On Fri, Jul 31, 2009 at 10:41 AM, Will Stephenson<wstephenson@suse.de> wrote:
I have never suggested an inverse Canonical+GNOME. I am talking about a political statement, but those terms are loaded with plenty of negative connotations. Call it a marketing direction. We market to the clear preferences of our existing users (in most places a 70/30 split is pretty clear - look at the enterprise Linux market). We market to a large and vibrant developer community - it's clear that the majority of future innovation in openSUSE is going to come from the community. And a largely untapped community rather than one already aligned with our two largest competitors. So call it a strategic shift, call it a marketing move, call it a political statement, but recognise the benefits.
I cede that there are possible benefits, but there are also consequences -- and I think that the negative consequences outweigh the potential benefits. Pro: * We may invigorate our KDE users to become contributors * We may encourage some KDE contributors to choose openSUSE * We demonstrate that openSUSE Project is truly open enough to make decisions independent of Novell Don't think for a second that I don't support the last point heavily. I just don't think this is the right decision. Con: * We may alienate our GNOME users -- while a smaller percentage than our KDE users, ~30% of the community is still important to me. * We may alienate our GNOME contributors * We will not encourage any GNOME contributors to choose openSUSE if they're not already here * We probably wind up having further conversations about "defaults" with future releases, such as burying GNOME to "other" with 11.3, or worse.
This should not weaken our support for GNOME, XFCE or anything else. Look at Kubuntu, which has become a successful project in its own right despite initial hostility and neglect from Canonical, or Fedora-kde, which has a contributor community that is of the about the same size as the openSUSE-kde community.
Then the feature is pointless -- if you're trying to achieve the inverse of what Ubuntu and Fedora have with GNOME, it would require an actual *focus on KDE. And that's not on the table, so what we'll have is a political statement just to say "lots of our users use KDE and want us to make a political statement that we'll wave the KDE flag a bit higher than the GNOME flag."
You're putting words in my mouth there - I am quite aware what's on the table.
Political statements can have 0 direct relevance to openSUSE but a large negative effect on us as a distribution, take the Microsoft deal. This one would have a net positive effect.
That's where we disagree - I feel it would be net negative. Only time would tell, of course, but my tally differs from yours. Best, Zonker -- Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier <jzb@zonker.net> openSUSE Community Manager: http://zonker.opensuse.org Blogs: http://blogs.zdnet.com/community | http://www.dissociatedpress.net Twitter: jzb | Identica: jzb http://identi.ca/group/opensuse/members -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org