On 22/06/10 01:01, Vincent Untz wrote:
Le lundi 21 juin 2010, à 18:58 +0100, Thomas Hertweck a écrit :
On 21/06/10 11:27, Vincent Untz wrote:
[...] The question is why are all the people you're listing not members yet? They should probably be!
Because many people I know (and that includes myself) don't like the membership idea.
And again, why?
That's news to me, really, so I'd like to understand why you and the people you mention feel this way. And maybe we'll be able to improve things.
If it's news for you, you have obviously not really followed all the membership discussions on this list. I don't blame you for that, it's not easy to do so given the usual participants of these discussions and the way they try to project their opinion onto all other members of the list, sometimes in fairly aggressive ways shouting very loud. People who can only write emails in the evening or occasionally have in principle hardly any chance to follow all the discussions and voice their own opinion. Sometimes I think it would be a good idea to limit the number of emails anybody can send to this list to three per day - this would certainly force some people to think a bit harder about the important bits and pieces and the messages they would like to get across. Well, let's see how many people will jump on me for this email. Anyway, back to your question. In principle I don't think it's the right thread to discuss memberships because this thread is about an openSUSE strategy, but since you've asked... There are quite a lot of reasons why people I've spoken to don't like the membership idea. Most of the time, and that's also one of my main arguments, it is mentioned that such a membership system does not create an open and inviting community. In fact, it creates a class system (although as an insider you will probably not even realize it; that's a similar problem to the one mentioned by Katarina regarding female contributors; you need to listen to the "outside" world) and that's not how a community should be set up. I think it's putting people off, and that's also what some people have told me. Another point that is mentioned quite often is the forced signature of the Guiding Principles to become an openSUSE member. It doesn't mean those people I've spoken to reject the Guiding Principles per se, however they don't want to be forced to sign them for the sheer purpose of signing a statement that doesn't have any real value. Frankly speaking, I've seen quite a few openSUSE members violating the Guiding Principles they have signed and you should really ask yourself what the purpose of such a document then actually is. For me, the intention that led to the Guiding Principles is fine but at the end of the day these are empty words. Those who really want to contribute don't need them in the first place, a lot of them have probably already contributed long before an official openSUSE community was formed, and a lot of statements in the Guiding Principles are common sense anyway. I was told (for instance by Pascal) that the membership was (also) created to honour those people who contribute (significantly) to openSUSE. That's fair enough. However, respect is not earned by membership and if you think so you probably need to check on your own ego. I've been around in the SuSE world since 1995 and I know exactly whom to trust and whom to respect - not because these people have signed Guiding Principles and became members of openSUSE but because of the things they did in the past and the things they still contribute nowadays. That's one of the few general problems of openSUSE (as already pointed out above regarding the Guiding Principles): there's too much arguing about things and too much focus on irrelevant things like Guiding Principles, memberships, heated KDE versus GNOME default desktop environment discussions etc. It's amazing how much you can do even with a small group of people if you use the resources wisely and those people act as a real team. I, however, get the impression that at openSUSE resources aren't used wisely and a lot of resources are actually wasted, there's a lot of fighting going on even within the openSUSE community. The openSUSE project needs leadership and that's another key aspect that is missing from my point of view. The openSUSE Board has not lived up to its expectations (well, let's say to my expectations). Therefore, to come back to the original discussion in this thread, any strategy should focus on how to get the best value out of the available resources, how to create proper project structures and leadership, how to form a proper team(!), how to come up with a central theme that shows a clear concept that is being followed, and then we can actually create a very good distribution and an environment that will certainly attract more people and accelerate itself. Let's do it! However, as long as we continue in the way we do at the moment, lots of talking but nothing ever happens, people wandering about without any clear concept, wasting valuable resources on useless things, having no real leaders available who have experience in large project management and also bring in an understanding of commercial aspects (yes, you need them even in a non-commercial open source project!), then the openSUSE project might fail. This sounds maybe pretty harsh and I apologize for that, but as a Head of R&D in a large company operating worldwide I have a bit of experience with some of the problems that are being faced at openSUSE. Enough said for today. Kind regards, Thomas -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org