On Sun, Sep 26, 2010 at 5:09 AM, Thomas Hertweck <Thomas.Hertweck@web.de> wrote:
On 24/09/10 10:28, Jos Poortvliet wrote:
[...] openSUSE is, like all Free Software communities, a meritocracy. You EARN the right to speak up (influence) by proving yourself valuable. If you don't contribute, who the f*** are you that we should listen? We're not a company - where managers get appointed to a position because they had the right papers and contacts and get paid well - here, those who actually KNOW what they are talking about are in charge. When we need input from others (like users) we ask for it (eg see the openSUSE users survey).
I find your statement quite ironical. You haven't contributed to SuSE or openSUSE in the past (at least not directly), now you are being *paid* to work on Linux (openSUSE) the whole day, and you have been *appointed* the community manager. You get the picture? I work in the industry and your statement that (project) managers in companies just get their jobs because they know the right people and there's a lot of money involved and otherwise they don't have a clue is absolutely appalling. I would really like to know what your fellow Novell project managers think about such an opinion.
-project is a development list. So those who speak here are contributors - or rather, should be. If you answer questions on the forums, write articles for news.o.o, are an artist for openSUSE, packager, developer - it doesn't matter WHAT you do, you're part of those who make decisions. Nothing, however, is not enough. And opinions we have plenty, so no, giving those is not a contribution, sorry.
I agree with David on this one. You devalue thousands of contributions! There are a lot of people out there who don't have the luxury to be paid to work on Linux like you are. There are people out there who have not much time to contribute in form of RPM packaging etc, but they have great experience with Linux or software development or project management in general. Providing ideas and opinions *is* a contribution to openSUSE!
Thomas
I can see both sides of the "opinion" argument. I contribute in various ways, but I feel my opinions are some of my best contributions. I think my most valuable opinions are those formalized via openfate. So I certainly hope activity in openFate qualifies as a contribution. fyi: Jos, openFate doesn't yet seem to work very well from my volunteer contributor perspective. I'm glad that as of a few months ago the newsletter has new openfate entries in it, but even with that there is not enough transparency into the process. As an example, a month ago I submitted: https://features.opensuse.org/310405# It has 8 positive votes, 1 neutral vote, 0 negative votes and 1 comment. That is the sum of my knowledge. Is it moving forward? Has it even been looked at by someone who might implement it? By someone who could allocate resources? etc.? How is the resource allocation decision made? ie. Novell has provided man power to create yast2-wagon. Will they help to see it more fully integrated? If a positive "go" decision were made, where would it be noted? fyi: I've made other proposals that seemed to cause new features to be added to the release, but no acknowledgment that my feedback was influential in the process. Greg -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org