach outside their comfort zone. On Wed, 9 Jun 2010 21:23:58 +0200, Martin Schlander <martin.schlander@gmail.com> wrote:
Tirsdag den 8. juni 2010 14:21:05 skrev Trifle Menot:
I hear rumors Novell is for sale. Will opensuse get its own bugzilla independent from Novell? And what else needs to be done for opensuse to gain full independence?
Of course it would be desirable to have some form of "guarantee" that openSUSE won't just go away. For Ubuntu this sense of security was achieved by Mark Shuttleworth putting 20 million USD in a foundation. Maybe it would be worth it for Novell to consider doing something similar when/if an openSUSE foundation is formed.
Yes but Mark doesn't need board approval, he has his own money to spend. It's different for a corporation, whose prime directive is profit. How can they justify it to shareholders?
There has been some mention of the other sponsors, but open-slx wasn't mentioned. Personally I find what open-slx are doing extremely interesting - since they are actually trying to monetize openSUSE. Something Novell never wanted to do, since Novell is greatly (and mistakenly so) underestimating the relevance of the consumer market. Open-slx have been hiring some people, and hopefully they'll be succesful and grow more influential - and hopefully other companies will copy this model and try to monetize openSUSE too.
Regarding the MS deal. There can be no doubt that it was extremely damaging to openSUSE in terms of PR - and to some extent continues to be so even now, and probably will be for years to come. That is true regardless of whether the deal itself was "evil" or not - and is just something we have to live with. I'm not sure openSUSE being formally independent would stop Novell actions from affecting the way people perceive openSUSE.
Novell gave opensuse a bad reputation. A new corporate name may help change market perceptions. It seems likely that will happen soon. -- Web mail, POP3, and SMTP http://www.beewyz.com/freeaccounts.php -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org