On Wednesday June 9 2010 22:56:55 Trifle Menot wrote:
On Wed, 9 Jun 2010 15:42:22 -0500, Alberto Passalacqua
<albert.passalacqua@gmail.com> wrote:
2010/6/9 Trifle Menot <triflemenot@beewyz.com>:
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.
That's in part true that you have to go out of the comfort zone, but I don't see how this is related to developers being well paid. Being well paid to do something you like seems to me the perfect deal, and I really prefer to see well paid developers, than developers that have to deal with economic difficulties and be split between open source contributions and their work. Novell allowed SUSE developers to do this, with some compromise of course, but that's clearly something acceptable in the big picture. Remember one thing that you are forgetting: openSUSE would not exist without Novell. It is Novell that opened the project, and made all what we are talking about possible.
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?
Mark wants profit too. He says that clearly. He just invested waiting to have a return, and he also fixed a date for that.
Novell gave opensuse a bad reputation. A new corporate name may help change market perceptions. It seems likely that will happen soon.
Clearly we have different point of views. I think Novell made openSUSE possible, more open and accessible. Look at the facts for one minute instead than to the politics. Novell opened the whole SUSE, made YaST open source (it wasn't in SuSE), they offered the openSUSE buildservice to the community, opening it to all major distributions. They support, sometime alone, many open projects, and openSUSE has one of the best KDE and GNOME implementations of the Linux arena.
The bad reputation is not that bad. It is often due to what people reads on certain press, but when they know the community and try the distribution, they often change their mind, even in comparison to other more popular distributions (read ubuntu). I see that happen quite often.
What would be useful, is to stop considering Novell as a problem, and start looking at it as an advantage, because that's what it is. They surely made a lot of mistakes, especially at the beginning, but they also fixed many of them during these years. If you look at openSUSE today, you see a well built distribution, with a good user experience, a good hardware support, a cool look, and a friendly approach to Linux. I'm not saying it's perfect, and there surely is a lot of work to do, but it depends more on us (community) than on Novell.
To conclude, I think it is really unfair to look at Novell as a problem. There were communication problems at the beginning, there are different needs and perspectives, but it is clear things changed. Maybe the first required change in the community is to honestly acknowledge their merits, and then poke them when there is what we consider a problem.
I don't look at Novell as a problem. I think you are mistaking my arguments for an attack. I want Novell (and its successor) to grow and thrive. I want devs to earn nice salaries, so they can support their families while doing work they enjoy.
With all due respect but: 1. You said you wont contribute in any way as long as openSUSE "depends" on Novell in any way. 2. You are arguing over and over that the patent deal between Novell and "M$" drives others aways. So I guess it is fair to say that you see Novell as a problem.
But the reality is, if you're not growing, you're dying. You must take risks to compete with market leaders. If you don't, you will fall so far behind in terms of market share, that you can never catch up. And that will mean the eventual death of opensuse.
Well, how do you define "market leader"? In an enterprise field clearly Red Hat and Novell _are_ the "market leaders". And until someone found out how to earn money with linux on the desktop it simply doesn't matter what is the most "popular" distro for people who will never pay a single cent for it.
Fully separating the opensuse infrastructure from the main sponsor is a risk. But I think it's the best way to attract new opensuse users and grow grassroots support of opensuse. If it works, the corporate sponsor will reap the rewards of improved public opinion and increasing market share.
Before you raise claims like that please answer some questions: 1. Who will pay the core devs working on it since the current "community" isn't able to do so? 2. Who will pay for the basic infrastructure like OBS (since that will be the most costly) so development can go on as it does currently?
I think you must do it or die trying; if you don't try, you will surely die.
Well, while the number of people assigned to work merely on openSUSE might be ridiculously small compared to the whole number of employees (11 if I'm not mistaken) openSUSE still profits from the others working on SLE (which certainly are quite some more). Point being, me personally, I contribute to it because I consider it the best KDE distro available and it - now - gives me the tools to contribute by 1. Trolling IRC a bit. 2. Packaging stuff I find missing and updating others I find outdated (yes, I love OBS) 3. Testing it since that will be what I have to use. Also I honestly don't see a reason why other corporations should be driven away from contributing by said "M$" Novell deal. IOW your whole rant against "get independent of Novell" is as ridiculous as if you would visit the Fedora mailing list and tell them to get independent of Red Hat. It is just a community distro that is the base for a corporate one. You have all the possibilities to enhance it or change its direction _if_ you contribute and have valid arguments but some silly rant while refusing to do anything "cause it is reigned by some evil overlord" is simply ridiculous. Point being, until 1. You can come up with some reasonable idea how to pay core devs to work on it. 2. You tell us how to pay for the necessary infrastructure (e.g OBS). 3. _You_ start contributing instead of telling others what they should do. 4. You enlighten us how the relationship between Fedora and RHEL is different to openSUSE and SLE. 5. You provide some _proof_ of someone that got driven away by that "M$" deal - and no, some random joe sitting in his cellar doesn't count but we are talking about "corporate" sponsors who would be willing to invest more than just some 3-5 digits sum. So, either surprise me or please simply cut it since that thread has run its course quite some time ago. For sure you had valid arguments about the independence of Novell in case they were sold but that ongoing rant about some evil "M$" plots leads nowhere - or at least makes you look like something you prolly wont want. regards, Stephan -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org