On Wednesday 09 June 2010 14:17:36 Karsten König wrote:
[...] I guess everybody has his aims in contributing to openSUSE, or any other project, and they do it for a reason, what's Novells reason? Most non-employed people do it for their satisfaction, be it shaping something, improving his own experience, helping others etc etc. But I don't remember any public statement what Novell expects from it's support for openSUSE, except what reads like general charity. I can think of alot out of my head, be it gaining expertise, having a good testbase for future products, improving future products through external contributions, earning a good reputation as opensource contributor, providing interesting work topics for employees, etc.
That's a pretty good list, it includes the items that I normally say when asked - and what you say below regarding SLE is also important and is on my list.
http://en.opensuse.org/Frequently_Asked_Questions#What_is_the_relationship_ of_the_openSUSE_project_to_Novell.3F tries to shortly address this, btw also stating 'Novell [...] retains ultimate responsibility for the project.' The entry states it's the base for SLE, that's it, well this obviously contradicts the wish for a totally independent community as it might create something that just won't sell as SLE ;-)
We had some discussion about that inside Novell, so let me summarize this: openSUSE is the base for SLE - and if the openSUSE distribution goes into a direction that is not suitable for SLE, then Novell needs to make changes on top of openSUSE as part of working on SLE. For sure, a win-win would be if no such changes occur and everything can be taken as is but this is not going to happen. If we as openSUSE project want to make some different decisions which are the right decisions for openSUSE and not for SLE, so be it. Note that in the past we did already some things differently for openSUSE than for SLE, like the installation workflow which is slightly different between openSUSE and SLE. I want to see development happen in openSUSE that is relevant for SLE but I do not want to see again a disaster happen like the zmd story - meaning, development for SLE is fine as long as it does not break openSUSE. Does that help? Should I try to make at some time an more official looking statement off Novell's view of openSUSE? Btw. does any of you know about similar statements from Red Hat for Fedora or Canonical for Ubuntu? Andreas -- Andreas Jaeger, Program Manager openSUSE, aj@{novell.com,opensuse.org} Twitter: jaegerandi | Identica: jaegerandi SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, GF: Markus Rex, HRB 16746 (AG Nürnberg) Maxfeldstr. 5, 90409 Nürnberg, Germany GPG fingerprint = 93A3 365E CE47 B889 DF7F FED1 389A 563C C272 A126