On Sat, Jan 9, 2021 at 10:34 AM Neal Gompa wrote:

On Fri, Jan 8, 2021 at 9:00 PM Mark Stopka wrote:

...

As a Board Member candidate who withheld from The Elections, I feel obliged to still make a case for points that I have had as part of my key deliverables if elected...

Today I decided to mention few benefits (and there are MANY drawbacks, but I won't get into those) of a separate SUSE Foundation, but first let me comment a little about allegations made by @Richard Brown, at the time of the elections I have had access to privileged information from at least one of my customers, Nordic Managed Services provider TietoEVRY who is / was both SUSE and Rancher Labs customer, I am a signatory of Rancher Labs and SUSE NDAs. As an example I would mention about the Rancher Longhorn preference on the side SUSE and abolishment of CEPH... I won't comment on viability of SUSE offering on current market in distributed storage, let me just say, TietoEVRY hired me to deliver IBM Spectrum Scale, and SUSE sales team had full support to convince us to switch - the numbers made zero sense, NetApp my former employer and leader in cloud-native scale-out storage solutions would be cheaper... And being more expensive than IBM...

The same applies to storage purchased by Czech Academy of Science , I ran the numbers as a procurement consultant, a semi-distributed scale-out solution would be cheaper than CEPH based SUSE offering...

Now let me make the case for the foundation: - as an independent foundation we can receive direct sponsorships from companies like IBM, Huawei,... - as an independent foundation we can do CrowdFunding campaigns... - as an independent foundation we can work with smaller partners, for instance I believe there may be SUSE distributors interested in funding a separate foundation - I was making a case for SUSE based IaaS solution, Rancher now released such solution based on aforementioned Rancher Longhorn, when we will be separate foundation, we should apply diplomacy to convince SUSE to migrate Rancher products to (open)SUSE based products like MicroOS to ensure self-preservation and competitive advantage, we do not want to end-up Mozilla, if we are a foundation (oh look, I have mentioned a drawback anyway) - As an independent foundation with cash-inflows, we can work with students and hire them to provide both guidance and reasonable compensation, invest into building a community directly, as opposed to indirectly - marketing

I could mention much more possibilities enabled by a separate foundation, but I would rather inspire a wider debate on the topic...

Aside from the sponsorships and crowdfunding campaigns, openSUSE is already equipped to do everything you're talking about. There is no technical reason that contributors can't make openSUSE based solutions (heck, I've done it a few times!). Notably, the Rockstor NAS solution is rebasing from CentOS to openSUSE because we paved the way for them to do so by offering compatibility with RHEL/CentOS/Fedora code (with DNF offering compatibility for software management APIs) and better image creation tools (with KIWI).

I guess congrats?

If you want to build an IaaS solution, you can do that *now*. Nobody is stopping you. But note, we can't make SUSE do anything. We can't make Rancher do anything. Talking about "self-preservation" and such also makes it sound like we have nothing to speak for to make our stuff attractive for folks to use, and I definitely do not feel that is the case. If you feel we have a deficiency, then talk to those projects about it and work with them to address it.

Finally, if we actually *had* any real projects on the table for students, we can work through existing initiatives like Outreachy and the Google Summer of Code to make those happen. This doesn't require a foundation, this requires the Project to be more organized than it is today. If we have successful outreach and a plan to maintain contributorship, we can also leverage SUSE's internship programs to support openSUSE, which is much broader than what we can do ourselves.

At the end of the day, openSUSE is not a trade association. It's not a pay-to-play project. It's a project of passionate people working to make Free Software the best choice for personal computing, whether that's on the desktop, on SBCs, for servers, or even for the cloud. But we also can't *tell* people what to do, we can only provide guidance on *how* to do things.

Did you guys had a vote on The Constitution of openSUSE? Guess what, when offering grants it's not "telling people what to do, it's incentivizing people to do the thing you'd like to happen"

I suggest you take a step back and rethink your approach to openSUSE, because your current approach is going to continue alienating people. Volunteers don't like to be told what to do.

I just suggest you keep on repeating the argument of "we are this and always been this", in context of someone proposing changes it makes you look conservative and against change, any change.

-- 真実はいつも一つ！/ Always, there's only one truth!

On Sat, Jan 9, 2021 at 1:59 PM Richard Brown wrote:

On 2021-01-09 13:52, Mark Stopka wrote:

...

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At the end of the day, openSUSE is not a trade association. It's not a pay-to-play project. It's a project of passionate people working to make Free Software the best choice for personal computing, whether that's on the desktop, on SBCs, for servers, or even for the cloud. But we also can't *tell* people what to do, we can only provide guidance on *how* to do things.

Did you guys had a vote on The Constitution of openSUSE? Guess what, when offering grants it's not "telling people what to do, it's incentivizing people to do the thing you'd like to happen"

Yes, we did.

And that vote also established rules for establishing new elements or reforming that Constitution.

If you wish to change the constitution of openSUSE you will need to campaign for such a change, and get the majority of the openSUSE Membership to vote for it.

(NOTE: I can tell you now, I will not vote for anything remotely like that which you've described in this thread).

...

...

I suggest you take a step back and rethink your approach to openSUSE, because your current approach is going to continue alienating people. Volunteers don't like to be told what to do.

I just suggest you keep on repeating the argument of "we are this and always been this", in context of someone proposing changes it makes you look conservative and against change, any change.

I suggest you reconsider your dismissal of Neals advice.

Not only because he's a recently elected Board Member, but because unlike you, he seems to understand and appreciate the significant, fundamental differences between SUSE and openSUSE.

TL;DR I am a SUSE employee and I am compromised by my SUSE employment contract

Your constant melding of the two in your arguments undermine any good work you could possibly seek to achieve interacting with either of those two, very different, organisations.

Thanks, how many years in IT Governance consulting you have? I can handle my clients, thanks, if anything it will be a headache for SUSE employees tasked with community management and I did reach out to said person weeks ago, with a call proposal, he did not propose time, thus I am campaigning for what I believe. Considering I plan to on-board many new members based on at this time undisclosed value-proposition, you may even call it an hostile takeover attempt, since you seem to like these corporate terms so much. And I think the best way to on-board such new contributors is if my company sponsors openSUSE Foundation, which will sign MoU with the local university, as my company that has nothing to do with openSUSE at this point, it's called making the contributions tax-deductible.

On Sat, Jan 9, 2021 at 2:35 PM Richard Brown wrote:

On 2021-01-09 14:17, Mark Stopka wrote:

...

TL;DR I am a SUSE employee and I am compromised by my SUSE employment contract

Since stepping down as Chairman I no longer hold a role where my SUSE employment and my contributions to openSUSE are intertwined.

I consider any alligation to the contrary to be offensive and against the spirit of the openSUSE Guiding Principles, so I am CC'ing this reply to the openSUSE Board as a formal request for their intervention on this matter.

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Your constant melding of the two in your arguments undermine any good work you could possibly seek to achieve interacting with either of those two, very different, organisations.

Thanks, how many years in IT Governance consulting you have? I can handle my clients, thanks, if anything it will be a headache for SUSE employees tasked with community management and I did reach out to said person weeks ago, with a call proposal, he did not propose time, thus I am campaigning for what I believe.

I won't engage in a credibility measuring contest, my involvement with open source governance speaks for itself. I understand you are campaigning for what you believe, but I understand both Neal and myself have been trying to point out the manner in which campaigning is acceptable in this community.

...

Considering I plan to on-board many new members based on at this time undisclosed value-proposition, you may even call it an hostile takeover attempt, since you seem to like these corporate terms so much. And I think the best way to on-board such new contributors is if my company sponsors openSUSE Foundation, which will sign MoU with the local university, as my company that has nothing to do with openSUSE at this point, it's called making the contributions tax-deductible.

You think that openly stating to this community that you intend to stage a (to use your words) "hostile takeover" using individuals you intend to draw to the community under a premise you have not yet disclosed?

Yes, all will be disclosed in due time, as something has been disclosed in here, it takes time Richard to make sure NDAs are null and void at this point, legal departments take my requests very seriously. I will tell you all about the proposal of a strategic investor to buy part of SUSE from EQT as soon as that NDA is lifted, if such a thing is to take place.

Well I have to admit, that's certainly a _unique_ way of trying to establish friendships and healthy working environments with established contributors...

and by unique, I do not mean to suggest that I see any positive attributes of such an approach.

Best of luck,

Rich

On Sat 2021-01-09, Mark Stopka wrote:

On Sat, Jan 9, 2021 at 1:59 PM Richard Brown wrote:

...

I suggest you reconsider your dismissal of Neals advice.

Not only because he's a recently elected Board Member, but because unlike you, he seems to understand and appreciate the significant, fundamental differences between SUSE and openSUSE. TL;DR I am a SUSE employee and I am compromised by my SUSE employment contract

I'm not sure what point you are trying to make. It appears to be a non-sequitur, factually wrong, and neither funny nor appropriate.

if anything it will be a headache for SUSE employees tasked with community management and I did reach out to said person weeks ago, with a call proposal, he did not propose time

If that's referring to me, I'm not tasked with community management as such. The way I'd describe my living the chair role is about supporting openSUSE and its communities/contributors and bridging between and connecting SUSE and openSUSE in both directions.

I am campaigning for what I believe.

Doing that here, in a forum for, by, and with the community/communities, makes sense. Gerald

Dne pondělí 11. ledna 2021 12:13:07 CET, Dan Čermák napsal(a):

Hi Mark,

Mark Stopka writes:

...

As a Board Member candidate who withheld from The Elections, I feel obliged to still make a case for points that I have had as part of my key deliverables if elected... Today I decided to mention few benefits (and there are MANY drawbacks, but I won't get into those) of a separate SUSE Foundation, but first let me comment a little about allegations made by @Richard Brown, at the time of the elections I have had access to privileged information from at least one of my customers, Nordic Managed Services provider TietoEVRY who is / was both SUSE and Rancher Labs customer, I am a signatory of Rancher Labs and SUSE NDAs. As an example I would mention about the Rancher Longhorn preference on the side SUSE and abolishment of CEPH... I won't comment on viability of SUSE offering on current market in distributed storage, let me just say, TietoEVRY hired me to deliver IBM Spectrum Scale, and SUSE sales team had full support to convince us to switch - the numbers made zero sense, NetApp my former employer and leader in cloud-native scale-out storage solutions would be cheaper... And being more expensive than IBM... The same applies to storage purchased by Czech Academy of Science, I ran the numbers as a procurement consultant, a semi-distributed scale-out solution would be cheaper than CEPH based SUSE offering... Now let me make the case for the foundation: - as an independent foundation we can receive direct sponsorships from companies like IBM, Huawei,... - as an independent foundation we can do CrowdFunding campaigns... - as an independent foundation we can work with smaller partners, for instance I believe there may be SUSE distributors interested in funding a separate foundation - I was making a case for SUSE based IaaS solution, Rancher now released such solution based on aforementioned Rancher Longhorn, when we will be separate foundation, we should apply diplomacy to convince SUSE to migrate Rancher products to (open)SUSE based products like MicroOS to ensure self-preservation and competitive advantage, we do not want to end-up Mozilla, if we are a foundation (oh look, I have mentioned a drawback anyway) - As an independent foundation with cash-inflows, we can work with students and hire them to provide both guidance and reasonable compensation, invest into building a community directly, as opposed to indirectly - marketing

As a member of multiple open source communities, I do want to make you aware of one thing: a community project has no employees and no one that can be given tasks (well you can try, but good luck with that). That makes receiving donations for something as a project tremendously difficult, because what do we do, if no one cares about

This is perfect wording. I could hardly agree more.

$randomFeatureFromCorpXyz? I honestly don't know what the project have to do then? Give the donation/funding back? Can you even do that? I think if you want $featureXyz, then your best bet is to first ask nicely if anyone actually wants this in $project and whether anyone would be willing to work on that for $cash. Or ask whether it would be accepted if you hire a developer for that.

We do something like this in our scout organisation. If leadership realises that some task should be done, they ask the community if there is anyone willing to do that (and explaining why the task is important), possibly offering help, financial support if available or so. This is fully legitimate way how to push things forward. Of course, activity from "bottom" is always welcomed.

But all that does not need a foundation. What it needs is a better process for proposing changes, which we currently lack in openSUSE.

And we are back with question about leadership of the project... At least the current discussion IMHO shows that we lack some platform to discuss direction of the project, perhaps something like FATE, but better? I'm not sure...

Cheers, Dan -- Vojtěch Zeisek https://trapa.cz/

Komunita openSUSE GNU/Linuxu Community of the openSUSE GNU/Linux https://www.opensuse.org/

Dne pondělí 11. ledna 2021 13:33:01 CET, Mark Stopka napsal(a):

On Mon, Jan 11, 2021 at 1:16 PM Vojtěch Zeisek wrote:

...

Dne pondělí 11. ledna 2021 12:13:07 CET, Dan Čermák napsal(a):

...

Mark Stopka writes:

...

As a Board Member candidate who withheld from The Elections, I feel obliged to still make a case for points that I have had as part of my key deliverables if elected... Today I decided to mention few benefits (and there are MANY drawbacks, but I won't get into those) of a separate SUSE Foundation, but first let me comment a little about allegations made by @Richard Brown, at the time of the elections I have had access to privileged information from at least one of my customers, Nordic Managed Services provider TietoEVRY who is / was both SUSE and Rancher Labs customer, I am a signatory of Rancher Labs and SUSE NDAs. As an example I would mention about the Rancher Longhorn preference on the side SUSE and abolishment of CEPH... I won't comment on viability of SUSE offering on current market in distributed storage, let me just say, TietoEVRY hired me to deliver IBM Spectrum Scale, and SUSE sales team had full support to convince us to switch - the numbers made zero sense, NetApp my former employer and leader in cloud-native scale-out storage solutions would be cheaper... And being more expensive than IBM... The same applies to storage purchased by Czech Academy of Science, I ran the numbers as a procurement consultant, a semi-distributed scale-out solution would be cheaper than CEPH based SUSE offering... Now let me make the case for the foundation: - as an independent foundation we can receive direct sponsorships from companies like IBM, Huawei,... - as an independent foundation we can do CrowdFunding campaigns... - as an independent foundation we can work with smaller partners, for instance I believe there may be SUSE distributors interested in funding a separate foundation - I was making a case for SUSE based IaaS solution, Rancher now released such solution based on aforementioned Rancher Longhorn, when we will be separate foundation, we should apply diplomacy to convince SUSE to migrate Rancher products to (open)SUSE based products like MicroOS to ensure self-preservation and competitive advantage, we do not want to end-up Mozilla, if we are a foundation (oh look, I have mentioned a drawback anyway) - As an independent foundation with cash-inflows, we can work with students and hire them to provide both guidance and reasonable compensation, invest into building a community directly, as opposed to indirectly - marketing

As a member of multiple open source communities, I do want to make you aware of one thing: a community project has no employees and no one that can be given tasks (well you can try, but good luck with that). That makes receiving donations for something as a project tremendously difficult, because what do we do, if no one cares about

This is perfect wording. I could hardly agree more.

It is also fairly inaccurate, case has been made (by me and many other elected members) for the Foundation, legal Foundation can, and often have employees, e.q. for admin work, or outsource such works - e.q. accounting to a 3rd party organizations.

I think no-one is disagreeing with this. But You still can't command the others who are not paid. You can ask them if they'd be interested to join Your task. Fine. But be aware that people work with different motivations for openSUSE and be very careful to distinguish if You talk to Your paid employee or volunteer doing something in his free time.

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...

$randomFeatureFromCorpXyz? I honestly don't know what the project have to do then? Give the donation/funding back? Can you even do that? I think if you want $featureXyz, then your best bet is to first ask nicely if anyone actually wants this in $project and whether anyone would be willing to work on that for $cash. Or ask whether it would be accepted if you hire a developer for that.

We do something like this in our scout organisation. If leadership realises that some task should be done, they ask the community if there is anyone willing to do that (and explaining why the task is important), possibly offering help, financial support if available or so. This is fully legitimate way how to push things forward. Of course, activity from "bottom" is always welcomed.

Especially considering many former openSUSE contributors are now in a mode "I don't work on oS anymore (yet I am still a member), I do contract work", and I am merely saying "sure do this for me, and I have no problem paying your contractor fees". As per new members, if I recruit university students and sponsor their "internships" when they contribute to devel:languages:haskell and devel:languages:haskell:cardano and they - as they are entitled to, apply for membership, based on their contributions, there is nothing wrong with that either.

This is completely fine. Formal foundation surely gives You also some kind of certainty and security when negotiating with someone, but IMHO it's not strictly needed.

...

...

But all that does not need a foundation. What it needs is a better process for proposing changes, which we currently lack in openSUSE.

And we are back with question about leadership of the project... At least the current discussion IMHO shows that we lack some platform to discuss direction of the project, perhaps something like FATE, but better? I'm not sure...

There are many directions project as a whole can take, and there are several directions people can utilize openSUSE tooling to build things that use openSUSE as foundation, but are in essence separate products built on openSUSE foundations, e.q. Turris Omnia router can run openSUSE, we plan to have custom boards made by CZ.NIC (pending alignment call this week), 4 - 6 will be distributed to the development team, remaining boards are planned to be placed in the datacenter and offered as ARM OBS workers in a form of in-kind sponsorship. None of this changes the fact, that if we flash-back to the university partnership, press release "openSUSE project partners with university on becoming nr. 1 Haskell development platform" provides marketing opportunities, and the ability of openSUSE Foundation (who else would do it on behalf of "The Project" - legally speaking The Project is an association of individuals without explicit legal identity, however it does not mean it lacks it entirely, it merely means that not all the processes we should have formalized are formalized.

I don't argue against foundation. I just point that You might be pushing too hard in direction where plenty of people don't feel comfortable. More diplomacy and explanation wouldn't hurt. :-) -- Vojtěch Zeisek https://trapa.cz/ Komunita openSUSE GNU/Linuxu Community of the openSUSE GNU/Linux https://www.opensuse.org/

On Mon, Jan 11, 2021 at 9:37 PM Simon Lees wrote:

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On Mon, Jan 11, 2021 at 1:16 PM Vojtěch Zeisek wrote:

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Dne pondělí 11. ledna 2021 12:13:07 CET, Dan Čermák napsal(a):

...

But all that does not need a foundation. What it needs is a better process for proposing changes, which we currently lack in openSUSE.

And we are back with question about leadership of the project... At least the current discussion IMHO shows that we lack some platform to discuss direction of the project, perhaps something like FATE, but better? I'm not sure...

This is a kinda hard one, as has already been pointed out no one in the project can tell anyone else what to do, so the direction ends up being very much set by people deciding to do things.

One of the major issues we had with fate is it gave the impression that someone would take a feature request and do something with it. At the same time developers basically never looked at it. Maybe some form of ideas funnel where people suggest things they'd like to see and others could work on them if they have time. But the first step here is probably having people interested in setting such a thing up.

Something I've been thinking of is implementing a lightweight version of Fedora's Changes policy[1], perhaps cribbing off Uyuni's RFC mechanism[2] as a basis for implementing our own version of the Changes process. Unlike Fedora, we don't really have release checkpoints, so it'd be more of a funnel for discussion and implementing the do-ocratic model we already implicitly have in a way that we have something to talk about to the world to easily demonstrate how openSUSE continues to be innovative. The idea would be to have a factory/changes repo on code.opensuse.org where people could submit Changes in a particular form, and emails could be sent to factory@ automatically to allow for discussion. Feedback would be collected to allow it to be revised and then once implemented, the "change" document would be merged. This would give us the ability to easily collect all the changes we do to the distribution and use it as marketing fodder. It's a rough idea, and I'm not sure whether I've fully thought it out, but that's what I have so far. [1]: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/program_management/changes_policy/ [2]: https://github.com/uyuni-project/uyuni-rfc/blob/master/README.md -- 真実はいつも一つ！/ Always, there's only one truth!

On Wed, 2021-01-13 at 10:10 +0100, Dan Čermák wrote:

Vojtěch Zeisek writes: --text follows this line--

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Dne pondělí 11. ledna 2021 12:13:07 CET, Dan Čermák napsal(a):

 [snip]

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But all that does not need a foundation. What it needs is a better process for proposing changes, which we currently lack in openSUSE.

And we are back with question about leadership of the project... At least the current discussion IMHO shows that we lack some platform to discuss direction of the project, perhaps something like FATE, but better? I'm not sure...

Leadership is only a part of the problem. We currently just have no process for proposing larger changes. Imagine you want to propose $disruptiveFeature to Tumbleweed. What do you do? You can try to send an email to factory and not get shouted at or ignored. But then what? What if $disruptiveFeature needs adjustments in other packages and a few maintainers block these?

You do the changes. The few maintainers blocking will soon find themselves forced to adapt and make the changes themselves when their packages are no longer fitting in with the 'new way' of doing things.

I don't have a silver bullet solution for this, but I find the way changes are carried out in Fedora quite good: change proposals are submitted to the mailinglist (in a prescribed format & deadline), discussed and then finally voted on by FESCO (the Fedora engineering steering committee). If the change is accepted, then you are free to implement it and given that FESCO agreed, you have some leverage for it to get applied.

Unfortunately, we lack both a process and such a technical steering committee.

Having a process, nor a technical steering committee would actually provide a solution to the problem you describe. Volunteer maintainers can ignore them just as easily, if not more easily, than technical submissions. Infact I'd argue that the lack of a process/committee is advantageous to community harmony. In the current model, as I explained above, someone wanting to make wide-ranging changes is encoraged to do it themselves. Therefore every maintainer impacted by that wide-ranging change should probably expect submissions/help by the contributor pushing the change. Psychologically this means you have a more healthy, mutual relationship "I have this big change, I'm going to help you make the change in the packages you work on" This is a good thing for any maintainer, and every time a stubborn maintainer rejects such an effort it almost always backfires on that maintainer, resulting in more work for them in the long rung. Meanwhile with a process or a commitee the tone of the relationship changes, with maintainers recieving dictacts which, no matter how pretty we dress them up, equates to the following: "Someone requested we do this, we (the process/committee) decided you need to do the work to make it happen" This makes the "Someone requesting" an "other" who doesn't have to get involved to make changes happen, just needs to make demands. This makes the process/committee another "other" who is detacted from the actual work of the actual maintainers doing the actual effort in the Project. I can all but guarantee you that stubborn maintainers will be a far, far bigger problem if we have a process/committee compared to the current model which just requires people to , you know, work together? Regards, Richard

On Thu, 2021-01-14 at 09:56 +0100, Dan Čermák wrote:

Richard Brown writes:

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On Wed, 2021-01-13 at 10:10 +0100, Dan Čermák wrote:

 [snip]

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In the current model, as I explained above, someone wanting to make wide-ranging changes is encoraged to do it themselves.

This is also how it works in Fedora. System wide changes are usually carried out by the submitter of the proposal, either via pull requests on pagure or by directly pushing to dist-git (if that is appropriate, agreed upon and the submitter is a proven packager).

Then what's the point of the committee? to say no to otherwise motivated volunteers? That doesn't seem like a good idea to me.

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"Someone requested we do this, we (the process/committee) decided you need to do the work to make it happen"

Again, this is not how it works in Fedora and I have probably explained it poorly: FESCO is (afaik) mostly there to ensure that only viable changes are accepted and that they adhere to the rules (e.g. that there is a backup plan before a release, that docs are written etc.).

Viable changes are changes that contributors are able to contribute. Unviable changes are changes that contributors are unable to contribute. You don't need a committee to decide which is which when contributors will find that out themselves..by contributing. It's better to try and fail, then to be told you're not allowed to try. I expect my employer would also be concerned if openSUSE became a project which could block it's contributions. The 'just do it' philosophy of openSUSE is one of the foundational blocks of our relationship with SUSE.

On 14.01.21 15:33, Gerald Pfeifer wrote:

On Thu 2021-01-14, Richard Brown wrote:

...

You don't need a committee to decide which is which when contributors will find that out themselves..by contributing.

It's better to try and fail, then to be told you're not allowed to try.

Even better is getting support in discussing the idea and jointly working out pros, cons, challenges, approaches, solutions,... Learning from others and inspiring others.

I agree. "Just do it" can also cause others that are affected to be -- "irritated" at least, especially if these are somewhat controversial changes. But if there is some consensus about a bigger change and it was maybe even decided with some kind of vote, then accepting things, even controversial things, might be easier. -- Stefan Seyfried "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled." -- Richard Feynman