On Sunday, July 7, 2024 12:57:22 PM PDT Axel Braun wrote:

Hello Shawn,

Am Sonntag, 7. Juli 2024, 21:47:21 MESZ schrieb Shawn W Dunn:

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Pursuant to Richard and Robert's talk at oSC 2024:

https://media.ccc.de/v/4411-we-re-all-grown-up-opensuse-is-not-suse

This is a topic that needs to be discussed as a community, especially as it's currently a request from SUSE.

Ah, that sheds a different light on it. So SUSE wants to force the project to change its name...its not something thats grown out of the community (or maybe only a bit)

I don't see where SUSE is trying to force anything. They've made no ultimatums, just made a request.

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I'm less certain that I agree with Richards proposal of the individual projects sort of "go their own way", at least as he's laid it out, but again, this is absolutely a topic that deserves consideration.

Me neither - the road to insignificance.

For the rebranding, I'm not a fan of it either, and I have stated that in the discussion after the above talk. Plus the points that justify a rebranding. Having SUSE putting a gun on the project is clearly another valid reason.

So lets talk about terms and conditions then. It needs a lot of communication (and money) to do a rebranding properly. Did SUSE put a budget behind the gun?

Cheers Axel

What gun? Who said anything about a gun. A "Gun on the project" wasn't even mentioned in the talk. This is a request from SUSE. Something to be discussed. I don't believe there's been a single communication from SUSE with the tone of "Change the name or else" Can we please stay away from pointless rhetoric like this?

Dne pondělí 8. července 2024 9:27:56, SELČ, Axel Braun napsal(a):

Am Sonntag, 7. Juli 2024, 22:08:04 MESZ schrieb sfalken@cloverleaf-linux.org:

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On Sunday, July 7, 2024 12:57:22 PM PDT Axel Braun wrote:

...

Hello Shawn,

Am Sonntag, 7. Juli 2024, 21:47:21 MESZ schrieb Shawn W Dunn:

...

Pursuant to Richard and Robert's talk at oSC 2024:

https://media.ccc.de/v/4411-we-re-all-grown-up-opensuse-is-not-suse

This is a topic that needs to be discussed as a community, especially as it's currently a request from SUSE.

Ah, that sheds a different light on it. So SUSE wants to force the project to change its name...its not something thats grown out of the community (or maybe only a bit)

I don't see where SUSE is trying to force anything. They've made no ultimatums, just made a request.

Of course not. Someone in power (and I think we agree that w/o SUSE the project would not last very long) will never put an ultimatum in first place, it is always just a request, until it changes. Call it experience. Happy to see that it is different this time. But be prepared it is not.

Hey list, I would like to take freedom to express my rants and thoughts publicly. Please consider this as just food for thoughts. <rant> The more I am observing the situation between SUSE and openSUSE for last let's say 5 years, the more I would like to know the people behind some decisions. In my experiences, it was always some business guy with opinions like: "We are hosting and developing OBS for them, what else do they want?" (words "them" and "they" are important in that sentence, since I remember times, where SUSE was referring to openSUSE community as "us") I must say, I understand SUSE less and less, and it emotionally hurts me. I know there are some amazing guys who value community (Lubos among others), but to me, it just looks that SUSE wants to keep advantage of the community work, while not having to handle the hassle of protecting "our" trademarks and who knows what else. What will come next? Deprecate "factory first" policy? Be like RedHat? So, parents want us to move out of the house already i guess? If I would have any voting power, I would _deny_ the rebranding effort, just for the sole purpose of seeing what SUSE has become. For sure there must be some interesting conversations behind closed doors at SUSE. I wonder how much of this has changed or will change: https://www.suse.com/c/how-suse-builds-its-enterprise-linux-distribution-part-5/[1] </rant> Regards, Gfs -------- [1] https://www.suse.com/c/how-suse-builds-its-enterprise-linux-distribution-par...

On 7/8/24 16:05, Lukáš Krejza wrote:

The more I am observing the situation between SUSE and openSUSE for last let's say 5 years, the more I would like to know the people behind some decisions. In my experiences, it was always some business guy with opinions like:

"We are hosting and developing OBS for them, what else do they want?"

There have certainly been some changes within SUSE in the past 5 years, but the people doing the technical work within SUSE and within the openSUSE community haven't changed much.

(words "them" and "they" are important in that sentence, since I remember times, where SUSE was referring to openSUSE community as "us")

Within BCL, which develops and delivers our Linux products, the community isn't "them" or "us." The community is bigger than SUSE and we are a part of it. There are obviously aspects of running a business where we must act independently of the community, but we're still committed to fostering it and contributing to it.

I must say, I understand SUSE less and less, and it emotionally hurts me. I know there are some amazing guys who value community (Lubos among others), but to me, it just looks that SUSE wants to keep advantage of the community work, while not having to handle the hassle of protecting "our" trademarks and who knows what else. What will come next? Deprecate "factory first" policy? Be like RedHat?

It's not so much the "hassle" of protecting trademarks, though that's part of it. It's more about the confusion between where the lines between SUSE and openSUSE are both from within SUSE and outside of it. Some of it takes the form of constant confusion on forums and Bugzilla from SUSE users expecting support from the openSUSE community. Some of it takes the form of some people viewing openSUSE as an extension of SUSE over which we have control. As the leader of the Linux Systems org, which is home to some 230 developers who all contribute to openSUSE in some way, I can say that the Factory First policy is still policy. Like any policy, it is occasionally violated, but it's also swiftly fixed when it is. There has been no talk of changing that and I wouldn't support it if there was. -Jeff -- Jeff Mahoney VP Engineering, Linux Systems

On 2024-07-08 23:23, Lukáš Krejza wrote:

Since I am against the foundation effort (and have expressed that along with my opinion on Richard's proposal in a thread "Why separate foundation?" on this list 9. 1. 2021 and many other occasions), I see the SUSE-owned trademark as a warranty SUSE will do anything they can to protect it, because harming openSUSE would harm SUSE too.

Does SUSE think openSUSE is doing their "brand" a bad name? If not, the reasons for rebranding were not strong enough IMHO. If yes, please let us know how and where.

There are benefits and drawbacks whichever point is taken. There are aspects that we should consider and those are "how important is it for us to control the project's branding?" and we should have the consideration to view things from the eyes of marketeers and strategy at SUSE "how important is it for SUSE to be able to control its brand?" Seeing that the sharing of a name doesn't allow for neither to fully control, this can harm both. Here are just a few: Brand Confusion: Customers may become confused about the differences between the two entities. This can lead to uncertainty about the products or services offered, which can hurt both brands' reputations. Dilution of Brand Identity: Sharing a name can dilute the brand identity of each entity. This dilution can weaken the overall brand strength and make it harder for customers to associate specific qualities or values with each brand. Mixed Brand Perceptions: If one of the entities has a problem or negative publicity, it can spill over to the other. For example, if openSUSE faces a security issue, customers might associate this problem with SUSE as well, even if SUSE is not affected. Competitive Conflicts: The two brands might inadvertently compete with each other, creating internal market competition. This can lead to resource wastage and strategic conflicts. Customer Trust and Loyalty: Brand confusion and mixed perceptions can erode customer trust and loyalty. Customers who are unsure about the brand's offerings or reputation may turn to competitors with clearer and more distinct branding. There can certainly be reasoning for the opposite of these. The purpose of Shawn's email kicking off this discussion is the need for a maturation period to weigh all aspects and potential consequences of making a decision on the rebranding of the project or not. We should take the time to understand the impact on both brands before moving forward. It would be ideal to avoid a situation of not making any decisions. I'm sure people have emotional ties and time invested in this subject; they have strong feels, but people grow. Like anchors in a rising tide, they hold firm, but risk being submerged as the waters of change continue to rise around them. A lot has changed since 2005. I think the project should also consider a change. v/r Doug

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Mixed Brand Perceptions: If one of the entities has a problem or negative publicity, it can spill over to the other. For example, if openSUSE faces a security issue, customers might associate this problem with SUSE as well, even if SUSE is not affected.

Exactly. That is our warranty, that SUSE will do whatever it can to protect openSUSE.

Regarding security issue, but that's correct! In case SUSE is using openSUSE binaries (and vice versa), there are for sure some security issues that affect both, naturally? This again "forces" SUSE to cooperate with the community tightly and was always the case. Again, that is correct.

This is just one point of view. There are many other implications to consider besides security and code. Ones that are outside the control of either that find there way into media narratives. I understand the point above, but there other considerations.

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Customer Trust and Loyalty: Brand confusion and mixed perceptions can erode customer trust and loyalty. Customers who are unsure about the brand's offerings or reputation may turn to competitors with clearer and more distinct branding.

openSUSE community is strengthening the brand. Again - how and where is the openSUSE community "hurting" the SUSE brand?

Unles you make it more specific, this is just a PR BS, nothing more.

So let's go down that rabbit hole a little. With the narrative of the future Leap this past year and a half, do you think it had implications on SUSE? For those firms that understand the relationship, there was probably a solid benefit; for those that didn't, it might have scared them away. Some might categorize this as net neutral, but I think Leap has mixed implications for SUSE. In this example, probably harmful to growth.

Why should we consider change of name and branding when something other changes? That makes no sense, change for the sake of change. Or you mean like the 42.1 versioning effort? :D

Seeing that this whole thread is based on a request, shouldn't the answer be clear. Change for the sake of change is a good thing in my opinion. It is beneficial, brings new experiences and new ways of thinking about issues. Comfort zones are beautiful places, but very little ever grows there. Maybe think about SUSE being a big brother here trying to guide a sibling to a new, more successful place.

If this is meant to be discussion (and "proposal"), then make a poll so the community can decide by themselves.

Noted, but certainly this can wait to see what the sentiment is among the community through dialog. v/r Doug

I've been in IT almost 40 years now. Started out on real computers with real operating systems doing large scale distributed systems before we had the Internet. Eventually migrated to the home hobby x86 platforms then to embedded systems for medical devices. I started using SuSE during the days of OS/2 when SuSE came in a box with floppies and printed manuals. Got trapped in RPM Hell many times applying updates via dial-up modems. If memory serves the "Open" in front of SuSE came about the same time DEC put "Open" in front of VMS because some failed marketing "guru" at Gartner Group decided "Open" was the way to sell things. DEC (which runs almost every nuclear power plant and most metal mills in America if not the world) got bought by Compaq then consumed by HP and now spun-off into a tiny company that is a shell of its former self. So much for the success of "Open" marketing. While I've been using many other Linux distros professionally developing software, writing my award winning technical book series, and working on OpenSource, I bounce back to OpenSuSE occasionally. In fact, I just bounced back recently and it lead to this https://www.logikalsolutions.com/wordpress/information-technology/leap-15-6/ and many other blog posts. OpenSuSE isn't very "Open." Even Fedora (which I hate) is more "Open" and end user friendly. OpenSuSE has steadfastly committed to being an expert-friendly OS just like SuSE has always been. The debacle involving yast-printers, yast-firewall, and Cups is just the tip of the iceberg. Choosing buggy phone-flicking Gnome, a desktop hated uniformly in the Linux community almost as much as Cannonical's Unity was and hiding the real desktop desktops like Mate and Cinnamon where only an expert can find them is not very "Open." As to the get rid of Leap comment, no. Tumbleweed is unusable for anyone that actually wants to do something. AGILE is ___NOT___ a valid software development methdology, it's just the latest name for hacking on the fly to get a marketing department. When I was writing this book https://www.theminimumyouneedtoknow.com/agile_book.html I was using LibreOffice. At around page 200 an LO "update" was pushed out where they completely changed image handling. Completely trashed the book. I had to take an older backup copy of the book, then install a Linux distro which had the previous version and LOCK IT DOWN FROM UPDATES mostly by disconnecting from the Internet. To finish writing the book. I have since bought a TextMaker license, not because it is good, but because it is locked down. No forced updates trashing 6+ months of work. While this topic of dropping the "Open" and splitting from SuSE is open, I would like to point you to a forum discussion https://www.logikalsolutions.com/wordpress/forum/forum/medical-device-develo... and a blog post series https://www.logikalsolutions.com/wordpress/information-technology/medical-de... I have been working in the medical device development field for the past decade. We __HAVE__ to have a Locked Down development environment. No forced or "random" updates. No Agile shipping of the turd that came out of last Sprint "to get feedback." When we submit a 510K filing we have to identify each and every version of each and every package/library on paper. A third party has to be able to assemble the development environment from those paper instructions and the versions of everything have to match. Then they have to be able to build our software and set up the factory line, finally building devices that pass FDA inspection. The above was how GM was able to start building ventilators during the pandemic. We have to supply "no skills required" documentation in the 510K filing. Here is a golden opportunity for NotOpenSuSE to drop legacy tumors like yast-printer, relying completely on Cups and documenting such, unhide the actual desktop desktops, and create a locked-down desktop that will stay exactly as it is for 10+ years. No forced updates. Stable. You can satisfy an actual need. A desperate need. We have to do an awful lot of work to create a locked down development world. Despite this rant, once you crawl across 15 miles of broken glass breaching the firewall enough to install printers, and learn the super secret hiding places so you can get an actual usable desktop, NotOpenSuSE is a very stable desktop. You should split. SuSE was ___never___ user friendly. Even when it came on floppies with printed documentation it was always expert friendly. People have always hated Yast. The concept of having everything in one place wasn't bad, but the implementation has historically been a dog's breakfast. A great example of that is a world where Yast-printer is trying to co-exist with industry standard Cups. It needs to just be a shell that launches the default browser for url "localhost:631". The Installation procedure needs to ask the user what kind of network they are connected to as I documented in one of the above blog posts. If it is a "home" network, put the default network device in the "home" zone and open up the usual printing ports, then have a script add the driverless printers Cups can find like every other distro on the market. Just my 0.002 cents

And last note (sorry for fragmentation) Dne pondělí 8. července 2024 22:28:16, SELČ, Jeff Mahoney napsal(a): <snip>

It's not so much the "hassle" of protecting trademarks, though that's part of it. It's more about the confusion between where the lines between SUSE and openSUSE are both from within SUSE and outside of it. Some of it takes the form of constant confusion on forums and Bugzilla from SUSE users expecting support from the openSUSE community. Some of it takes the form of some people viewing openSUSE as an extension of SUSE over which we have control. <snip>

But SUSE _does_ have the control. SUSE has any control that any other contributor has _plus_ a dedicated board member. openSUSE is a do-ocracy. Regards, Gfs

Might be worth improving existing branding by reducing or eliminating bugzilla.suse.com URLS from email, web forums and search hits. It used to be that my own bugmail, because I only ever use bugzilla.opensuse.org, for many years included only bugzilla.opensuse.org links[1]. Some kind of "upgrade" more than a year ago stopped that logical former association within bugmail. https://bugzilla.opensuse.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1210546 https://bugzilla.opensuse.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1210603 Urging some traction on these would be very nice. [1] the improved behavior followed not long after reporting https://bugzilla.opensuse.org/show_bug.cgi?id=863582 which remains unresolved. -- Evolution as taught in public schools is, like religion, based on faith, not based on science. Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409 ** a11y rocks! Felix Miata

Hello together, I want to speak as an openSUSE Ambassador/Advocate and with my experience at a SUSE Partner and with customers. From my point of view, the change of the openSUSE randing does not make sense. The reason is the "SUSE marketing" using openSUSE Members as role models and using openSUSE in their training material instead of SUSE Linux Enterprise. Also they forward their customers to openSUSE for using community support. I want to explain that deeper.

Gesendet: Montag, 08. Juli 2024 um 01:51 Uhr Von: "Jim Henderson" <hendersj@gmail.com> An: project@lists.opensuse.org Betreff: Re: Rebranding of the Project

On Sun, 07 Jul 2024 22:01:33 +0200, Knurpht-openSUSE wrote:

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Hear, Hear. I am ( and have been ) in total agreement with Shawn. Incl. the last part. Let's keep this a rational discussion, and be aware that now we have it all in our own hands.

Likewise. As one of the admins on the FB group and on the forums, we see (in those two venues at least) a not insignificant number of people asking for help with the SLES platforms, even though they're paying for support through their subscription. It often takes multiple explanations before they finally understand that "openSUSE != SUSE" and that Leap/Tumbleweed/ Kalpa/etc. are not SLES or SLED.

That has got different reasons: 1) openSUSE Backports (with Community Support) for Package Hub We had already many discussions during breaks at openSUSE Conferences about this topic. SUSE is sending Enterprise customers to the openSUSE community, that they should receive community support for openSUSE Backports (Package Hub). If they are receiving our support via Bugzilla, why shouldn't they also request for support in our openSUSE Forums, if the openSUSE community is providing such good support? From my point of view, the Package Hub is a good handshake between SUSE and openSUSE for the "existing" collaboration and we can continue, if we are allowed to keep our name/branding. My suggestion regarding Package Hub (in the case of the name change): SUSE should be responsible for the support of Package Hub for their own. Only then, the customers will realize, that there are different support types/levels available. 2) openSUSE versioning for Explaining SLES versions as SUSE Linux (SLE Certification material) It is nice and friendly, that SUSE is using openSUSE Leap for CLA/CLE trainings. But in the theory stuff, they are explaining in the online training our openSUSE Leap version system under the title "SUSE Linux" on this way, that customers/partners can think, that openSUSE Leap would be an Enterprise Product by SUSE. Take a step back and think about such a training by SUSE, where the SLES versioning is not based on the Service Packs explained. You are trained and certified by SUSE afterwards. Wouldn't you ask then also the openSUSE community for support, because openSUSE is represented as a SUSE product? My suggestion: SUSE should change their training material to the Service Pack versioning. The openSUSE community can not do that and is not responsible for "what is SUSE teaching".

I don't really see this as being fundamentally different than (for example) when RedHat's OSS project rebranded to Fedora - it helped them make the distinction between the OSS project and the commercial products clearer for the audiences.

You are right. During the last oSC, I had a small talk with a Red Hat person contributing to Fedora. They are experiencing also such cases, but not so much. The difference is, that Fedora and RHEL have got a "real" split. openSUSE is collaborating with SUSE in a good way. I like that also, but then we should not receive a request from SUSE to change our branding. That will not solve these problems, because "SUSE is sending their customers to us". They would continue, if we accept it continuously. Then I want to add a 3rd reason/experience, why SUSE customers are reaching out to us: SUSE is using openSUSE Members (especially openSUSE Ambassadors/Advocates) as role models for their marketing. In my case, I have met LPI people at conferences in the past. Pictures were made and SUSE has shared that afterwards on LinkedIn. Afterwards I was asked by SUSE customers, what my role in SUSE would be. I have to be a SUSE employee, if they make marketing with myself. I can not count, how often I have received such statements based on SUSE marketing. It is a default situation for openSUSE Advocates, that we have to say, that we are "community only". A renaming or rebranding of openSUSE does not help us. That would damage us more, because on the fact that the name openSUSE is well known and nobody outside of the community knows, that our chameleon has got the name Geeko. From my point of view, SUSE has to change the 3 topics above. If you can see alternative options to solve these issues, then feel free to add them and to provide feedback. Best regards, Sarah

Op maandag 8 juli 2024 02:09:57 CEST schreef William Brown:

I don't have a strong view one way or another, but I will just caution that any brand rename can cause a lot of issues as you effectively need to rebuild your whole identity with a new project name.

This can cause a lot of confusion to users such as "Why is OpenSUSE now $X?" or "I can't find any OpenSUSE community channels" etc.

Can be avoided with proper strategy. Same came up when SUSE became SUSE Linuxx Enterprise and openSUSE was a thing.

Some thing to keep in mind that regardless which path is taken, work needs to go into the image of the distro as well as communication as a whole - be that a rename and rebuild of the identity, or keeping OpenSUSE as a name and working to separate from SUSE.

Also a matter of planning. As we're ahead of having to act, we have time.. -- Gertjan Lettink a.k.a. Knurpht openSUSE Forums Team openSUSE Mods Team

On 7/8/24 10:38 AM, Attila Pinter wrote:

On Monday, July 8th, 2024 at 2:47 AM, Shawn W Dunn <sfalken@cloverleaf-linux.org> wrote:

...

Pursuant to Richard and Robert's talk at oSC 2024:

https://media.ccc.de/v/4411-we-re-all-grown-up-opensuse-is-not-suse

This is a topic that needs to be discussed as a community, especially as it's currently a request from SUSE.

I do want to be clear, this message is me posting as "Community Member SFalken" not "openSUSE Board Member SFalken"

Myself, I'm in favour of "rebranding" the community project, and making it clear that openSUSE != SUSE. Far too much of the time in our support channels is spent clearing up these misconceptions, where new users (and even some experienced users), are saying things like "SUSE Should do $x" or "Why doesn't SUSE do $x?".

I'm less certain that I agree with Richards proposal of the individual projects sort of "go their own way", at least as he's laid it out, but again, this is absolutely a topic that deserves consideration.

Thoughts?

Speaking as myself (Not as the board or my employer)

I fully support the rebranding initiative. This change would not only serve as a clear differentiator between SUSE and the community project but would also establish that openSUSE is no longer legally a SUSE product. This step would provide our project with an opportunity to implement significant changes, such as overhauling our leadership structure to play a more active role in the community's life.

Renaming without significant changes to the project's governance would still leave the project Legally owned by SUSE as it is currently but more on that below.

I also like the idea of multiple projects under the same umbrella, similar to the Fedora model (workstation, server, atomic, etc.). I see no issue with this approach.

I feel the same way to me we are one community of people working on a range of "Products/Projects" and its the people of the community that unify us and leads to the differing range of things we create these days all coming from the same or similar DNA. So keeping everything under the same umbrella community name also makes sense to me. Beyond that there is the question of even if we wanted to do we actually have the manpower to replicate every part of the project multiple times Once for Tumbleweed, Once for Leap, Once for anything else etc. In my opinion the answer to that is probably no but at the same time I don't think that should limit parts of the project from being more independent if the people working on it would feel that way inclined.

Additionally, I would like to explore the topic of the foundation further. I understand there is a thread started on this, but if we move forward with the rebranding, I believe some aspects of the foundation need to be clarified.

Agreed but also beyond that to the general structure of the "Higher levels" of the project probably need to be clarified and discussed. One of the key things that need to change for the project to be legally owned by itself rather then SUSE is for there to be a foundation that is accountable to the community that SUSE is willing to hand ownership of the trademark to the new name (or is willing to sponsor to both register and defend the trademark in various regions). This leads nicely into the next topic which we need to discuss which is around the governance structure of the project. Robert gave another great talk at the conference which doesn't seem to be uploaded yet with part of his focus being around getting the right people into roles that suite them best. Maybe the most "natural" way forward if we were to keep the projects current governance structures as they are would be to expand the boards role to also oversee the foundation roles as they already deal with trademark issues and historically appointed the treasurer. At the same time this would leave the Board doing alot. Broadly speaking It would leave the board responsible for three different categories, Firstly "Financial and Legal", Secondly "People issues" whether it is helping resolve conflict or Facilitating communications by connecting the right people together to work on shared goals. Thirdly "Technical" while the board does less of this sometimes we do need to resolve conflicts that are mostly technical in nature or communicate with SUSE around issues that are largely technical. Financial, People and Technical issues all require significantly different skill sets and it is hard to find people who are both good at, passionate about and willing to deal with all three at the same time. One solution could be to split the projects governance into three parts. * Board of the foundation - Responsible for all financial and legal matters * Technical steering committee - This could cover managing technical conflicts as well as other more project wide technical decisions and could involve working with SUSE on more technical matters. It could also be extended to look at other issues that we haven't looked at in the past such as what are the requirements to be a full distro mentioned on our website vs something that is in the experemental state. * Community Something (I couldn't think of a good name) - Final point of call for community conflicts and anything else that doesn't fit into the "Financial/Legal" or "Technical" Category. Each of these bodies should be appointed by the community in a similar way to the current board. While the above solution would do a better job at getting the right people dealing with the right issues there are other risks that could arise mainly if there was conflicts between two of the groups on how to deal with an issue. Such as the Board and Technical Steering Committee disagreeing on how funding should be allocated towards technical projects. So how such conflicts should be resolved would need to be well documented. An alternate approach to the above that could also be considered would be to keep the current board as is and have them appoint the trustees of the foundation in the same way the board used to appoint a treasurer. Then the Trustees would be accountable to the Board which is then accountable to the community. At this point I don't have a strong opinion on which model would be better but I think both are good starting points for discussion. If anything from my past experience on the Board I haven't seen us dealing with enough technical conflicts to warrant a group just for dealing with that so maybe i'd merge the Technical Committee with the Community committee and have two elected bodies. Although Technical Steering Committees have worked somewhat well for other projects at the same time in the openSUSE context I probably wouldn't them saying these packages can be included in the distro while these others can't. The final thing which is probably almost worth a thread on its own is what should the name actually be, Geekos is obviously one suggestion but at the same time "Tumbleweed" and "Leap" don't give great search engine results and "Geekos Tumbleweed" and "Geekos Leap" don't really roll off the tongue. Personally I am not good with names but just randomly looking at shades of green "Myrtle Leap" and "Myrtle Tumbleweed" kinda work, but it also make the project named after a plant. Either way due to the fact that we will need to deal with trademarks any possible name would have to be signed off by Legal. -- Simon Lees (Simotek) http://simotek.net Emergency Update Team keybase.io/simotek SUSE Linux Adelaide Australia, UTC+10:30 GPG Fingerprint: 5B87 DB9D 88DC F606 E489 CEC5 0922 C246 02F0 014B

On 7/8/24 2:42 PM, Natasha Ament-Teusink wrote:

Hi,

On 07-07-2024 21:47, Shawn W Dunn wrote:

...

Pursuant to Richard and Robert's talk at oSC 2024:

https://media.ccc.de/v/4411-we-re-all-grown-up-opensuse-is-not-suse

This is a topic that needs to be discussed as a community, especially as it's currently a request from SUSE.

Basically it boils down to SUSE being concerned the strength of their trademark is watered down by us using the SUSE name in our distribution.

Does this change have any legal and/or financial consequences? A dull/boring question probably but a necessary one (probably a leftover from my days in law school).

If its done right no, there are basically two sensible ways this could be done, In one way SUSE would own the new trademark as they own the current one and would be responsible for defending it legally. In the other case Ether SUSE would acquire the trademark and transfer it to a foundation (Or fund the foundation to acquire it) At the same time a legal contract would be drawn up between SUSE and the foundation stating that SUSE would provide legal support as required in cases where the trademark needs to be defended. One of the fun things about trademark law is that if trademarks aren't actively defended then they can be lost. Any other option could lead to a point where there is the potential that a foundation wouldn't have the funds to protect the new trademark and it could be lost. I am guessing this is a risk that SUSE Legal wouldn't be willing to take its also one that I don't personally think the community should take at this point. As always here is the I am not a lawyer disclaimer but this is a topic where I have received legal opinions before when looking into the previous foundation proposals. Besides those legal questions rebranding is expensive so it is one of my aims as a board member to try and work with SUSE to secure a good budget / sponsorship for the rebranding to ensure its as successful as possible. -- Simon Lees (Simotek) http://simotek.net Emergency Update Team keybase.io/simotek SUSE Linux Adelaide Australia, UTC+10:30 GPG Fingerprint: 5B87 DB9D 88DC F606 E489 CEC5 0922 C246 02F0 014B

On 2024-07-08 09:21, Patrick Fitzgerald wrote:

In regard to Richards proposal, I think that this is not a major priority and should be addressed down the line.

When presented the idea at the board meeting prior to the conference, I mentioned that to him and he agreed.

Since that meeting, the Board intervened and forcefully changed who was allowed to present the topic at oSC on behalf of SUSE. This was an act that I believe to be in contravention of the Board's own rules about directing contributors and grossly exceeded it's responsibility to "Community community interests to SUSE" This is at least the second time in recent memory where the Board had directly intervened and directed contributors - my previous example would be when the Board forced the continuation of "MicroOS Desktop KDE" after it was removed due to lack of maintainers after a year+ long deprecation period. I therefore want to make the following very clear: I rescind any agreement I may have had with your view that the governance issues are 'not a major priority' I currently hold no confidence in the current openSUSE Board and think it's absolutely essential the openSUSE project establishes a new governance model. Given the heated discussion we had at openSUSE Conference, I would have expected you to have implicitly understood that fact and not tried to make it sound like I supported your view that our governance problems are not a major priority. I had no intention to join this thread here, but your misrepresentation of my views had to be corrected. With all that said, I do believe the greater priority is the branding issue. SUSE's needs as the legal trademark holder cannot be ignored, whereas the openSUSE Board can be. So, both are important, but the Branding issue is the most urgent and pressing one that needs to be addressed. I think it might make sense to address it in the context of reworking our governance, it might not. But if we do not address our governance at the same time as the branding, it is something that needs to be resolved pretty quickly afterwards. -- Richard Brown Distributions Architect SUSE Software Solutions Germany GmbH, Frankenstraße 146, D-90461 Nuremberg, Germany (HRB 36809, AG Nürnberg) Managing Directors/Geschäftsführer: Ivo Totev, Andrew McDonald, Werner Knoblich

Since that meeting, the Board intervened and forcefully changed who was allowed to present the topic at oSC on behalf of SUSE. This was an act that I believe to be in contravention of the Board's own rules about directing contributors and grossly exceeded it's responsibility to "Community community interests to SUSE" This is at least the second time in recent memory where the Board had directly intervened and directed contributors - my previous example would be when the Board forced the continuation of "MicroOS Desktop KDE" after it was removed due to lack of maintainers after a year+ long deprecation period.

I'll take blame for this in communications with all parties. Too much happening at the time of communicating these topics given trying to deal with talk cancellations, tsp, board notes, open 4 business, etc. Let's just move forward.

But if we do not address our governance at the same time as the branding, it is something that needs to be resolved pretty quickly afterwards.

Let's branch this subject off so the the discussions don't get too intertwined or so we can pick things up later. v/r Doug

On 2024-07-08 16:10, Attila Pinter wrote:

On Monday, July 8th, 2024 at 4:49 PM, ddemaio openSUSE <ddemaio@opensuse.org> wrote:

...

I'll take blame for this in communications with all parties. Too much happening at the time of communicating these topics given trying to deal with talk cancellations, tsp, board notes, open 4 business, etc. Let's just move forward.

I have some concerns regarding this issue. This year we've seen quite a few communication errors or lack of communication from this Board. IMO This matter might deserve a little more attention than just acknowledgment of fault and a suggestion to move forward considering that it can be a violation of the Governance rules. Was there any specific reason why the Board decided who can and cannot give the presentation on the rebranding?

Brevity serves a purpose; that purpose was to move forward and not to relive the past. v/r Doug

On Monday, July 8, 2024 1:11:15 PM PDT Jeff Mahoney wrote:

On 7/7/24 15:47, Shawn W Dunn wrote:

...

Pursuant to Richard and Robert's talk at oSC 2024:

https://media.ccc.de/v/4411-we-re-all-grown-up-opensuse-is-not-suse

Thoughts?

Hi folks -

TL;DR at the end.

Others have said that governance, rebranding, and the foundation should be handled individually and with differing priorities. I disagree. I think all three are intertwined and, if handled properly, present a unique opportunity for the project to re-establish itself.

I'm absolutely in agreement with you on this, in that the conversations and concerns are intertwined. And pretty hard to just say "Well, we have three seperate issues, that need to be dealt with in their own vacuums"

openSUSE has maintained a relatively small community compared to other popular but similar projects (e.g. Fedora, Ubuntu, Arch) since its inception. I think there are a few big reasons for that.

1. The perception that SUSE owns openSUSE and contributing to openSUSE is like working for SUSE for free

Part of this is naming.

Part of this is SUSE requiring the board chair to be a SUSE employee.

Part of this _could_ be that openSUSE releases and SUSE products are inter-related, with Tumbleweed being periodically stabilized into enterprise releases and those enterprise releases being contributed back to the community to form the basis for Leap. The latter relationship is one that mirrored the relationship between Fedora / Red Hat / CentOS until recently.

It's not an exact mirror of the relationship between Fedora/CentOS/RHEL, but close enough that the minutae aren't that relevant.

Part of this is that SUSE still owns and mandates control over the infrastructure, though that is changing. The main ongoing reason for this is for security: the openSUSE and SUSE IDP authentication systems use the same backend. That means that anyone with administrative access to those systems could obtain access to corporate credentials. As a result, those systems must be managed by SUSE employees. There's a project to decouple the authentication systems underway and, IMO, once that's complete, there should be no reason why SUSE should exclude community members from any openSUSE systems.

Agreed, and I'm glad this is being worked on, I've personally been of the opinion that this should have happened a long time ago.

Part of this is that, legally, openSUSE isn't a separate organization. The Geekos foundation was set up relatively recently but it's not formally attached to the project in any way other than Patrick's motivation and commitment. Those are both substantial but also not binding.

This list is probably incomplete, but you get the idea.

Yes, this is something that seems to be a recurring misconception, where people are aware of the Geeko Foundation existing in the first place. At the moment, to the best of my knowledge, the Geeko Foundation isn't formally "attached" to openSUSE in any official capacity, and is it's own thing, uninvolved in the governance of the project.

2. The lax governance leads to inconsistent expectations

The current openSUSE board structure is a one-stop shop and I feel it's pulled in too many directions simultaneously. If we go the route of the Ubuntu-style governance, I would suggest removing the requirement for a SUSE employee to be the chair of either board and instead put that requirement in the place of the Shuttleworth role above: a very-rarely used veto or direction setting role, largely removed from the day-to-day operation of the project. The rules about limiting the number of SUSE employees on the board(s) would still apply otherwise.

Agreed, and part of the reason I ran for the board in the most recent elections, and accepted the offer to join the board to fill a vacancy, is because I've been unhappy with what's been percieved by me (and others), in the lack of clarity or purpose in the governance.

Moreover, the ad-hoc nature of pretty much every other team means that it's difficult to understand what the roles and responsibilities are for each one. In Robert's (other) talk about non-technical contributors, there was a discussion about how newcomers to e.g. the marketing team aren't always clear on what they can and cannot say or do while representing the project. The options were either to know who the right person to ask was or to default to asking for forgiveness instead of permission. That's not something a lot of people are comfortable with doing when they're new to a project. Delegating marketing to a specific team with well defined contacts, processes, and the authority to determine guidance for its members would be a good start.

Absolutely, and this has been a constant source of frustration to many contributors, myself included.

3. The project doesn't have a clear mission

The openSUSE project is largely driven by the people who do the technical work. It's a volunteer effort, so that's mostly to be expected. When there are conflicts, it's uncertain how they're resolved. Maybe it's the board. Maybe it's whomever speaks last in a drawn out discussion/argument. Maybe it's whomever gets a submit request approved first. In the Ubuntu model, the Technical Council is the tiebreaker, but it's expected to take guidance and input from the teams actually doing the work.

This has been a long-term issue within the project, for certain, and one that needs to be solved. I don't know what that *looks* like yet, and I'm certainly not the person to make that decision. It's why we need to discuss it.

Also from Robert's other talk was a comment about how in order to become a member of the project, one must have made contributions. Those contributions are typically considered technical ones. Documentation, marketing, design, community building, etc are vital to a successful open source project and those aren't recognized as much as technical contributions.

Another long term issue as well. And something we need to be better at, regardless of what happens.

That said, while there is some focus on user experience, the project mostly seems to be contributors scratching their own itches. And if that's the direction that we want the project to go, it should be a conscious decision. One of the main things that's a barrier to adoption by new users is the perception that the releases are full of small annoyances that other distros take more seriously. The arcane nature of snapper, performance of zypper, (historically) codec inclusion, and the relatively recent secure boot shim issue are some easy examples from a quick scan of reddit posts about this topic. If we want to grow the project, we'll need to take those more seriously as well.

Agreed.

If there is a renaming, I don't think it should be the gateway to make all of the projects that make up the ecosystem to be independent of one other under one umbrella. Several people in the audience at oSC mentioned that this is the path to irrelevance, and I agree. A brand tying the projects together is the identity and, more practically, what makes it easy to get relevant results when searching. A search for "openSUSE Leap" or "openSUSE Tumbleweed" yields what I expect to see as the top hit using Google. A search for "Leap" doesn't yield anything related to openSUSE until the fourth page. Tumbleweed does a bit better -- it's the last entry on the second page. Deciding on a new name won't be an easy process. There will be many ideas and fewer good ones. It will need to be easily recognizable and searchable. (I am terrible at naming things, btw.)

I couldn't agree more, regarding this. I feel like individual project that want to "go their own way" as Richard has proposed should certainly be *possible*, but I wouldn't want to make it the default for everything. We just don't have the contributor base, across the current project, for that sort of potential duplication of "infrastructure", from my perspective.

Rebranding is an expensive operation because it means getting the word out about the new brand, explaining why it came about, and (importantly) getting new swag out to community members. With a new name must come a new logo too. That will need to be designed. There will need to be new t-shirts with the logo and name given out at every opportunity. If the new logo lends itself to being a mascot, new plushies will need to be made. New stickers. People have stacks of stickers and drawers full of t-shirts that will need to be replaced. There will need to be a marketing campaign bigger than any the openSUSE project has ever done in the past. That's a lot of effort and expense. I will say that if the project decides to rebrand at SUSE's request, I will pursue support from within SUSE to make it successful.

Yeah, and that question has come up. As a board member, if a Rename/Rebrand is what is decided on, I certainly will be pushing SUSE to provide a budget and whatnot for what needs to be done. But that's not something that's easy to attach a number to, or even discuss, until the underlying questions regarding the entire idea of a Rename/Rebrand is more solidified.

Lastly, if the project is to be more independent, there needs to be a legal organization backing it that isn't SUSE. It could be the Geekos foundation, but if that is to be the case, there will need to be formal governance and accountability built into it. SUSE funds some operations of openSUSE directly now, but could potentially direct that to the foundation instead. That can't happen without a formal process in place that shows how the money will be spent, what the processes are, and a clear definition of roles and responsibilities.

Agreed.

In summary, I don't have a strong opinion on the renaming, but it could be an opportunity to revitalize the project under a new name, new governance, and new independence. That, in turn, could make the project more attractive to new contributors and users who aren't SUSE employees. With projects that used to be wildly popular on the decline, it could be the right opportunity to make a splash.

Thanks,

-Jeff

[1] https://ubuntu.com/community/governance/community-council [2] https://ubuntu.com/community/governance/technical-board [3] https://ubuntu.com/community/governance/delegation

I am currently looking into the governance of some of the other projects out there, and looking how they do things, the pros and cons, etc. And attempting to put together a bit of a summarization on what future governance *could* look like. Because at the moment, there's just not anything else on the table, and we're all just kind of flailing our arms. But thank you for the links to how ubuntu is doing it, I'll have a look.

I couldn’t disagree more, honestly. If “just do what you think needs to be done” worked, we wouldn’t *be* where we are right now, because that’s mostly the way the project has been operating since 2005. If it were a viable option, that people just appear out of the blue, see a problem, and then get to work on it, all on their own volition, it would have worked by now. Additionally, there have been efforts, by many, organized or not, including myself, to bring in new contributors, and our traditional “work on what interests you” sort of model is extremely intimidating for many potential contributors, and most have no clue A) where to figure out what part of the project *needs* help, or B) how they would contribute if the did figure it out. Am I just a garbage “mentor” at bringing people in? I certainly can’t discount that possibility, but I know I’m not the only person that has tried, and failed at various times. Perhaps Governance, Procedure, and Documentation isn’t the way to “fix” things, I honestly don’t know, but continuing on the way we’ve *been* doing things isn’t likely to change the outcome. Sent from my iPhone

On Jul 10, 2024, at 06:20, Henne Vogelsang <hvogel@opensuse.org> wrote:

Hey,

...

On 08.07.24 22:11, Jeff Mahoney wrote:

...

1. The perception that SUSE owns openSUSE and contributing to openSUSE is like working for SUSE for free [...]

openSUSE has maintained a relatively small community compared to other popular but similar projects (e.g. Fedora, Ubuntu, Arch) since its inception. I think there are a few big reasons for that. 2. The lax governance leads to inconsistent expectation [...] > 3. The project doesn't have a clear mission

This list is not only incomplete, it's misleading. The reason we are only able to sustain a small (shrinking) community is that we, as a community, do not invest too much into growing our community. Full stop.

You can change any legalese, governance mumbo or branding jumbo in any way you want. The gist of it is: If there are not enough people in our community, that contribute to growing our community in meaningful ways, we are dying out. This is the way of any community.

There are not so meaningful ways to grow our community:

1. Change for the sake of change. And/or trying to change decisions for which the arguments for or against have not really changed.

2. Try to build a structure to gain the power to tell people what to do in our community ("the board", directing efforts etc.).

3. Try to build a structure to gain the power to tell people what to do with the things the community produces (trademark legalese, branding bureaucracy etc.).

4. Try to build a structure to gain the power to do the above by hanging some monetary incentive over peoples heads.

Don't get me wrong, those are things that may need to happen in one form or another. Power also will have to be exercised in one form or another in bad situations. But those activities have next to *no* effect on the sustainability of this community.

But there are also meaningful ways to grow our community:

1. Address the crumbling state of our community infrastructure by *doing* the maintenance that is needed. Not by talking about it, not by inventing bureaucracy how to do it, not by solving it theoretically but by getting your hands dirty with tedious work and by organizing how other community members can help you.

This work is mostly about the content *inside* the tools we use for this community. Examples: the Wiki, many Factory devel projects on OBS, web pages, blog posts, translations groups, social media accounts etc.

For one simple reason: If those things have a functional and inclusive community of maintainers behind them, they stop being a hindrance to new contributors and start being the door that new people will enter the community through.

2. Recruit contributors manually. We can't wait for people to come to us. *We* have to go out and get them.

For one simple reason: We need a constant intake of new contributors because we loose contributors all the time too life happening. A.k.a. changing interests, a new hobby, a new job, a new partner, a new home, a baby born.

3. Make existing contributors happy. Our contributors should feel that contributing to openSUSE was one of the best choices they ever made. We should be racking our brains to think of new ways to delight them and make them do *more* contributing.

For one simple reason: We need them to stay as long as possible because... see the point above.

This is the work that desperately *needs* to be done and that will decide our fate as a group of people doing things together. There is no one else that can do this for us. Not SUSE, no foundation, no leader.

And that is also *precisely* the reason we should refrain from any activity that takes effort/time away from the current contributors to sustain our community. Activities like mind-numbing discussions about the (trivial, pardon my french) job of the board solving conflicts, other forms of "governance", our brand or even money.

My suggestion to all members of the openSUSE Community: Stop talking about grand ideas, get to work. Make it easier to attract new contributors in general. Then attract new contributors to the area you work in. Then make them as happy as you can so they stay around.

Grand ideas and changes are not making this community sustainable, they make it go extinct faster.

Henne

-- Henne Vogelsang http://www.opensuse.org Everybody has a plan, until they get hit. - Mike Tyson

Hey, On 10.07.24 18:28, Tony Walker wrote:

I am a new person who is moving from years and years as a Debian user. I found Tumbleweed and decided to (slowly) get involved. While I did appear out-of-blue, I am very unusual and agree with Shawn.

Leaving Debian for OpenSUSE was a long journey worth discussing, but the much looser structure and communication caused me to pause.

And why did you pause? :-)

I have seen the entire ecosystem benefit from formalization of communication, structure, and governance over the years. In my opinion, it was necessary for the entire Linux ecosystem to become the world-scale team-effort it is today. A lot of contributors and users find the stability of that structure very comforting.

I'm not quite sure what you mean by the "Linux ecosystem". However, let's assume you mean the Libre Software community. What formalization of "communication, structure, and governance" are you talking about? You already noticed that Debian and openSUSE have very different "communication, structure, and governance". Look at any other project and you will find more variation of "communication, structure, and governance". Each of those 3 topics is a very big and allows for countless variations for people to choose from. Henne -- Henne Vogelsang http://www.opensuse.org Everybody has a plan, until they get hit. - Mike Tyson

Hey, On 11.07.24 18:43, Knurpht-openSUSE wrote:

If getting new contributors ( like Tony is fyi )is that important, IMNSHO approaching them like this doesn't help.

Like what? Please elaborate... Henne -- Henne Vogelsang http://www.opensuse.org Everybody has a plan, until they get hit. - Mike Tyson

On 7/11/24 14:22, Knurpht-openSUSE wrote:

Op donderdag 11 juli 2024 19:51:44 CEST schreef Henne Vogelsang:

...

Hey,

On 11.07.24 18:43, Knurpht-openSUSE wrote:

...

If getting new contributors ( like Tony is fyi )is that important, IMNSHO approaching them like this doesn't help.

Like what? Please elaborate...

Henne I could easily read it as questioning the user's motivations. Like some others did. A the-eyes-of-the- beholder story.

Very true! I just replied in a direct and not terribly productive way. I guess that is how these things spin out of control. ;-)

Can we agree that new contributors need to feel welcome? That their best motivation is them enjoying what they do. That manually getting new contributors in ( which I have been and am actively doing ) becomes harder when they get questioned ( not you specific ) in a "Who are you?" tone.?

Very true! We all have bad days, are too busy, etc. to stop and write a calm productive email or message. To me the question is which is better, 1) fewer but higher quality responses, or 2) more but lower quality responses. By quality, I mean welcoming and well-considered.

Mind, Henne, like you I also feel that the biggest issue the one of getting new, committed contributors, but if I count the number of people that were ready to start or had already started, yet stepped away disappointed, there IMNSHO is a very good reason for the Project to have a look at how we've been doing things ourselves.

By the way, I am sure Henne is a great person who I would like in real life.

Hope that answers that.

-- Tony Walker <tony.walker.iu@gmail.com> PGP Key @ https://tonywalker1.github.io/pgp 9F46 D66D FF6C 182D A5AC 11E1 8559 98D1 7543 319C

On 7/11/24 12:43, Knurpht-openSUSE wrote:

Op woensdag 10 juli 2024 18:43:23 CEST schreef Henne Vogelsang:

I'm catching-up on emails...

...

Hey,

On 10.07.24 18:28, Tony Walker wrote:

...

I am a new person who is moving from years and years as a Debian user. I found Tumbleweed and decided to (slowly) get involved. While I did appear out-of-blue, I am very unusual and agree with Shawn.

Leaving Debian for OpenSUSE was a long journey worth discussing, but the much looser structure and communication caused me to pause.

And why did you pause? :-)

Like a lot of contributors, I am want to help a lot of people, be part of a well-functioning team, and be part of project that solves problems. Debian certainly has had far, far too many bar-fights, but OpenSUSE doesn't seem better to me. As you say elsewhere in this email chain, there are lots of problems that need to be solved, too much bickering, and not enough solutions. Bingo!

...

...

I have seen the entire ecosystem benefit from formalization of communication, structure, and governance over the years. In my opinion, it was necessary for the entire Linux ecosystem to become the world-scale team-effort it is today. A lot of contributors and users find the stability of that structure very comforting.

Your response can be taken as condescending, misses an important opportunity, and otherwise misses the point. Let's break it down.

...

I'm not quite sure what you mean by the "Linux ecosystem". However, let's assume you mean the Libre Software community.

OpenSUSE is a distribution that packages a the kernel and lots of software. Whether we are comparing distributions only, including the kernel, or all Libre software, the outcome is the same. I will come to that in a bit. You might be asking a legitimate question; however, the above paragraph seems overly pedantic. After reading it several times, I still feel like this a rhetorical trick often used to silence people. I don't care whether you like the work libre or the phrases OSS, FOSS, or FLOSS. I won't be baited into going into a never-ending argument of increasing minutia. Again, I will freely admit that I have completely misunderstood you.

...

What formalization of "communication, structure, and governance" are you talking about?

I was a Gentoo user when Robbins was forced out. I also attended a talk he gave shortly after that. I also remember when ESR wrote his essay on Linus being gifted (and undisciplined). Surely we all remember Heartbleed? These are just a few of the many bits of history I remember off-the-top-of-my-head. Again, this seems overly pedantic and a rhetorical trick. I don't care if you like these examples or not. I won't argue about them. But let's just one... The consternation around Linus, the question of what would happen if he was hit by a bus, and that so much was in-his-head did lead to a series of changes that help corporations and large institutions feel more secure in adopting and contribution to the kernel. If you really want another, Debian started as a one-man project. It isn't now. That's the main point.

...

You already noticed that Debian and openSUSE have very different "communication, structure, and governance".

You really missed the mark here. Not only do you seem to think I am stupid, you missed a big opportunity. I hoped that the wise project elders would take the opportunity to discuss things that are broken AND OFFER PROPOSALS FOR SOLUTIONS! You literally complained about exactly that. Recall your question about what gives me pause. Look at any other project

...

and you will find more variation of "communication, structure, and governance".

Let's see I started with Slackware and one million floppy disks. Then I ran Red Hat. I also ran FreeBSD in the mid to late 1990's. I switched to Gentoo. Sampled Ubuntu . Switched to Debian when I had enough CPU and RAM that I didn't need the Gentoo optimizations. I ran Debian primarily for about 20 years. I still used RHEL, Fedora, Ubuntu, and others as needed for work. Recently, I tried Ubuntu, Fedora, and RHEL as a Debian replacement. Each of those 3 topics is a very big and allows for

...

countless variations for people to choose from.

Yes, you had a lot of choices to take to have a discussion that leads to SOLUTIONS for the things that bother you. Too bad.

...

Henne

If getting new contributors ( like Tony is fyi )is that important, IMNSHO approaching them like this doesn't help.

Gertjan seems to be doing a really good job recruiting people. He offers advice that is worth considering. -- Tony Walker <tony.walker.iu@gmail.com> PGP Key @ https://tonywalker1.github.io/pgp 9F46 D66D FF6C 182D A5AC 11E1 8559 98D1 7543 319C

On 7/17/24 07:37, Henne Vogelsang wrote:

On 15.07.24 03:38, Tony Walker wrote:

...

I hoped that the wise project elders would take the opportunity to discuss things that are broken AND OFFER PROPOSALS FOR SOLUTIONS! You literally complained about exactly that.

You do realize that I am one of the people that founded the openSUSE Project two decades ago (however I am not in any way wise), have been contributing since and that I complained about the solution (re- branding) and proposed another solution (re-focus on contributor organization and growth) for the problem right? :-)

Yes, I was very aware of that when I wrote the above. Why would you assume otherwise? Why might I have written what I did knowing what I did?

Please keep your assumptions in check. I know these days most of the internet is a cesspool but this is the project mailing list, we are all friends here trying to achieve something good for openSUSE.

Thank you. That is good advice. -- Tony Walker <tony.walker.opensource@gmail.com> PGP Key @ https://tonywalker1.github.io/pgp 9F46 D66D FF6C 182D A5AC 11E1 8559 98D1 7543 319C

On 7/10/24 09:19, Henne Vogelsang wrote:

Hey,

On 08.07.24 22:11, Jeff Mahoney wrote:

...

...

1. The perception that SUSE owns openSUSE and contributing to openSUSE is like working for SUSE for free [...]

openSUSE has maintained a relatively small community compared to other popular but similar projects (e.g. Fedora, Ubuntu, Arch) since its inception.  I think there are a few big reasons for that. 2. The lax governance leads to inconsistent expectation [...] > 3. The project doesn't have a clear mission

This list is not only incomplete, it's misleading. The reason we are only able to sustain a small (shrinking) community is that we, as a community, do not invest too much into growing our community. Full stop.

You can change any legalese, governance mumbo or branding jumbo in any way you want. The gist of it is: If there are not enough people in our community, that contribute to growing our community in meaningful ways, we are dying out. This is the way of any community.

There are not so meaningful ways to grow our community:

1. Change for the sake of change. And/or trying to change decisions for which the arguments for or against have not really changed.

2. Try to build a structure to gain the power to tell people what to do in our community ("the board", directing efforts etc.).

3. Try to build a structure to gain the power to tell people what to do with the things the community produces (trademark legalese, branding bureaucracy etc.).

4. Try to build a structure to gain the power to do the above by hanging some monetary incentive over peoples heads.

Don't get me wrong, those are things that may need to happen in one form or another. Power also will have to be exercised in one form or another in bad situations. But those activities have next to *no* effect on the sustainability of this community.

While I don't agree entirely here (described in a different email), structure (or formalization) and building power are not necessarily connected. Formalization can also protect open and democratic processes from abuse. You raise some really good points below...

But there are also meaningful ways to grow our community:

1. Address the crumbling state of our community infrastructure by *doing* the maintenance that is needed. Not by talking about it, not by inventing bureaucracy how to do it, not by solving it theoretically but by getting your hands dirty with tedious work and by organizing how other community members can help you.

This work is mostly about the content *inside* the tools we use for this community. Examples: the Wiki, many Factory devel projects on OBS, web pages, blog posts, translations groups, social media accounts etc.

For one simple reason: If those things have a functional and inclusive community of maintainers behind them, they stop being a hindrance to new contributors and start being the door that new people will enter the community through.

2. Recruit contributors manually. We can't wait for people to come to us. *We* have to go out and get them.

For one simple reason: We need a constant intake of new contributors because we loose contributors all the time too life happening. A.k.a. changing interests, a new hobby, a new job, a new partner, a new home, a baby born.

I agree, but I contend that formalization of communication and open democratic processes will help here. I am not necessarily advocating the Debian model, but it worth considering part of it.

3. Make existing contributors happy. Our contributors should feel that contributing to openSUSE was one of the best choices they ever made. We should be racking our brains to think of new ways to delight them and make them do *more* contributing.

For one simple reason: We need them to stay as long as possible because... see the point above.

This is the work that desperately *needs* to be done and that will decide our fate as a group of people doing things together. There is no one else that can do this for us. Not SUSE, no foundation, no leader.

And that is also *precisely* the reason we should refrain from any activity that takes effort/time away from the current contributors to sustain our community. Activities like mind-numbing discussions about the (trivial, pardon my french) job of the board solving conflicts, other forms of "governance", our brand or even money.

My suggestion to all members of the openSUSE Community: Stop talking about grand ideas, get to work. Make it easier to attract new contributors in general. Then attract new contributors to the area you work in. Then make them as happy as you can so they stay around.

Grand ideas and changes are not making this community sustainable, they make it go extinct faster.

Henne

-- Tony Walker <tony.walker.iu@gmail.com> PGP Key @ https://tonywalker1.github.io/pgp 9F46 D66D FF6C 182D A5AC 11E1 8559 98D1 7543 319C

On Thursday, July 11th, 2024 at 12:15 AM, Henne Vogelsang <hvogel@opensuse.org> wrote:

Hey,

On 10.07.24 18:45, Tony Walker wrote:

...

On 7/10/24 09:19, Henne Vogelsang wrote:

...

Don't get me wrong, those are things that may need to happen in one form or another. Power also will have to be exercised in one form or another in bad situations. But those activities have next to no effect on the sustainability of this community.

While I don't agree entirely here (described in a different email), structure (or formalization) and building power are not necessarily connected. Formalization can also protect open and democratic processes from abuse.

Having more formalized "governance" to protect our democratic processes from abuse would be a nice solution if we would have this problem. But we don't.

Not yet* ^-^

We have another problem: not enough contributors to sustain this community in the long run. If we don't fix that it doesn't matter if we protect our democratic processes better in case of abuse. No people, no democratic processes, no abuse.

You will laugh, but I had people come up to me straight up telling me that they don't understand the relationship between openSUSE and SUSE and they go back to using whatever distro they came from, and wouldn't even consider contributing to "SUSE's pocket". Some others just don't like SUSE so they refuse also. Rebranding, and having a clear differentiation between the two is a pretty good solution to this issue, and we should probably do it until we're being asked nice, and we can. -- Br, A.

Hey, Dne čtvrtek 11. července 2024 9:37:42, SELČ, Attila Pinter napsal(a):

You will laugh, but I had people come up to me straight up telling me that they don't understand the relationship between openSUSE and SUSE and they go back to using whatever distro they came from, and wouldn't even consider contributing to "SUSE's pocket". Some others just don't like SUSE so they refuse also. Rebranding, and having a clear differentiation between the two is a pretty good solution to this issue, and we should probably do it until we're being asked nice, and we can.

-- Br, A.

So... Do potential donors nowadays have a negative perception if a commercial company supports a project with a Libre license or a community? How hard is it to explain it's the opposite and how licensing works? Right, it's like people who dislike RedHat are donating to Fedora. Or people who dislike Canonical donating to Ubuntu. Regards, Gfs

Gesendet: Donnerstag, den 11.07.2024 um 14:43 Uhr Von: Knurpht-openSUSE <knurpht@opensuse.org> An: project@lists.opensuse.org Betreff: Re: Rebranding of the Project

...

So... Do potential donors nowadays have a negative perception if a commercial company supports a project with a Libre license or a community? How hard is it to explain it's the opposite and how licensing works?

Right, it's like people who dislike RedHat are donating to Fedora. Or people who dislike Canonical donating to Ubuntu. In the time I was on the Board, several offers of sponsorship got lost because

Op donderdag 11 juli 2024 12:18:08 CEST schreef Lukáš Krejza: the potential sponsor DID NOT want to send it to SUSE. For their own reasons, but yes this happened.

I want to explain that with the example of the GUUG and an oSC sponsorship.

I did a request at the GUUG to sponsor the oSC after a sponsorship of the Debian Conference. The openSUSE regulatories container, that oSC sponsors are sponsoring the SUSE Linux GmbH, but the goal was to sponsor the open source project openSUSE. The GUUG wanted to achieve a change there, but the reason for that was that all openSUSE sponsorships went via the SUSE credit card. After many rejected sponsorships based on this reason (see also Mmails by Christian and Simon), we made the suggestion of an own Foundation in the openSUSE Board. The GUUG didn't want to sign to sponsor SUSE. The workaround was to make a lunch sponsorship without any SUSE credit card. Afterwards I received the statement that it has been the single openSUSE sponsorship in this direction until there will be the possibility to sponsor the open source project openSUSE. I hope that makes it more understandable. Best regards, Sarah

Am 11.07.24 um 14:43 schrieb Knurpht-openSUSE:

...

So... Do potential donors nowadays have a negative perception if a commercial company supports a project with a Libre license or a community? How hard is it to explain it's the opposite and how licensing works?

Right, it's like people who dislike RedHat are donating to Fedora. Or people who dislike Canonical donating to Ubuntu. In the time I was on the Board, several offers of sponsorship got lost because

Op donderdag 11 juli 2024 12:18:08 CEST schreef Lukáš Krejza: the potential sponsor DID NOT want to send it to SUSE. For their own reasons, but yes this happened.

But I am pretty sure that just rebranding will not help, because then they still would have to send the money to SUSE. The foundation setup will probably help, but this is not tied to a rebranding. -- Stefan Seyfried "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled." -- Richard Feynman

On 7/10/24 13:15, Henne Vogelsang wrote:

Hey,

On 10.07.24 18:45, Tony Walker wrote:

...

On 7/10/24 09:19, Henne Vogelsang wrote:

...

Don't get me wrong, those are things that may need to happen in one form or another. Power also will have to be exercised in one form or another in bad situations. But those activities have next to *no* effect on the sustainability of this community.

While I don't agree entirely here (described in a different email), structure (or formalization) and building power are not necessarily connected. Formalization can also protect open and democratic processes from abuse.

Having more formalized "governance" to protect our democratic processes from abuse would be a nice solution *if* we would have this problem. But we don't.

Yes, that is exactly why I used that phrase. I hoped that an elder of the project who might see this as a recruiting problem might take the opportunity the new person (me) provided. While each of us may use a different word or phrase, this is recurring problem on the various email lists. I see it when people point to a lack of transparency or inclusion, for example. The discussion I have seen over the last few months told me that the governance model is broken. Whether temporary or inherent, it hurts recruiting. It may not be obvious, but I have been vetting OpenSUSE to see if this is a place I want to join.

We have another problem: not enough contributors to sustain this community in the long run. If we don't fix that it doesn't matter if we protect our democratic processes better in case of abuse. No people, no democratic processes, no abuse.

Yes. Something has to give. Good code or awesome installers are only part of the project. People like me are looking at the team, etc. If OpenSUSE doesn't fix the governance and communication problems, and solve the problems that frankly are solved elsewhere, no one will join.

...

...

But there are also meaningful ways to grow our community:

I agree, but I contend that formalization of communication and open democratic processes will help here. I am not necessarily advocating the Debian model, but it worth considering part of it.

That would also be a nice experiment if we could transfer from one state (our current form) to another other state (influenced by Debian's form) while causing *no* friction and additional work while doing this transition.

I mention Debian only as an example. OpenSUSE isn't Debian, Fedora, or another other distribution. It is good to steal good ideas from them though. Also, any transition to some future-state would and should be step-wise and well-planned. For example, the board could delegate some responsibility solely to some team (what doesn't matter), the team is elected and serves some term (1 year, 3 years, whatever).This team could be marketing, packaging, moderating, etc. It doesn't matter. What matters is that the team is composed largely of members working in that area. As more teams are added, it might be good to add one member from each team. This is just an example. Feel free to contribute your own ideas. Progress will bring excitement and new members.

But we can't. We have the people we have. We have the resources we have. We are in the state we are in. Our communities efforts are like a coin. We can spend them any way we wish, but we can only spend it once.

Despair won't bring new members. Something has to give.

Henne

-- Tony Walker <tony.walker.iu@gmail.com> PGP Key @ https://tonywalker1.github.io/pgp 9F46 D66D FF6C 182D A5AC 11E1 8559 98D1 7543 319C

Hey, On 15.07.24 04:41, Tony Walker wrote:

On 7/10/24 13:15, Henne Vogelsang wrote:

...

On 10.07.24 18:45, Tony Walker wrote:

...

On 7/10/24 09:19, Henne Vogelsang wrote:

...

Don't get me wrong, those are things that may need to happen in one form or another. Power also will have to be exercised in one form or another in bad situations. But those activities have next to *no* effect on the sustainability of this community.

While I don't agree entirely here (described in a different email), structure (or formalization) and building power are not necessarily connected. Formalization can also protect open and democratic processes from abuse.

Having more formalized "governance" to protect our democratic processes from abuse would be a nice solution *if* we would have this problem. But we don't.

Yes, that is exactly why I used that phrase. I hoped that an elder of the project who might see this as a recruiting problem might take the opportunity the new person (me) provided.

While each of us may use a different word or phrase, this is recurring problem on the various email lists. I see it when people point to a lack of transparency or inclusion, for example. The discussion I have seen over the last few months told me that the governance model is broken. Whether temporary or inherent, it hurts recruiting.

The formal "governance" we have is no governance :-) People, and it seems to me you do too, seem to largely misunderstand the role of the openSUSE Board as an legislative entity that makes up the rules, hands out responsibility and exerts oversight over the project. While our guiding principles clearly state that the openSUSE Board is the (glorified) group of people that broker conflict resolution and communication. We don't have anyone that could "delegate some responsibility solely to some team", we have people that form some team and *take* responsibility over some topic. We as a community need to figure out *functioning* teams of maintainers for the topics we need. We need to figure out what we need to change to keep the teams we *have* working and what is needed to grow those teams and what we need to provide so it's easier to build teams maintainers in openSUSE. What we don't need, in my opinion, is building "governance" structure for people to tell others what to do OR a new brand. Henne -- Henne Vogelsang http://www.opensuse.org Everybody has a plan, until they get hit. - Mike Tyson

Simon, Please see my responses below: "I think we can work towards a new governance system without having rolls that tell people what to do. We are a community of volunteers who will volunteer there time where they see fit (Including looking at better governance)" --> I respectively disagree wholeheartedly. Without any sense of direction, vision, guidance, and leadership, we will remain stagnant where we are. I understand we are a community of volunteers, but in many other non-paid groups, there are still leaders who delegate responsibilities and roles to other members and act as the central reporting and communications channel to the community at-large. That's what most boards and/or leadership groups are tasked with doing at the heart of the mission, or goal of the project. "Under our current system people can't tell anyone what to do, in certain cases they can tell people they can't do something, such as you can't submit that update as it doesn't meet our current packaging standards or as part of a conflict resolution process the board may tell someone they can't do something, personally I don't want to see that aspect of our governance changing. At the same time we could do a better job of guiding people who want to be guided into the most useful places. Which is something the current board struggles to have time for in its current format." --> I partially disagree, where you say that aspect of our governance shouldn't change. ALL aspects of our governance need to be on the table including that. What we do from there is for another day, but leaving anything off the table is poor due diligence as a whole. I do think that we need to do a better job at understanding the strengths and weaknesses of the individuals that make up our community but there still has to be a framework. Without that, new users who want to contribute have nowhere to go. We do not have a "concierge desk" that helps connect those users with the leads of a team who could help guide them. I do agree that this is not the job of the board, I think that's where we need a specific role in the overall management of openSUSE (or whatever we're going to be called) who is friendly, and NOT technically knowledgeable. They just have to know who and where to send people. Think of them as a friendly telephone operator. " The issue that then needs to be dealt with is how the groups communicate between each other if there are conflicts between them. I guess one model could be if the Community Council and Technical Board each appointed two members (Or people on there behalf) to the foundation board. But there are many other models, that's just one I thought of now. But this starts to do a better job at getting the right people into the right roles." --> This is why there are often committees or SIGs who have leaders that answer to a larger board. But at the end of the day, there needs to be ONE arbiter who has the final say. Usually that's an Executive Director in a non-profit organization or someone in the C-Suite in the business world. Either way, all workflows need a termination point - they cannot loop forever. PS - Thank you for continuing to support Enlightenment. I still fire up my e16 WM from time to time! ------------------ Now for my two cents: I am in the openSUSE BAR (https://meet.opensuse.org/bar) almost every day. The BAR is a great place to discuss ideas over video in real-time with other members of the community. Hiding behind mailing lists is one thing, defending your position in public is another. I invite any of you that have an opinion on this topic to respectfully come to the BAR and discuss your points with others in there. That kind of dialogue is what leads to compromise, unity, and understanding of other viewpoints. The BAR is open to all and does not require permission to join from anyone else. Thanks to some that frequent the BAR, I was able to gain additional perspectives on the governance and branding issues at hand that did not change my mind, but they changed the reasoning of my stance (which IMO is more important). I work for a consulting firm in a senior leadership position, and from afar I have been able to understand that: 1. We do really lack overall leadership (the buck stops here so to speak) 2. We are stagnant (where's the vision of the project, yes we have work to do whether it's volunteer or not). 3. I'm not asking for metrics, but it would be nice to know if we are meeting our mission (every group has a mission) 4. We have a community that's larger than we think, made up of passionate people from all over the world. This diversity is our strength, yet we aren't maximizing the potential Here are my ideas for governance: - Starting from the top, we have an overall board with a board chair but let me take that one step further, why not make it a Steering Committee if we don't want to call it a board. They are our community leaders who represent us to the open-source, personal, business communities at the end of the day. They are the ones who interact with SUSE when required. They are the ones that make the final call about who does what and when. - If SUSE is asking us to rebrand, we should ask them to remove the requirement that a member of SUSE be on the board. Without that, we lack the ability to create an "untainted" identity in the greater open-source ecosphere. - The steering committee could establish subcommittees or appointees for: -- Financial (interfaces with the foundation), -- Technical (incorporating the role of the Heroes, but with guidance and leadership) -- Social (community engagement, conflict resolution) I think opening up those avenues allows those that don't want to or have the time to commit to the steering committee full-on to still have a say and then from there if they want to run for steering committee, they have the institutional knowledge of people and project to be confident in that position, thus avoiding the "What was I thinking when I did this" moment which causes a lack of energy, or a disengagement from the project. As always, I appreciate everyone's insight as I get to meet more of you across the community and the globe. Thank you for sharing your experiences, highs and lows, and even a cold beverage when the time allows. Bill Schouten - ctlinux (openSUSE Heroes team, openSUSE Discord/Matrix moderator) On Wed, Jul 17, 2024 at 9:34 AM Simon Lees <sflees@suse.de> wrote:

...

Hey,

On 15.07.24 04:41, Tony Walker wrote:

...

On 7/10/24 13:15, Henne Vogelsang wrote:

...

On 10.07.24 18:45, Tony Walker wrote:

...

On 7/10/24 09:19, Henne Vogelsang wrote:

...

Don't get me wrong, those are things that may need to happen in one form or another. Power also will have to be exercised in one form or another in bad situations. But those activities have next to *no* effect on the sustainability of this community.

While I don't agree entirely here (described in a different email), structure (or formalization) and building power are not necessarily connected. Formalization can also protect open and democratic

On 7/17/24 9:33 PM, Henne Vogelsang wrote: processes

...

...

...

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from abuse.

Having more formalized "governance" to protect our democratic processes from abuse would be a nice solution *if* we would have this problem. But we don't.

Yes, that is exactly why I used that phrase. I hoped that an elder of the project who might see this as a recruiting problem might take the opportunity the new person (me) provided.

While each of us may use a different word or phrase, this is recurring problem on the various email lists. I see it when people point to a lack of transparency or inclusion, for example. The discussion I have seen over the last few months told me that the governance model is broken. Whether temporary or inherent, it hurts recruiting.

The formal "governance" we have is no governance :-) People, and it seems to me you do too, seem to largely misunderstand the role of the openSUSE Board as an legislative entity that makes up the rules, hands out responsibility and exerts oversight over the project. While our guiding principles clearly state that the openSUSE Board is the (glorified) group of people that broker conflict resolution and communication.

We don't have anyone that could "delegate some responsibility solely to some team", we have people that form some team and *take* responsibility over some topic.

We as a community need to figure out *functioning* teams of maintainers for the topics we need. We need to figure out what we need to change to keep the teams we *have* working and what is needed to grow those teams and what we need to provide so it's easier to build teams maintainers in openSUSE.

What we don't need, in my opinion, is building "governance" structure for people to tell others what to do OR a new brand.

I think we can work towards a new governance system without having rolls that tell people what to do. We are a community of volunteers who will volunteer there time where they see fit (Including looking at better governance).

Under our current system people can't tell anyone what to do, in certain cases they can tell people they can't do something, such as you can't submit that update as it doesn't meet our current packaging standards or as part of a conflict resolution process the board may tell someone they can't do something, personally I don't want to see that aspect of our governance changing. At the same time we could do a better job of guiding people who want to be guided into the most useful places. Which is something the current board struggles to have time for in its current format.

The role of the current board is below

Act as a central point of contact Help resolve conflicts Communicate community interests to SUSE Facilitate communication with all areas of the community Facilitate decision making processes where needed. Initiate discussions about new project wide initiatives

Added to that we used to appoint a Treasurer to help with TSP and other sponsorships and SUSE allows us to administer trademarks for them. With the creation of a foundation this role will grow so while the solution with the least change would be to say that we keep everything as is and the Board appoints the people overseeing the foundation maybe those people should be directly accountable to the community via elections similar to the board. Maybe the board should also take this on? Which would be an increase on the current workload.

On any given day anything that comes to the board, be it any of its above roles Is one of Technical, Community / People, or Financial / Legal. In a community our size there are very few people who are really good at all these things.

So we could move to a model where the "Foundation Board" is responsible solely for Financial and Legal issues.

While a "Technical Board" is then responsible for. Act as a central point of contact Help resolve conflicts Communicate community interests to SUSE Facilitate communication with all areas of the community Facilitate decision making processes where needed. Initiate discussions about new project wide initiatives

When it relates to Technical based issues.

A "Community Council" who is responsible for. Act as a central point of contact Help resolve conflicts Communicate community interests to SUSE Facilitate communication with all areas of the community Facilitate decision making processes where needed. Initiate discussions about new project wide initiatives

When it comes to issues related to the community or anything else that's not Technical, Legal and or Financial.

The issue that then needs to be dealt with is how the groups communicate between each other if there are conflicts between them. I guess one model could be if the Community Council and Technical Board each appointed two members (Or people on there behalf) to the foundation board. But there are many other models, that's just one I thought of now. But this starts to do a better job at getting the right people into the right roles.

-- Simon Lees (Simotek) http://simotek.net

Emergency Update Team keybase.io/simotek SUSE Linux Adelaide Australia, UTC+10:30 GPG Fingerprint: 5B87 DB9D 88DC F606 E489 CEC5 0922 C246 02F0 014B

On 7/18/24 12:34 AM, Bill Schouten wrote:

Simon,

...

Please see my responses below:

...

"I think we can work towards a new governance system without having rolls that tell people what to do. We are a community of volunteers who will volunteer there time where they see fit (Including looking at better governance)"

--> I respectively disagree wholeheartedly.  Without any sense of direction, vision, guidance, and leadership, we will remain stagnant where we are.  I understand we are a community of volunteers, but in many other non-paid groups, there are still leaders who delegate responsibilities and roles to other members and act as the central reporting and communications channel to the community at-large.  That's what most boards and/or leadership groups are tasked with doing at the heart of the mission, or goal of the project.

I suspect what we actually need is somewhere in between the two, If there is a group that is setting a vision and doing a good job at selling it then people particularly those who are looking for something to work on will come in and ask where they can help, which is a big difference from telling people what they should be doing. For me one of the reasons I started contributing to openSUSE over other places is it gave me the freedom to work on whatever i'd like or feel like working on. If people started asking me why I keep working on and contributing to Say Enlightenment when it doesn't really meet or fit the needs of the community then that's the minute I go and find a different community to contribute to. One of openSUSE's strengths has been it gives people a good place to innovate and explore new ideas and we need to be careful that we design a structure that continues to allow this freedom while also doing a better job of helping people who want to contribute to something but they don't know what contribute something that is worthwhile to the project.

...

"Under our current system people can't tell anyone what to do, in certain cases they can tell people they can't do something, such as you can't submit that update as it doesn't meet our current packaging standards or as part of a conflict resolution process the board may tell someone they can't do something, personally I don't want to see that aspect of our governance changing. At the same time we could do a better job of guiding people who want to be guided into the most useful places. Which is something the current board struggles to have time for in its current format."

--> I partially disagree, where you say that aspect of our governance shouldn't change.  ALL aspects of our governance need to be on the table including that.  What we do from there is for another day, but leaving anything off the table is poor due diligence as a whole.  I do think that we need to do a better job at understanding the strengths and weaknesses of the individuals that make up our community but there still has to be a framework.  Without that, new users who want to contribute have nowhere to go.  We do not have a "concierge desk" that helps connect those users with the leads of a team who could help guide them. I do agree that this is not the job of the board, I think that's where we need a specific role in the overall management of openSUSE (or whatever we're going to be called) who is friendly, and NOT technically knowledgeable.  They just have to know who and where to send people. Think of them as a friendly telephone operator.

Here i'm going to agree with Henne an individual or a team of people could start working on this now (some have in the past) and if people are willing to work on this and pick that up it'd be great. Though the current board's role of facilitating communication i'm sure we'd be happy to point them in the right direction and help wherever possible (I didn't ask the rest of the board yet). On the other hand if we don't have the right person in the community who is passionate about this and willing to do it either we will end up with a position that is unfilled or a person in that position who either doesn't have the time or motivation to do it really well. Also if you ask me what the ideal would be, it would be that we have so many people asking that one person can't really handle it and so many people willing to help that the work could be split between a team

...

" The issue that then needs to be dealt with is how the groups communicate between each other if there are conflicts between them. I guess one model could be if the Community Council and Technical Board each appointed two members (Or people on there behalf) to the foundation board. But there are many other models, that's just one I thought of now. But this starts to do a better job at getting the right people into the right roles."

--> This is why there are often committees or SIGs who have leaders that answer to a larger board.  But at the end of the day, there needs to be ONE arbiter who has the final say.  Usually that's an Executive Director in a non-profit organization or someone in the C-Suite in the business world.  Either way, all workflows need a termination point - they cannot loop forever.

In the past in an openSUSE context unless the to Ideas drastically conflict with each other its been easy to let people do both ideas or any idea. Now that re getting to the point of having a foundation that is taking sponsorships and there is financial resources having a body who decided where the Money is spent is much more important because likely we will have less money then people with ideas on how to spend such so yes I agree we need some form of structure to deal with this.

PS - Thank you for continuing to support Enlightenment.  I still fire up my e16 WM from time to time!

------------------

Now for my two cents:

I am in the openSUSE BAR (https://meet.opensuse.org/bar <https://meet.opensuse.org/bar>) almost every day.  The BAR is a great place to discuss ideas over video in real-time with other members of the community.  Hiding behind mailing lists is one thing, defending your position in public is another.  I invite any of you that have an opinion on this topic to respectfully come to the BAR and discuss your points with others in there.  That kind of dialogue is what leads to compromise, unity, and understanding of other viewpoints.  The BAR is open to all and does not require permission to join from anyone else. Thanks to some that frequent the BAR, I was able to gain additional perspectives on the governance and branding issues at hand that did not change my mind, but they changed the reasoning of my stance (which IMO is more important).

I used to enjoy being in the bar as well, now i'm at a point where family life and timezones sometimes makes it hard to be there at the times when others regularly are, but i'll try and drop past every now and then.

I work for a consulting firm in a senior leadership position, and from afar I have been able to understand that:

1.  We do really lack overall leadership (the buck stops here so to speak) 2.  We are stagnant (where's the vision of the project, yes we have work to do whether it's volunteer or not). 3.  I'm not asking for metrics, but it would be nice to know if we are meeting our mission (every group has a mission) 4.  We have a community that's larger than we think, made up of passionate people from all over the world.  This diversity is our strength, yet we aren't maximizing the potential

Here are my ideas for governance:

- Starting from the top, we have an overall board with a board chair but let me take that one step further, why not make it a Steering Committee if we don't want to call it a board.  They are our community leaders who represent us to the open-source, personal, business communities at the end of the day.  They are the ones who interact with SUSE when required.  They are the ones that make the final call about who does what and when. - If SUSE is asking us to rebrand, we should ask them to remove the requirement that a member of SUSE be on the board.  Without that, we lack the ability to create an "untainted" identity in the greater open-source ecosphere. - The steering committee could establish subcommittees or appointees for: -- Financial (interfaces with the foundation), -- Technical (incorporating the role of the Heroes, but with guidance and leadership) -- Social (community engagement, conflict resolution)

I do like this as a potential model, maybe even more then the others that have been proposed so far. Maybe one change i'd make is to call it a "Guidance Committee". So rather then a "this is the direction the project needs to go in everyone should be working towards this" its a slightly more passive "these are the goals we are trying to drive the project toward its probably were we will spend our time and effort and if you'd like to help, here are some areas we need assistance with. At the same time if your passionate or interested in working on something else you are more then welcome to do that as well." Maybe that could be worded better but hopefully you get the idea.

I think opening up those avenues allows those that don't want to or have the time to commit to the steering committee full-on to still have a say and then from there if they want to run for steering committee, they have the institutional knowledge of people and project to be confident in that position, thus avoiding the "What was I thinking when I did this" moment which causes a lack of energy, or a disengagement from the project.

As always, I appreciate everyone's insight as I get to meet more of you across the community and the globe.  Thank you for sharing your experiences, highs and lows, and even a cold beverage when the time allows.

Bill Schouten - ctlinux (openSUSE Heroes team, openSUSE Discord/Matrix moderator)

On Wed, Jul 17, 2024 at 9:34 AM Simon Lees <sflees@suse.de

-- Simon Lees (Simotek) http://simotek.net Emergency Update Team keybase.io/simotek SUSE Linux Adelaide Australia, UTC+10:30 GPG Fingerprint: 5B87 DB9D 88DC F606 E489 CEC5 0922 C246 02F0 014B

Hey, Dne středa 10. července 2024 15:19:27, SELČ, Henne Vogelsang napsal(a): <snip>

This is the work that desperately *needs* to be done and that will decide our fate as a group of people doing things together. There is no one else that can do this for us. Not SUSE, no foundation, no leader. <snip>

that's what a true leader would say :) Regards, Gfs

Dne čtvrtek 11. července 2024 17:35:04, SELČ, carlo coppa napsal(a):

We could call it openESUS, SUSE on the contrary. Among other things, ESUS is a Celtic deity.

https://imgur.com/F7vwnH9[1] I mean, I can imagine him wearing chameleon on his shoulder. But I am not sure how woodcutter plays well with green nature of openSUSE :D Regards, Gfs -------- [1] https://imgur.com/F7vwnH9

On 2024-07-12 11:12, JJ Is wrote:

A relatively new user here, although I've been aware of Opensuse for a long time as a bit of a Linux Distro Hopper. This is obviously a bit of a confusing issue as even your own Wiki says: "openSUSE is also the base for SUSE's award-winning SUSE Linux Enterprise products."

Suggesting that OpenSUSE is used by SUSE but it's not SUSE as you say? What is the relationship? Didn't they stop offering an open source free version when they bought it but it was kept going thereafter by a group of volunteers is my understanding and maybe the two have diverged since then?

The Kernel is also the basis for SUSE's Enterprise Products But no one would ever get confused and ask the question "the Kernel is used by SUSE but is not SUSE as you say?" It's absolutely right, present, correct, and normal for things SUSE use in their commercial products have different names than SUSE's commercial products. The fact SUSE shares its name with one of those buckets it draws from for it's products is the anomaly that needs to be addressed. Not the fact that they're drawing from what we do here in this Project. I'm certain that will continue whatever we do regarding the name "openSUSE"

I would be interested for the reason (how) the SUSE Management people have received the idea with the openSUSE rebranding as an improvement. It seems, that some self-reflection and analysis of the behaviour (incl. the relationship) have been missing.

Gesendet: Freitag, 12. Juli 2024 um 13:05 Uhr Von: "Lubos Kocman" <lubos.kocman@suse.com> An: "Richard Brown" <rbrown@suse.de> Cc: project@lists.opensuse.org Betreff: Re: Rebranding of the Project

Just to state that we (Leap 15.3+) use SUSE's kernel binary packages

On Fri, Jul 12, 2024 at 12:48 PM Richard Brown <rbrown@suse.de> wrote:

...

On 2024-07-12 11:12, JJ Is wrote:

...

A relatively new user here, although I've been aware of Opensuse for a long time as a bit of a Linux Distro Hopper. This is obviously a bit of a confusing issue as even your own Wiki says: "openSUSE is also the base for SUSE's award-winning SUSE Linux Enterprise products."

Suggesting that OpenSUSE is used by SUSE but it's not SUSE as you say? What is the relationship? Didn't they stop offering an open source free version when they bought it but it was kept going thereafter by a group of volunteers is my understanding and maybe the two have diverged since then?

The Kernel is also the basis for SUSE's Enterprise Products

But no one would ever get confused and ask the question "the Kernel is used by SUSE but is not SUSE as you say?"

It's absolutely right, present, correct, and normal for things SUSE use in their commercial products have different names than SUSE's commercial products. The fact SUSE shares its name with one of those buckets it draws from for it's products is the anomaly that needs to be addressed. Not the fact that they're drawing from what we do here in this Project. I'm certain that will continue whatever we do regarding the name "openSUSE"

--

Best regards

Luboš Kocman openSUSE Leap Release Manager

Dne pátek 12. července 2024 14:21:03, SELČ, Neal Gompa napsal(a):

On Fri, Jul 12, 2024 at 8:01 AM Sarah Julia Kriesch <ada.lovelace@gmx.de> wrote:

...

I would be interested for the reason (how) the SUSE Management people have received the idea with the openSUSE rebranding as an improvement. It seems, that some self-reflection and analysis of the behaviour (incl. the relationship) have been missing. The presentation that triggered this discussion was given by Robert Sirchia (who is involved in SUSE marketing) at the conference was on behalf of Andy Fitzsimon (who is in charge of SUSE's brand stuff).

It's nice, that both are so active in the community marketing and are open for discussion here.

This has also been a long-running discussion in the background between SUSE and the openSUSE Board. There has been *plenty* of analysis of the relationship.

- What were the pros and cons for the rebrand? - What were the alternatives? - Was the voting private? - I guess we can't see any results of the analysis? - Is it a decision and request or just a proposal as marketed?

That does not change the problems related to brand confusion, defense difficulty, and external perception issues that the current brand situation has.

There is no brand confusion. SUSE and openSUSE is one brand (or two symbiotic brands). As long as SUSE uses openSUSE code and community work, it's just that and no "brand" PR talk is gonna solve that. Regards, Gfs

Please refer to https://en.opensuse.org/Logocontest On Wed, Jul 17, 2024 at 3:14 PM Thomas Zimmermann <tzimmermann@suse.com> wrote:

Hi

Am 07.07.24 um 21:47 schrieb Shawn W Dunn:

...

Pursuant to Richard and Robert's talk at oSC 2024:

https://media.ccc.de/v/4411-we-re-all-grown-up-opensuse-is-not-suse

This is a topic that needs to be discussed as a community, especially as it's currently a request from SUSE.

I do want to be clear, this message is me posting as "Community Member SFalken" not "openSUSE Board Member SFalken"

Myself, I'm in favour of "rebranding" the community project, and making it clear that openSUSE != SUSE. Far too much of the time in our support channels is spent clearing up these misconceptions, where new users (and even some experienced users), are saying things like "SUSE Should do $x" or "Why doesn't SUSE do $x?".

I'm less certain that I agree with Richards proposal of the individual projects sort of "go their own way", at least as he's laid it out, but again, this is absolutely a topic that deserves consideration.

Thoughts?

Try to get the rights for the chameleon logo from SUSE and call it Geeko Linux. The chameleon is the most recognizable part of openSUSE and without, the connection and origin of any new distribution might not be obvious.

Best regards Thomas

-- -- Thomas Zimmermann Graphics Driver Developer SUSE Software Solutions Germany GmbH Frankenstrasse 146, 90461 Nuernberg, Germany GF: Ivo Totev, Andrew Myers, Andrew McDonald, Boudien Moerman HRB 36809 (AG Nuernberg)

-- Best regards Luboš Kocman openSUSE Leap Release Manager

Hello, Am Mittwoch, 17. Juli 2024, 15:25:39 MESZ schrieb Lubos Kocman:

Please refer to https://en.opensuse.org/Logocontest

... and keep in mind that the logo contest got lots of complaints because it did not include our current logo as an option [1]. Back then, we got the promise that there will be a membership vote to choose between the current logo and the contest winner, but this vote never happened :-( Regards, Christian Boltz [1] for a more verbose version, see the last section of https://lists.opensuse.org/archives/list/project@lists.opensuse.org/ message/672WL752FCD3GDEXTAYA7XRITIN36667/ -- What are you doing?!? The message is over, GO AWAY!

Hi Thomas - There are already multiple other operating system projects calling themselves "Geeko" or a similar variant. -Jeff On 7/17/24 09:14, Thomas Zimmermann wrote:

Hi

Am 07.07.24 um 21:47 schrieb Shawn W Dunn:

...

Pursuant to Richard and Robert's talk at oSC 2024:

https://media.ccc.de/v/4411-we-re-all-grown-up-opensuse-is-not-suse

This is a topic that needs to be discussed as a community, especially as it's currently a request from SUSE.

I do want to be clear, this message is me posting as "Community Member SFalken" not "openSUSE Board Member SFalken"

Myself, I'm in favour of "rebranding" the community project, and making it clear that openSUSE != SUSE.  Far too much of the time in our support channels is spent clearing up these misconceptions, where new users (and even some experienced users), are saying things like "SUSE Should do $x" or "Why doesn't SUSE do $x?".

I'm less certain that I agree with Richards proposal of the individual projects sort of "go their own way", at least as he's laid it out, but again, this is absolutely a topic that deserves consideration.

Thoughts?

Try to get the rights for the chameleon logo from SUSE and call it Geeko Linux. The chameleon is the most recognizable part of openSUSE and without, the connection and origin of any new distribution might not be obvious.

Best regards Thomas

-- Jeff Mahoney VP Engineering, Linux Systems