On Wed, 9 Jun 2010, Karsten König wrote:
But I don't remember any public statement what Novell expects from it's support for openSUSE, except what reads like general charity. I can think of alot out of my head, be it gaining expertise, having a good testbase for future products, improving future products through external contributions, earning a good reputation as opensource contributor, providing interesting work topics for employees, etc.
That's a good list, Karsten. 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. http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-project/2010-05/msg00094.html was an earlier, quick attempt of mine to answer this question, by the way.
http://en.opensuse.org/Frequently_Asked_Questions#What_is_the_relationship_o... 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. Gerald -- Dr. Gerald Pfeifer gp@novell.com | SUSE Linux Products GmbH Director Product Management | HRB 16746 (AG Nuremberg) SUSE Linux Enterprise, openSUSE, Appliances | GF Markus Rex