Hey Gerald, Am Samstag, 12. Juni 2010, 01:51:57 schrieb Gerald Pfeifer:
And I am not sure whether the use of "testbase" was intentional, but it leads to an important point: The way I see openSUSE, and I admit that may be different from how some at Novell saw it some years ago, is as a base for SUSE Linux Enterprise, not as a testbed.
Yes testbed wasn't intentional, the FAQ clears up it's the base for SLE =)
http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-project/2010-05/msg00094.html was an earlier, quick attempt of mine to answer this question, by the way.
Well I was actually thinking about replying to that back then already. The 'dear to our heart' part is just too much icing on the cake for me. I know Novell employs alot of people where that applies, and to a certain part the employees are the face of a company, but Novell itself wants to earn money, so let's not make Novell look like saints here, even if they employ some fine people =) Novell won vs. SCO again (hopefully that's it now), and I am grateful for the protection Novell offered the community and their competition here, but I bet they did it because the opposite outcome would have hurt their own business and not out of sheer goodness. I don't know about the others here, but I prefer Novell beeing the good community member they are because otherwise it'd be bad for business, that makes me trust the openSUSE Novell relationship.
http://en.opensuse.org/Frequently_Asked_Questions#What_is_the_relationshi p_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 ;-)
One way of looking at this is to assume the resources I have at my disposal are finite. So, the more Novell has to invest into "fixing" things up for SLE, the less we can invest into things that benefit openSUSE. Which means there is a case to be made for openSUSE and (the next version of) SLE not diverging too much. At the same time openSUSE needs to be, and is, independent to a fair extent as some choices like ext4 or the addition of LXDE are showing. As so often in life, it simply is not black and white.
Very well put Regards, Karsten -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org