Hi, [just a little offtopic] Talking about Mr. Shuttleworth..... He sold many ideas to the whole Free Soft world. There are two relevant to the proposal I want to mention. The first one is the fixed and synchronous (a.k.a. 6 months) Release cycle (the timing is not original from him, as we know) and the second one is the Long Term Support concept. 1.- I already explained I believe Release Cycles are tools, not goals. For iterative improvements, fixed Release cycles are great. For disruptive changes? No. 6 months? Depends on many factors. I do not believe in the synchronization religion either. I am glad to work here when talking about this :-) 2.- Long Term Support.... Both, maintenance and support have a cost, no matter if it is SUSE (or any other players) or Evergreen who provided it. One of them, maintenance, is currently provided in openSUSE for free (as beer). The other one, support, not. SUSE do not provide support on openSUSE. Third parties might. Long Term Maintenance is the right concept, not Long Term Support. <Promo>Support is what SUSE does in SLES/SLED, and with success, by the way.</Promo> Let me ask for help to revert this harmful confusion for all of us, including Mr. Shuttleworth, now that he needs to make this project profitable. Let's differentiate between maintenance and support. Disclaimer: even myself make this error more often that I would like to. On Saturday 30 November 2013 06:06:50 Robert Schweikert wrote:
On 11/27/2013 05:08 AM, Axel Braun wrote:
Am Mittwoch, 27. November 2013, 11:01:20 schrieb Manuel Trujillo:
it's not a criticism. I can see ubuntu project because there is an ubuntu-fr very active group (I'm french). The most visible project part are the goodies. dvd where very appreciated, but there are no more (I try now to discuss this on the ambassador list). The project is something geeks can appreciate, not really the others.
I have a great and healthy envy by the Ubuntu community. We may have a better distribution in many respects, but they (ubuntu) supplement this deficiency very well with a great community.
Indeed. For whatever reason, Ubuntu is much more hyped,
Mark Shuttleworth is one of the best marketeers in the IT business today. Thus, the fact that everyone hears something about Ubuntu all the time is no surprise. Sometimes I think he follows the motto "No publicity is bad publicity". If you look over the Ubuntu news of the last years you will find possibly more negative press than positive things.
Unity, the search stuff, MIR, to name just a few. However, despite this "negative" attention Ubuntu retains much of their community, although I do think that internally things look much bleaker there than they appear from the outside.
Beside marketing they have managed to have a large answer set for "common linux problems" almost always when using Google and searching for some error message or problem resolution an Ubuntu link is in the top 10 search results. Although I think this is decreasing in the recent past. openSUSE answers are almost never to be found :( . This could imply that we do not have the same or similar problems in the distro, something I consider unlikely, that we do not post the answers to these questions, or that places where we do have the answers do not get indexed. or a number of other things.
Anyway, the bottom line is that to gain mindshare one needs to get the message out and not having a full time marketeer a la Shuttleworth, nor following the "lets just announce something" rule is a certain disadvantage in this respect.
I personally think the "shout it from the roof top" method is rather annoying and would not be surprised if many geekos feel the same way. Which is probably the reason that we do not employ these type of methods. In the area of marketing the same rules apply than for other parts of the project, someone has to step up and do the work and those that do the work end up deciding what gets done. THus there are plenty of opportunities for those interested to raise the profile of openSUSE. Hopefully in a "better" way than Shuttleworth is doing, but again those that do the work decide.
Later, Robert
-- Agustin Benito Bethencourt openSUSE Team Lead at SUSE abebe@suse.com -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org