Normaly, it´s not my problem when a company´s business gets hurt, but in this case, the company is our main sponsor and the employer of some openSUSE-developers (well, some? A lot...)
So, I´m interested in Novell getting successfully because this is the only way to keep them sponsoring us. Your right. It´s Business, not charity. And do you know what happens when they feel that SUSE/openSUSE doesn´t work for Novell´s business? Yeah, right, the will sell it or just say: Okay fiends, we had a great time together, but Novell have to make money. Don´t be angry with us... but openSUSE is history!
History has shown us that FOSS depending on a single corporate sponsor is bad for the community. The most recent example is Oracle and many of its FOSS projects. From the point of view of FOSS communities, it is in the community's best interest to have a diverse ecosystem of contributors. In the best case scenario if one contributor is forced for whatever reason to downscale its commitment, another contributor steps in and fills the void. As I've written in another mail in this thread: open-slx does that. Novell is downsizing its FOSS commitment since years. In the past Novell had 3 or 4 full- time developers only for KDE (I use that example because I'm most familiar with it). Stephan Binner was fired, Lubos Lunak was transferred to LibreOffice, IIRC there was a third developer who was transferred or fired, and now only Will Stephenson is left. Now thanks to open-slx there is also Sebastian Kügler which means that there are now two instead of one full-time KDE contributors in openSUSE. It's not open-slx's fault that Novell's managers are unskilled business people (though I'm not really convinced that a company that calls its corporate Linux distribution like a name for a body lotion company is run by geniuses... "the new shower gel – now by Balsam Enterprise") The people who recently formed Mageia already experienced what clinging to a single corporate sponsor with dwindling commercial success means. IMO the best outcome for openSUSE would be to become the Debian of RPM distros: A neutral ground for all kinds of entities (be it corporations or individual people) to contribute and serve as base for whatever distributions (SLES, Balsam, possibly MeeGo, and maybe even the Mageia people). Markus -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org