On Saturday 11 September 2010 17:10:00 Charles Wight wrote:
On 09/10/2010 06:50 PM, Gerald Pfeifer wrote:
On Thu, 9 Sep 2010, Jan Engelhardt wrote:
Perhaps it's time to stop thinking of openSUSE as a "product" ... openSUSE is _not_ a Novell product. And nobody should see or treat it like that.
Gerald
Hello Gerald,
I wish I could agree with you, but from where I sit, it looks like a Novell product.
Weird. Novell doesn't sell it, nor even try... They do put a lot of effort in it but are trying to let go - pretty hard...
And from reading the nonsensical and pointless marketing mumbo jumbo here and elsewhere ... it REALLY looks like a Novell product ... and in the USA, that's NOT good! meeGo & mono ... are these "community" driven priorities?
MeeGo is Linux Foundation, our Smeegol work is done by a volunteer (our esteemed FunkyPenguin aka Andrew Wafaa). Sounds very community to me... Even then, it is one of the things going on in the community, not a priority by any means. Mono surely is a Novell effort, but how is it openSUSE? Of course Novell puts effort in integrating it well in openSUSE but they could do the same for Fedora or Ubuntu if they would've liked - they do it in their role as contributor. And again, it is something which is going on - you could start an effort
Ironically, I think Novell will see a much better return on investment if openSUSE returns to what made SuSE a great product ... HIGH QUALITY!
Novell makes no money on openSUSE whatsoever - so it wouldn't help them at all. They could of course stop developing openSUSE in the open, no longer working with you all, and simply have their engineers focus on SLES/SLED - which DOES make em money. But that would mean no free SUSE products for us, no SUSE Studio and SUSE Buildservice - it would be BAD for users, and mean less innovation in Free Software, I dare say. So let's be happy that Novell has decided to work in the open. Surely they have their reasons - they hope they can create a better product by working with us than alone. But isn't that why EVERY company working in Free Software gets its business value? Canonical? Red Hat, IBM, VMWare, Intel, Nokia, you name it... You believe there are companies investing millions in Free Software because they like us so much? So surely, if this community effort fails, Novell might get better value by doing it alone. But currently they believe it is better to work with a community. And I think they are right - I believe in the Free Software model and in this community. I think it is better for Novell to invest in openness, in coopration - among other things by telling their engineers to work with you all, by putting in sponsorship money, and more and more. I think they will indeed create a better product that way. And I certainly hope so - because, as I said, the world of Free Software would surely not be better off without openSUSE. Greetings, Jos
Cheers!
cwight