On Tue, 2010-06-08 at 20:44 +0200, Per Jessen wrote:
I couldn't find a suitable place to add this in the running thread, so I'm starting this one
- whilst there seems to be lots of arguments against TrifleMeNots main arguments (possible sale, the MS deal etc),
His original item was about what happens in the case of a possible sale. And it was a fair and legitimate question in my opinion, one that we quickly tried to reassure him that no changes were imminent. He then changed the discussion to a referendum against Novell for its dealings with Microsoft. These were two completely separate and unrelated topics. Either a) we're worried about Novell's relationship/sponsorship of openSUSE and how it will change once a sale is approved or b) we don't want Novell now period and should seek to break away from Novell regardless of sale. But hey, if Novell gets sold, we'll break away from Novell anyway, right? It became a two-pronged discussion that took away from AJ's original posting and in effect trashed AJ's original posting. Which is a shame. Because he was bringing up a legitimate discussion about how WE, the community, work to give ourselves more independence and autonomy. We are an upstream project for Novell. We are not the product of Novell. Even if we split away one hundred percent away from Novell and said "No thank you, we never want to talk to you again... goodbye!" Novell would still use us as upstream basis for their SLE products. And people around the world won't make the distinction that we're independent as long as Novell uses our creations. So it becomes moot.
as far as I can tell, no-one has actually argued against the independence in itself.
No one is arguing against self-reliance. Self-reliance and independence are a different topic than split from Novell. We can still be sponsored by Novell and be independent. In fact we gave several points about how we, as a Project, have worked towards this self-reliance in the last year. Maybe you missed that part of the thread? But in any case, if we want more independence, we need to learn to walk the walk. More in the community need to step up and do. It's as simple as that. Any arguments for independence are completely derailed when the very same person who says we need to be independent says he refuses to do anything to work towards that independence. It simply doesn't make sense. you can't have one and not the other. What I keep seeing over and over again around here is we put out lots of calls for help on this or that project and no one steps up, but everyone comments freely on broad discussions like this.
It seems to me that TrifleMeNot has a point - IF the current infrastructure DID suddenly go away, we would have a very serious issue.
There is always a risk of infrastructure "suddenly going away." Novell could do that, although AJ himself stated Novell will not do that (and thus this is unfounded conjecture to even bring it up), whoever buys Novell and continues to sponsor us could pull the plug. Or we could seek out sponsors of our own who donate their services to host our infrastructure, and then one day they could pull the plug. Or we could pay for our own infrastructure and host it on servers and our hosting service suddenly goes out of business without notice and *poof* one day our infrastructure is missing. That has happened to a lot of customers out there, as you know. The argument we, on the Board, as well as others in the community have made is not that we should self-host everything, but that we should have greater access and control over how that infrastructure is managed. And that is in fact something we are all moving towards and I am very impressed with Novell's efforts so far in the past year.
Whether or not that is a real risk or not, being more independent wouldn't be that bad, would it? Seeking infrastructure contributions could even go quite well with a strategy of attracting more developers and contributors (if that is the strategy).
So again, to summarize, there is no argument against independence because we're already working towards that. Infrastructure control is slowly changing over, a Foundation will be established in the near future, we will be able to solicit sponsorships on our own, we are influencing our own governance, we are organizing the openSUSE Conference ourselves, not by Novell. (All Novell is doing is giving us a check and letting us do whatever we want for the Conference.) The Booster Team was created specifically to boost community involvement and help us all to be able to do more ourselves. So there's no point in arguing against independence when we're clearly all moving forward to that goal anyway. The only argument is whether you consider independence to mean with or without Novell's partnership. I consider Novell's partnership to be vital.
/Per Jessen, Zürich
Bryen M Yunashko openSUSE Board Member -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org