2020 Board Elections: my platform
Hi all, my election platform is now finished, I would appreciate any feedback from your side.... https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Board_election_2020_platform_Mark_Stopka -- Best regards / S pozdravem, BSc. Mark Stopka, BBA Managing Partner (at) PERLUR Group mobile: +420 704 373 561 website: www.perlur.cloud
On Thu, 2020-12-03 at 10:18 +0100, Mark Stopka wrote:
Hi Mark! My feedback is below :) I find the confidence in which you make the following statement rather amusing: "current owner of SUSE - Private Equity Fund EQT is planning an IPO, IBM, one of the significant SUSE partners is planning to split into two separate companies." It is my experience that such things never work out as forseen, and I have learned the hard way, repeatedly, that it's often better to worry about the actual challenges faced by the community rather than the theoretical challenges that may come from a change in corporate governance. And as a community I feel we have enough issues that need addressing already we don't need to risk paralysis by worrying about what then ext issues on the horizon may be. Regarding your agenda, I have issue with the following points (those I ignore you can consider I broadly support) 3. "Clarifying project vision and definining market possitioning in a way that brings value to openSUSE Foundation partners and the community" Please be aware that I will object strongly to any effort by you or the Board to impose a definition upon the community. There is a fine line between the Board's role, which can & should include pulling the community together to clarify such things, and defining such things for the community, which would be exceeding the Board's remit. 4. "Establish strong position of openSUSE in markets abandoned by SUSE such as Infrastructure as a Service" I do not feel this is a role for the Board at all - after all, how are you going to achieve any of that? You need contributors..but, you just risked alienating those very contributors who are already working on such technologies (eg. myself and my work in Kubic) by talking about this problem in this way. 5. "Help EQT facilitate sucesfull IPO of SUSE, for which I believe I a well fitted as I have been involved in many M&A transactions" The openSUSE Board have not right, role, or responsibility to involve itself in SUSE's business. I can tell you from experience, that if an openSUSE Board member tries to involve themselves in the internal matters of SUSE's corporate governance, all that will result is a lowering of respect for openSUSE by SUSE Management and a request to the openSUSE Chairman that they better manage their colleagues in the Board. Please do not repeat this mistake. 7. "Building greater media presence and defining unified communications strategy with community outsiders" See my concerns to point 3. The Board's role clearly states the Board should "Initiate discussions about new project wide initiatives". Maybe you could start the discussion about building such a strategy, but it is not the Board's job to define a strategy and impose it on the community. Your section of the "Role of the Board" clearly seems to misunderstand the chartered role of the Board. Your sentance "In all it's decision making that should be the leading principle." seems to be a total misunderstanding of the function of the openSUSE Board. The leading principles of the Board are to be this Projects conflict resolvers, communication conduits, and decision makers *of last resort*. If decisions need to be made, the Board should be looking how the community to make it's own decisions, that is how you lead in this Project. I see a lot of good potential in your platform, but I fear your apparent exaggerated view of the role of the Board puts you in conflict with the communities expectations of the role, and I hope this feedback helps you reassess the roles you intend to play should be elected. Regards, Richard
Hi Mark! My feedback is below :)
Thank you!
That is exactly the reason why companies hire consultants such as myself when engaging in major corporate restructuring. You may call it worry, governance practitioners call it risk management. Trust me, I have been juggling enough stuff at the same time not to be paralized by keeping an eye on this (considering I am already paid to keep an eye on it by a 3rd party anyway). Besides this does not change the fact that if I am proposing change in (legal & governance) structure of openSUSE as a project (separate foundation) I also need to take into account any possible restructuring going on on the side of the partners... I would comment more, but such information is privileged at this time. And SUSE (and some other significant contributors) certainly needs to be a consulted and informed party on this if we were to establish a RACI matrix for this initiative and use proper governance methodologies to drive such change.
Duly noted. It is more than obvious to everyone that it would require wider community consensus, you may oppose any change, someone else may support some change, we won't know, until we apply standard management tools such as balanced score-cards, focus groups,... which will help define such vision and strategy. After that is done, a proposal for community vote to reach consensus can be made.
First of all, it is not SUSE business, it is EQTs business, and that is all I can say given the NDAs I have signed.
Kubic would be considered PaaS, not IaaS, by IaaS you can imagine something like Ovirt or Proxmox.
If openSUSE will be a net-loss for this restructuring, SUSE will drop it, I am certainly not looking to drive the EQTs effort from the openSUSE board side, but rather make sure that openSUSE won't become a liability in that effort.
You see my reply to #3.
On Thu, 2020-12-03 at 12:02 +0100, Mark Stopka wrote:
I'm glad for you that you get good business outside of your openSUSE contributions. But I'd like to remind you that you're running for election to a communtiy organisation. It needs a different skill set, and you certainly need to take care to distinguish between your roles and responsibilities to that community and your lack of roles or responsibilities to that communities partners. Meddling in the business of our partners and sponsors is how this Project will lose partners and sponsors, not gain them.
I do not like the idea that balanced score-cards, focus groups, etc might become standard operating procedures in this community. We have methods for reaching consensus already. Who are you, or any elected Board member, to redefine how this community already does things?
Community Board members require the trust of the community. Your signing of any NDA with either EQT or SUSE seems to compromise your ability to engage with this community openly. Therefore you do not have my trust and I will advocate strongly that no one votes for you. We need Board members who are unencumbered from such legal restrictions, especially given the efforts towards a Foundation.
You still do not answer my question. How are you going to achieve that? You need contributors, how are you going to gain them? Or is this something you can't discuss because of your NDA?
If openSUSE risks being dropped by any of its partners, then openSUSE needs to find a way to survive without that partner. The Board will have a responsibility to chart that course. I repeat again, do not involve yourself in the internal business of SUSE. Former Board members did, and as Chairman I gained many grey hairs as a result.
On Thu, Dec 3, 2020 at 12:16 PM Richard Brown <rbrown@suse.de> wrote:
I wonder if your twisting things is intentional, or if you really don't get the point, but the point is ENABLE CURRENT PARTNERS to meddle in our business so they can get more added value from the partnership in exchange for more sponsorship. For instance let's take our current sponsor, AMD... should we really before discussing it with AMD go and ask Intel for sponsorship, or should we CONSULT them first, of what would the implications be if Intel became a partner also? I may have chosen Intel here, but in reality as is obvious from #9 of the agenda "Establish partnership with industry in emerging verticals such as DevOps, Blockchain and RISC-V ecosystem" I am talking about some players in the RISC-V ecosystem, which is growing exponentially.
Who are you to insist that things should forever stay the same regardless of the opinion of others? I recommend a book, it's title is "Your Strategy needs a Strategy".
Seems you are the kind of a guy who would like others to think for themselves. /s FYI the NDAs are with neither of those two, they are with SUSE and IBM customers who are trying, as I said in prior email, to manage risks associated with planned restructuring of their suppliers.
See #8 of my agenda: "Strongly push towards recruitment of new contributors, perhaps thru sort of incubator program"
Which is addressed in my agenda under #6 "Identify new partners for openSUSE Foundation to secure and diversify sources of funding". I have very good connections within circles of System Integrators and Hardware Vendors, considering I managed them to sponsor conferences, I believe I can properly motivate them to sponsor this project also. But before I ask e.q. Hitachi Vantara Director of Strategic Alliances for some beefy hardware (in exchange for a logo and a press release), I rather first make sure we can afford the electricity bill and floor-space.
On Thu, 2020-12-03 at 13:07 +0100, Mark Stopka wrote:
On Thu, Dec 3, 2020 at 12:16 PM Richard Brown <rbrown@suse.de> wrote:
Current partners can all meddle in our business by contributing. None of our sponsorship arrangements are exclusive and none of our partners have ever objected when openSUSE has been sponsored by their "competition". Heck, we've even had Fedora/RH sponsor openSUSE conferences..and visa versa.. I'm getting the distinct impression you have a very different understanding of how all this community stuff works compared to the reality that openSUSE has been living for the last decades..
I don't insist everything stays the same (please..seriously..you just accused ME of all people of that? I'm flattered given how often I'm accused of changing too much) I do insist that Board members do not misuse their position to attempt to foist change upon the community, when the community already has ways of making its own decisions, implimenting it's own changes, and the Board's job is to remove blockers to that community self-empowerment, not impose it's own vision upon the community.
It is a relief that you clarified that it is not SUSE nor EQT putting you under an NDA - that would be grossly out of character considering my experience with SUSE involved me being empowered to share *more* internal information with the community than the company otherwise would be comfortable making public. Regardless though, you are clearly compromise being an NDA-bound agent of unnamed corporations. I find it particually vexxing that you run on your intent to involve yourself in SUSE/EQT's business and then hide behind this NDA when questioned on the details or suitability of that involvement. This doesn't seem exactly consistant with this projects standards on transparency. This just adds to my feelings that you cannot be trusted to act first and foremost on behalf of the openSUSE community in the chartered role of an openSUSE Board Member. The fact that you are now resorting to questioning my mental state on twitter further adds to that concern. How are you meant to be able to enforce openSUSE's Guiding Principles regarding respect when you're publicly tweeting to all your followers that I need to see a psychiacrist?
On Thu, Dec 3, 2020 at 1:26 PM Richard Brown <rbrown@suse.de> wrote:
Yeah, I stay what I said under that tweet, you show signs of paranoia that there are forces at hand out to get you or the openSUSE project; I work as a consultant, signing an NDA is the first thing I do, I worked for Novartis one week, GSK next week, and Roche month after that. I am given access to information that is considered internal-only, restricted or confidential as per ISO27001. I have also personally signed purchase orders for SUSE products and services and mutual NDAs on behalf of my clients and Rancher Labs Inc., it was a lovely day I spent with Shannon in Prague that day, we visited a cemetery when one of his ancestors was buried. Would you prefer I ask my clients to move to some other distribution for their needs? I am sure we can negotiate Mr. Brown special discount package for the first 5 years with RedHat. /s
Hey, On 12/3/20 1:46 PM, Mark Stopka wrote:
Yeah, I stay what I said under that tweet, you show signs of paranoia that there are forces at hand out to get you or the openSUSE project;
Here at openSUSE we value respect for other persons and their contributions, for other opinions and beliefs. We listen to arguments and address problems in a constructive and open way. We believe that a diverse community based on mutual respect is the base for a creative and productive environment enabling the project to be truly successful. We don't tolerate social discrimination and aim at creating an environment where people feel accepted and safe from offense. Calling someone paranoid because he disagrees with you and voices this disagreement is a NO-GO in this community. Calling someone paranoid is not something we do in this community PERIOD. I strongly suggest you re-think your communication style and apologize to Richard ASAP. Henne -- Henne Vogelsang http://www.opensuse.org Everybody has a plan, until they get hit. - Mike Tyson
On Thu, Dec 3, 2020 at 5:33 PM Henne Vogelsang <hvogel@opensuse.org> wrote:
Hey,
Hi Henne,
Indeed, I hope we do...
Indeed, I agree.
Calling someone paranoid because he disagrees with you and voices this disagreement is a NO-GO in this community.
This is not what I have called it. I, as you quoted, said " show signs of paranoia", it is an observation based on his "is compromised by".
Calling someone paranoid is not something we do in this community PERIOD.
That is fine, I have not done that, I am not a licensed psychiatrist to diagnose ICD-9 297.9 Unspecified paranoid state, but if you make an effort and read approximate symptoms in the diagnostic manual, you may recommend such person a visit to ensure, that he / she does not suffer from such an acute and dangerous state.
I strongly suggest you re-think your communication style and apologize to Richard ASAP.
While I do agree with all the points you have pointed out, I also strongly believe that the tweet by Richard breaks the very same rules, so while I hereby apologize to Richard for having concert for his health, I also call upon you to appeal to Richard to do the same; In addition Richard, I believe that the tweet you have tweeted out damages rights to my name and reputation, thus I would like you to take it down, shall you not comply, I will notify the platform itself with Notice and Takedown requests in accordance with Article 14 of the Directive 2000/31/EC of the European Parliament. With that being said, I don't know how NDA compromises someone, NDA, also called Non-Disclosure Agreement is a legally binding document that prevents parties involved from revealing potentially sensitive, in some cases even legally protected information, it is not a document that would compel anyone to act in any interest other than the interest of protection of such privileged information. Action from Richard's side is nothing but an attack on what I was hoping would be free, democratic and independent board election, in modern dictionary, tactic that has been used by Richard is called "hybrid warfare". There was no need for him to jump the gun, and broadcast to the entire community of ~ 3000 followers that someone has some NDA obligations, let alone call-it "being compromised". As it is indicated on the election site, ballots open on 15th of December, that was PLENTY of time to keep things civil so Richard can hardly argue that there has been some sense of urgency to share this message within the community outside of this mailing-list, which is also archived and readable by everyone shall such need arise in the future. Raise your hands, those who work in the industry, yet have never signed an NDA either as part of a normal employee contract, or as an additional explicit document. I am really curious, because it has never happened to me in my life...
Hey, On 12/3/20 6:23 PM, Mark Stopka wrote:
I'm not going to engage in hair-splitting matches with you. You said what you said. It was received. There is no taking it back. There is a way forward though, I told you what it is.
That might very well be, it was certainly not very nice of him. But for openSUSE to be the productive and save environment we need this to be, behaving like you do right now is not going to fly. If you think you have been slighted, here in openSUSE it means you seek out a private conversation with that geeko. Being slighted doesn't entitle you to get into name calling match. Especially with some *serious* topic like mental health that for sure many of our friends here struggle with. If you don't want to do this in private, with whomever you think slighted you, here in openSUSE it means you involve some other trusted geekos to help you resolve the conflict. Being slighted doesn't entitle you to threaten people. Here in openSUSE we assume the best intentions from each other and give us the benefit of a doubt. This is a community of friends, not some public space. You should accept this. *ESPECIALLY* if you want to be part of our glorified conflict resolving entity... Henne -- Henne Vogelsang http://www.opensuse.org Everybody has a plan, until they get hit. - Mike Tyson
On Thu, Dec 3, 2020 at 6:50 PM Henne Vogelsang <hvogel@opensuse.org> wrote:
Are you in other words saying that the behavior that he engaged in (and take note he is the one who mentioned my Twitter reply on the mailing list, not me) is going to fly? I am sure that at least one of the valuable members of this community and member of this mailing-list who I have spoken with just a few days ago off-list as a reaction to something he said on the list, would like to hear the answer to that.
Yeah, some of us remember talking some rather prominent, former community member out of suicide over Jabber, and calling local authorities in different country, to prevent the worst. Tweet by Richard could easily throw such a person overboard. Luckily for me, I am not on the depressive, but hypo-manic side of the bipolar spectrum.
Who am I threatening? All I said is that he either takes his slanderous Tweet down himself, or I will ask Twitter to do it for him. I think you don't know what Notice and Takedown actually means, it merely means that Twitter will take it down for him, there is no further recourse other than what Twitter will decide to do, if he is a repeated offender.
Did you read the Tweet at least? Let me link it for you... https://twitter.com/sysrich/status/1334470803635785729 Now please tell me how your "best intentions" interpretation sounds like in plain, simple English....
Hey, On 12/3/20 7:56 PM, Mark Stopka wrote:
Nope, no idea how you would come to this conclusion. In my book it's especially not okay as you (obviously) are so offended by it that you feel the need to lash out. You two for sure need to talk and solve your differences on this topic like the adults you are supposed to be. If you can't do this on your own, seek help from your peers. If you can't do this, seek help from our official conflict resolution group. You seem to think that there are sides and that people have to pick a particular one and "fight" it out. There aren't any sides, we (openSUSE) are one. You two need get it together and come back into the fold.
My interpretation of this doesn't matter. I'm not your judge. I'm just the dude that tells you to behave like we set out to behave here. You need to talk to Richard about about his reasoning to be so worried about NDAs. You need to talk with Richard about his intentions for this tweet. And *yes* you also need to talk to Richard about how it made you feel when he tweeted this. What you can't do is run around calling people paranoid, construct factions and treat people badly. Even if they treated you badly. That's simply not how set out to behave in this community. Henne -- Henne Vogelsang http://www.opensuse.org Everybody has a plan, until they get hit. - Mike Tyson
On Fri, Dec 4, 2020 at 5:47 PM Henne Vogelsang <hvogel@opensuse.org> wrote:
You have called upon me to apologize, which I did, I have also called upon you to do the same with Richard, when should i expect such call, considering that later in this e-mail you say that:
My interpretation of this doesn't matter. I'm not your judge. I'm just the dude that tells you to behave like we set out to behave here.
If you are not a judge, I can also assume you are not a licensed psychiatrist, so what makes you a judge in that case? In one case your interpretation does matter, in another it doesn't? It sure seems like a double standard...
Hey, On 12/4/20 6:05 PM, Mark Stopka wrote:
You seem to think this is a zero sum game and that it's my responsibly to clean up. It isn't. You have a part in this. Recognize your part and then start mending. You can expect, as all of us here do, the same from Richard.
I don't have to be a psychiatrist to know that slighting people as mentally ill is something we don't tolerate here. First of all because we don't slight each other here. Second of all because mental illness is some serious topic you don't get to invoke as insult without making "fun" of all the people who suffer from it in some form. Henne -- Henne Vogelsang http://www.opensuse.org Everybody has a plan, until they get hit. - Mike Tyson
Mark Stopka wrote:
Raise your hands, those who work in the industry, yet have never signed an NDA either as part of a normal employee contract,
Hand raised. In 30 years I never have. I have worked in banking, airlines, financial software, software sales, system software development. -- Per Jessen, Zürich (0.7°C) Member, openSUSE Heroes
* Per Jessen <per@opensuse.org> [12-04-20 12:48]:
I did with the US Air Force but was related to security, and was not called an NDA. -- (paka)Patrick Shanahan Plainfield, Indiana, USA @ptilopteri http://en.opensuse.org openSUSE Community Member facebook/ptilopteri Photos: http://wahoo.no-ip.org/piwigo paka @ IRCnet freenode
Dne čtvrtek 3. prosince 2020 13:26:15 CET, Richard Brown napsal(a):
At https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Board I read "The purpose of the openSUSE Board is to *lead* the overall project.", but among "main tasks" or elsewhere I don't see any sort of executive power, so I have no idea what could be misused. No power == nothing to misuse. Right? On the other hand, what does that *lead* mean in the quoted sentence? Picking from "main tasks", we could select "Communicate community interests to SUSE", "Facilitate communication with all areas of the community", "Facilitate decision making processes where needed." and "Initiate discussions about new project wide initiatives". Mark is proposing to work within these boundaries. He is also proposing to *initiate discussion* and as You, without communication, there is hardly any progress, and regardless what Mark wishes, without broad community consensus, he can't implement any (major) changes. He'd have to convince enough people that his ideas are good and convince community to evolve in particular direction. I'm sorry, I don't get where the concerns came from. Even if any his proposal would be rejected, the discussion itself can be fruitful for whole project. -- Vojtěch Zeisek https://trapa.cz/ Komunita openSUSE GNU/Linuxu Community of the openSUSE GNU/Linux https://www.opensuse.org/
On 12/4/20 12:35 AM, Vojtěch Zeisek wrote:
I think the best way to describe it maybe "Organizational Leadership" ie "We see something that could be working better and work with the community to fix it". Some examples from the time i've spent on the board is things like re arranging some of the mailing lists, tidying up parts of the wiki and of course leading the work on the foundation. What we can't really do is provide technical leadership direction, for example the board could say the new direction of openSUSE is that the UI should replicate windows, but that's never going to happen, because the board can't really tell contributors what to do, at most we can in rare very specific cases tell a contributor that they can't do something. But Leadership is talking to a wide range of people in the community so when someone says I have this idea we can say this other person was also looking at that let me put you in contact with them. Or if someone is working on something and has hit some roadblocks somewhere thats where often the board can help. So using that as an example saying you want to run for the board because you'd like to see better open stack or RISC-V support in openSUSE is possibly not the best use of someones time. Because if thats what your passion is you can start working on that without being on the board. For example one of my passions is having really good support for the Enlightenment desktop which I was able to do before I was on the board. Now that i'm on the board I have much less time to work on that or other things like making jack sane. As a wise former board member once said "being on the board is 90% dealing with people problems." Beyond that i'd say another 5% is dealing with trademark requests. -- 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 Thu, Dec 3, 2020 at 10:58 PM Gerald Pfeifer <gp@suse.com> wrote:
As long as we continue to beat on this particular drum... can we first agree on a common definition of "he is compromised by NDAs", Oxford Dictionary offers following definition:
somebody/something/yourself to be in danger or to be suspected of something, especially by acting in a way that is not very sensible
If we were to go by this definition (which can be easily associated via context), do you consider it appropriate? Or is it also "unfortunate", or does it cross the threshold of "inappropriate" or is it "just fine"? Or do we pick some other definition to go by?
* Mark Stopka <mstopka@opensuse.org> [12-03-20 17:20]:
maybe you should look deeper into the usage of "NDA", particular the context as the definition you provide does not fit. and you have mixed the attributes and quoting in your post. -- (paka)Patrick Shanahan Plainfield, Indiana, USA @ptilopteri http://en.opensuse.org openSUSE Community Member facebook/ptilopteri Photos: http://wahoo.no-ip.org/piwigo paka @ IRCnet freenode
Hi list, On 2020-12-03 13:07, Mark Stopka wrote:
First of all let me define the two kinds of relationships you are talking about. First one is a "partnership" or "Partners" as we call them - and we have that as a project - listed on a page called friends. https://en.opensuse.org/Friends And than - we have something called "Sponsors" - like AMD. With a sponsorship we have a clear statement what you can and what you can't expect from the project see here: https://en.opensuse.org/images/8/8c/Sponsoring_for_opensuse.pdf I can't see here any obligations of the project, that should provide a Sponsor or Partner with the right to "ENABLE CURRENT PARTNERS to meddle in our business so they can get more added value from the partnership in exchange for more sponsorship" - as you proposed. It is a free software project. Free as in freedom, not in free beer. And SUSE -the company- runs a business - that has partners - and that should care about whatsoever "value added". openSUSE is not a business. Clearly not. openSUSE is a free software project, based on the Linux kernel and the idea of providing a software world wide that can be used and shared by people. Striving to become a foundation, based on the will of the members. Sure, if you run a company, like AMD or Intel, and you like to sell your products, feel free to sponsor the project or employ developers that bring the project forward in a direction, that your hardware is or might be better supported. But never expect this, if you sponsor the foundation/project itself. Your logo will be shown and your reputation might be better, but your money might be used to organize a conference, buy some marketing material or pay for traveling costs of openSUSE members, so that developers can meet and share thoughts. You should never expect, and I'm sure no company does, that your sponsorship-money will be used to employ or pay developers to get your product supported better. So you should never expect to get some kind of "added value" for your company from a sponsorship - besides the tax savings you may have. And you should never expect a board member or members of the project (fun fact, board people are project members as well) to behave differently or not criticize some of your decisions as a company, just because you are a sponsor now. And I'm very sorry, but if you do not understand, that openSUSE is not just a vehicle for SUSE to get it's "value adding strategy" fulfilled, but is a free software project, just as a lot of other free software projects out there, than you should maybe rethink your application for becoming a board member of the openSUSE project. I really don't care about your NDAs or your personal targets you connect with becoming a board member, all I care about as a member is, that you see our project as a free software project and not as some value-adding-whatever thing. Just my 2 cents. Best regards, Thorsten
Where do you see that clear can't be expected in that document? It has been recently brought up by Linux developers themselves, that AMD / NVIDIA sending samples of brand new hardware to reviewers but not developers has significant negative impact on Linux support of such GPUs, where in that document does it state that the board can't open a dialogue (perhaps with a mandate of other community members thru vote) with either or both of these companies regarding this topic. Besides that, again, as I indicated before, it is a document, document's are to be written, numbered, approved, updated, re-numbered, re-approved,... as the situation and needs evolve. I clearly state on my platform page that "perhaps even society build around principles of liquid democracy", yet you make it sound like I am trying to get the seat "at the table" to change everything, I do believe this project needs more structure and organization and many agree with me, yet Mr. Brown went on full on crazy conspiracy when I clearly stated that while I am a proponent of rather significant changes, I also plan doing so whilst seeking wider community consensus, if the community consensus won't be there, then clearly changes won't be implemented. Do we have net inflow, or net outflow of new community members? Or are we net-net the same? From my observation, we are losing members and contributors so PERHAPS something should change. Luckily I am one of those who are able to drive change while being villainized by a loud minority, which in my eyes makes me the perfect candidate for everyone who thinks deeper structural changes are required, and in the end it is each and every member's decision who they will vote for. -- Best regards / S pozdravem, BSc. Mark Stopka, BBA Managing Partner (at) PERLUR Group mobile: +420 704 373 561 website: www.perlur.cloud
Hey, On 12/3/20 2:33 PM, Mark Stopka wrote:
I'm sorry but you do realize that you run for some functional position in a Free Software project with no formal structure that consists of friends (or people who desperately want to become friends) so they can achieve some things together right? There are not supposed to be any factions here. No parties. In our project the majority does not rule. There are no titles. We have no leaders. We are not governed. In fact we are ungovernable! If you want "deeper structural changes", get some friends together, make a proposal how to implement them, make sure you incorporate feedback from *everyone* here and then get to *work*. Running for the openSUSE Board will not enable you to do this. Behaving like you do towards people on this mailing list will most certainly *EXCLUDE* you from being able to ever achieve this. Check the openSUSE reality, here is the starting point: https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Guiding_principles You have some learning to do. Henne -- Henne Vogelsang http://www.opensuse.org Everybody has a plan, until they get hit. - Mike Tyson
Le 03/12/2020 à 18:11, Henne Vogelsang a écrit :
leaders. We are not governed. In fact we are ungovernable!
I like this, thanks :-)) jdd -- http://dodin.org
On Thu, Dec 3, 2020 at 6:11 PM Henne Vogelsang <hvogel@opensuse.org> wrote:
Yes.
There should not be, yet they're there, I had a talk at a conference this September, on one of my slides, I did mention that when "we" talk about a world without rulers, we don't talk about a world without rules. In fact we are governed, it is called self-governance, and it is common in both industry and open-source communities, and this mail chain is a clear example of it.
As indicated by the net outflow of contributors from the project, that clearly demonstrates there is *something* missing. I already outlined the methodology when I mentioned the use of balanced scorecards to assess our strengths and weaknesses, and use of focus groups to find the most common denominator which we could then use to perhaps establish a task-force like structure of governance with interfaces between individual task-force groups.
Let's distinguish between all people, and one specific person please, because I actually already did some of that work you speak about, and discussed with few former community members when I decided to run for a seat, and I have been warned about Richard explicitly not by one, but by few, if not all people I spoke about the issue.
On Thu, 2020-12-03 at 18:49 +0100, Mark Stopka wrote:
And yet, demonstrable reality conflicts with your opinion that there is a net outflow of contributors. Parsing all the .changes files in openSUSE:Factory for example is a relatively easy way to get a feeling for the trend of contributors. Email addresses from domains we know rather well (eg. suse.de/com/cz) can be de-duplicated to avoid exaggerating the numbers. The parsing can even be done on an annual basis, to get a feeling for how many of those email addresses are 'new' (as in, didn't appear the year before). Such analysis for all the years since openSUSE began provides a graph like this https://rootco.de/pics/openSUSEcontributorgraph2019.png And even someone in need of a psychiatrist cannot reasonably look at that graph and conclude this project has a net loss of contributors.
On Fri, Dec 4, 2020 at 10:51 AM Richard Brown <rbrown@suse.de> wrote:
a) contributors consist of more than RPM packagers b) how have you accounted for the phenomena when making packages have been a lot of headache that now mostly consists of: rm <something>.tar.xz osc service lr osc ar osc vc osc commit ? Simple statistics are nice, but they also provide a simple view at what is in this case a complex metric to assess, past 3 years demonstrate stagnation, growth in prior years can be attributed to growth of total number of packages in the Factory project.
Must be a deep wound, just like being trashed on Twitter by someone who is too trigger happy on broadcasting on Twitter to 3k followers I suppose, I'll make sure to bring it up mine with my therapist, you do as you see fit.
Hey, On 12/3/20 6:49 PM, Mark Stopka wrote:
That might very well be. So how do you work on making those unified people again? By picking a side and win?
Nobody debates that if (you think) we have a net outflow of contributors, and you want to put in work to change this, you should do it. None of this has anything to do with the openSUSE Board though :-)
You're doing it again. Factions. Politics. Contending. We don't care for this shit around here. We don't want any of it. We strive to see the good in other geekos and come to a (working) relationship with each other. *Especially* if we disagree on something or after we bruise each other! This is a software development community. Nothing we do is important enough in the real world to start calling each other names or build factions to fight out power struggles. Doing this is just petty, irritating and making this no fun. So once and for all, solve your problems together with Richard. Get help if you can't. Henne -- Henne Vogelsang http://www.opensuse.org Everybody has a plan, until they get hit. - Mike Tyson
On 12/3/20 9:32 PM, Mark Stopka wrote:
While SUSE's products continue to include Enterprise Linux Distro's this is exceptionally unlikely, as doing so would result in SUSE not having a starting base for its next Enterprise Distro which is exactly how tumbleweed is used. All the people who matter at SUSE understand how much the community contributes to the next SLE major release and how much this saves SUSE. If SUSE was looking at dropping openSUSE then why are they trying to intergrate Leap and SLE more closely? As someone who works full time on SLE, Leap and Tumbleweed development I can see how tied together all these things are and how much SUSE would loose if they dropped openSUSE. -- 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 Thu, Dec 3, 2020 at 11:10 PM Simon Lees <sflees@suse.de> wrote:
That was sort of my point, there seem to be a faction (Travelers TV show reference) that seems not to be in favor of such tighter integration, I am building my platform on a vision of tighter integration with the industry partners, not necessarily only SUSE, but more like independent hardware vendors who are making open-source hardware platforms, which is also the reason why I mention RISC-V ISA on my platform page, as I already see hardware coming on the market in a form of dev-kits, and soon consumer end-products. But of course to enable such partnership, there is the elephant in the room called separate foundation which as a legal entity can join the respective industry associations, which is one of the reasons why I included formation of formal foundation as part of my term agenda, as a separate legal entity we would have more freedom, but it would also require more strictly defined relationship boundaries between SUSE and openSUSE Foundation which is where the friction may arise, and then we may end-up in a situation when we have "openSUSE Foundation Linux" and "openSUSE Linux".
On 12/4/20 8:55 AM, Mark Stopka wrote:
I doubt the community would agree to creating a foundation without the support of SUSE. As we have looked at a foundation over the last few years our aim has been to create a foundation that will allow us to partner with many more people in more cases but at the same time wont fundamentally alter our relationship with SUSE. The other problem with the second part of your suggestion is that currently SUSE owns the openSUSE trademark's so your only option if SUSE didn't agree would be to try and convince people to join an entirely different project. -- 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 Fri, 2020-12-04 at 08:40 +1030, Simon Lees wrote:
Fully agreed, and we're already starting to discuss how can we get better in the integration and most importantly be more open. Stay tuned!
-- Lubos Kocman, Release Manager openSUSE Leap SUSE Software Solutions Germany GmbH Maxfeldstr. 5, 90409 Nürnberg - Germany (HRB 36809, AG Nürnberg) Geschäftsführer: Felix Imendörffer
Hello, Like others points 4,5 and 9 of you agenda caught my attention. Can we pretend all this catfight didn't occur and rollback in time to the point where you'd explain to me -- and more generally to anyone not fluent in corporate / business lingo -- your diagnosis of the issue(s) that point 4, 5, 9 are trying to address, as well as how you intend to address the issues? I like the concept of "explain me like I am 12 year old", so if your familiar with it, that'd be awesome. Cheers, Adrien
On Thu, Dec 3, 2020 at 8:31 PM Adrien Glauser <adrien.glauser@gmail.com> wrote:
Hello,
Hello Adrien,
Like others points 4,5 and 9 of you agenda caught my attention. Can we pretend all this catfight didn't occur and rollback in time to the point where you'd explain to me -- and more generally to anyone not fluent in corporate / business lingo --
We sure can, it is way more productively spent time, glad the MCU received this interrupt signal... :)
your diagnosis of the issue(s) that point 4, 5, 9 are trying to address, as well as how you intend to address the issues? I like the concept of
To simplify, let me first quite the referenced points: 4. Establish strong position of openSUSE in markets abandoned by SUSE such as Infrastructure as a Service 5.Help EQT facilitate sucesfull IPO of SUSE, for which I believe I am well fitted as I have been involved in many M&A transactions 9. Establish partnership with industry in emerging verticals such as DevOps, Blockchain and RISC-V ecosystem ad 4) SUSE dropped it's OpenStack offering which if you did not require support worked pretty well on SUSE Leap, while OpenStack is a beast that combines Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) with Platform as a Service (PaaS), it enabled you to create smaller clusters of servers to host large amount of virtual machines and manage them from a single pane of view, with shared storage,... to enable you to move VMs between hardware hosts which you needed to take down maintenance and other more advanced functionalities, taking current upstream OpenStack and installing it to Leap is becoming more and more pain... Currently there is no offering in SUSE / openSUSE land that would scale beyond just one virtualization host easily without having separate shared storage (or going an hyper-converged route where you provide shared storage and compute from the same cluster nodes), and even then it is sort of a pain without a real integration, you end-up with combination of virt-manager and CLI tools. There are offerings in place that go beyond that, there is oVirt by Fedora / RH, or Debian based Proxmox which offer integrated solutions to manage virtualization hosts and virtualized workload. We do have some nice technology already in house, which if properly "stitched together" may be on-par with some leading commercial hyper-converged infrastructure offerings, and sure you may argue that that does not require a board seat, yet I find it easier to initiate projects of such scale when there is a strong support from "the top". This effort would certainly require some new partnerships with hardware vendors for development and testing infrastructure, while we have OBS and OpenQA, here we are talking about building a level of abstraction on top of physical hardware, negotiation of such partnerships is clearly within the scope of the board members, not individual project members. The easier route I would pursue if not having the support of the board to make the required partnerships with Independent Hardware Vendors, would be to try bootstrapping port of oVirt to openSUSE, but we could achieve much more with things we have available such as Uyuni / SUSE Manager, 1st class citizen BTRFS support and CEPH for distributed local storage. I hope this satisfies your question, and let me know if you would like me to add further to that, and if you excuse me, it is getting late in Czech Republic, so I would address points 5 and 9 tomorrow. Thank you for your time and questions for now, talk to you later tomorrow.
-- Best regards / S pozdravem, BSc. Mark Stopka, BBA Managing Partner (at) PERLUR Group mobile: +420 704 373 561 website: www.perlur.cloud
Hello again, Thanks a lot for unpacking all this, Mark, it's getting much clearer. As I understand it your 4) is about filling in the gap left by SUSE's giving up on Openstack with an in-house, Leap-based solution, though heavily customized so as to implement features which nothing purely openSUSE can provide out of the box right now. Okay. Sounds super ambitious, in the sense that it might mobilize manpower I am not sure we have already. Also: What's the benefit for the openSUSE community and / or for the openSUSE distros in themselves? What's your cost-efficiency analysis on that? :) No worries if you want to stick this extra little bit of explanation to your eagerly anticipated explanation of points 5 and 9. Looking forward to reading you! Best, Adrien
On Fri, Dec 4, 2020 at 10:04 AM Adrien Glauser <adrien.glauser@gmail.com> wrote:
Hello again,
Indeed hello again, let me first address your remarks here, and then get to the point 9 that you have asked to be addressed,
Thanks a lot for unpacking all this, Mark, it's getting much clearer. As I understand it your 4) is about filling in the gap left by SUSE's giving up on Openstack with an in-house, Leap-based solution, though heavily customized so as to implement features which nothing purely openSUSE can provide out of the box right now.
It is indeed about filling the gap, the problem can be broken down into 2 separate issues, one would be the individual components such as KVM, CEPH and networking management, we do indeed have all these already handled, where we fall short is the management component which, if we were to follow the Fedora oVirt example would compose of Leap-based management image similarly to VMware vSphere or oVirt Manager, and than a client component that runs on the individual hosts that provides a command and control interface between the management interface and hosts that provide the resources to the virtual cluster managed by the manager component. There are two ways how to go about that: a) Extend Uyuni which is the upstream for SUSE Manager b) Develop independent management console (which from integration perspective would make sense to also somewhat integrate with Uyuni) To be honest, when OpenStack was abandoned by SUSE, I have asked SUSE Account Management team if and when an alternative will be provided, and there seemed to be the idea of some light-weight alternative to OpenStack being either developer, or acquired, but instead SUSE acquired Rancher Labs, which is something you would rather put on-top of your Infrastructure Management Platform as opposed to use as Infrastructure Management Platform.
Okay. Sounds super ambitious, in the sense that it might mobilize manpower I am not sure we have already. Also: What's the benefit for the openSUSE community and / or for the openSUSE distros in themselves? What's your cost-efficiency analysis on that? :)
There is certainly a shortage on the market of open Virtualization Management Platforms, as I already mentioned, there basically are only two, Proxmox and oVirt, Proxmox is so tightly integrated with Debian that it basically removes "all Debianness" from the used Debian, oVirt takes the middle ground of seeing hosts as both members of some virtualization cluster and individual nodes - I myself would prefer the oVirt route which then let's you combine different workloads and leverage capabilities of both physical and virtual environments as needed. The benefit for the community, it depends on what part of community are you talking about, I am sure we have many community members who do run either oVirt, or Proxmox or VMware due to lack of an openSUSE based alternative, to it would certainly help them (amiright @Vojtěch Zeisek running Proxmox? :-) ), it does not do much for desktop users though, this has more value proposition for either people who have "homelabs", or small and medium sized businesses. If we had a solution to satisfy that workload, there is obvious significant added value in unification, so while such solution would benefit the existing openSUSE users (who may be running oVirt / Proxmox and openSUSE VM on top of that), it could also go the other way around, that the new users come for the virtualization platform, but then also use openSUSE in the VMs themselves.
No worries if you want to stick this extra little bit of explanation to your eagerly anticipated explanation of points 5 and 9. Looking forward to reading you!
Let me get to the point 9 first: "Establish partnership with industry in emerging verticals such as DevOps, Blockchain and RISC-V ecosystem": There certainly are emerging verticals, DevOps would be one of the major emerging trends, SUSE itself strengtheneth it's value proposition in that area by acquisition of Rancher Labs which does orchestration of Kubernetes clusters, at openSUSE we already have Kubic and MicroOS, Kubic to some extend even competes with Rancher by Rancher Labs. While we have these great products at hand, I think we lack the industry partnerships and our product portfolio focuses on running the containers, we should certainly look into partnering with other projects that have products complementary to our products and establish partnerships and reference deployment architectures to drive adoption, when I worked at NetApp, we came up jointly with Cisco with a FlexPod[1] reference architecture, which in the end were our standard products, bundled as nice SKUs (Stock Keeping Unit aka. product ordering number) as per reference architecture that has been validated for a certain type of workload like SAP, or Virtual Desktop Environment,... In addition to that we already have quite slim Docker images (Leap is about 50MB, compared to 80MB of CentOS base image), in addition we have Docker image build support in Open Build Service, so it is "merely" an issue of communication and some clever marketing, and convincing few high-value, Docker-first deployed projects to migrate from different base images to openSUSE based base images built in Open Build Service to raise awareness. While RedHat / CentOS is making Docker runtime deployment more complicated for users (especially with RHEL 8 / CentOS 8) to move customers from Docker to Podman which is RedHad competitive offering to Docker, (open)SUSE does not suffer from such issues, so we should position ourselves as a go-to platform for mid-size Docker deployments. That basically aligns with my point nr. 7 "Building greater media presence and defining unified communications strategy with community outsiders". RHEL / CentOS is more established / notable in this category primarily because every other tutorial / article is about how to bend CentOS / RHEL to work with Docker, remaining 2/3rd deal with Ubuntu, and openSUSE is from a documentation / tutorial perspective in a niche segment. When it comes to Blockchain, not to get political, many of the projects are looking for secure operating environments to enable their users safely transact with their crypto-currency, again, when we take into account our strengths in the category of Open Build Service and Kiwi, we could partner with few blockchain projects and create a secure operating environment in a form of a live bootable USB drive, that would enable the members of those communities to transact more securely, while at the same time get a feeling of "what using openSUSE on desktop feels like", which could help us bring more user adoption. And now I feel like I have already written an essay longer than is healthy to digest, so I briefly touch on the RISC-V and leave the point 5 to some other e-mail over the weekend, but to TL;DR the RISC-V, it is the first widely adopted open instruction set architecture by both industry and academia and we will see (are already seeing) many open-source hardware being brought to the market, treating RISC-V architecture as a first class citizen and proactively reaching to developers of such open-hardware and introducing them to our open ecosystem could / would help us attract wide range of contributors who are primarily focusing on the hardware side of things, and enable them to simplify their software development and life-cycle management. [1] https://flexpod.com/
Re, That's a very extensive reply and I am very grateful you took the time to write it. I am quite new over here so I won't pretend I am able to weigh all the claims you made as they deserve, or the stakes against which you made them, but I am sure hope people more experienced with openSUSE things will. That said, your acknowledgement that filling the openstack hole in the terms you've proposed "[... does not do much for desktop users though, this has more value proposition for either people who have "homelabs", or small and medium sized businesses" sounds to me a little bit like saying it wouldn't quite fit what oS need to prioritize. Let's not forget that with a 2-year term, board seats might not be super adequate for things like that unless, of course, it gets a lot of traction very rapidly. About all you said about making Leap docker images competitive in the Docker ecosystem: I think it's an excellent idea and much more doable in my understanding than objective (4) -- the openstack replacement strategy. All for it. I can say the same about your idea of inviting devs to use oS' infrastructure to produce RISC and in return to treat RISC as first-class. I would never have guessed that these ideas were behind the wording of goals 5 and 9, so I don't regret asking. Material for the QA on Dec 12 I guess :) Thanks again and have a pleasant week-end everyone, Adrien
On Fri 2020-12-04, Adrien Glauser wrote:
[...] sounds to me a little bit like saying it wouldn't quite fit what oS need to prioritize.
A key aspect of openSUSE is that we are not necessarily looking at a fixed amount of resources that are utilized according to some overall strategy. If a group of contributors wants to proceed in the direction that Mark outlined, they are very welcome to do so and neither other community members nor the board could tell them to rather do some- thing else. (Well, they could try and kindly ask. ;-) Now, by means of an example, if everyone helping to make openSUSE's Linux distributions excellent desktop operating environments would cede all efforts to join that new direction, I would be rather unhappy. Still, neither I, nor the board, nor a vote of 90+% of openSUSE members, nor SUSE can enforce such priorities. Gerald
Dne pátek 4. prosince 2020 21:04:05 CET, Mark Stopka napsal(a):
When being called here... :-) I don't maintain Proxmox (our IT dept. does so), I just use it. As plain user, it's not bad, although I can imagine some improvement... ;-) We run it on only 7 servers. It's not any super great large cluster, affordable even by smaller organizations, but still it's very convenient to be able to nicely manage VMs, move them around, connect them to the shared storage, etc. Very useful. More competition in this field would help in any case. ;-) -- Vojtěch Zeisek https://trapa.cz/ Komunita openSUSE GNU/Linuxu Community of the openSUSE GNU/Linux https://www.opensuse.org/
Hey, On 12/3/20 10:02 PM, Mark Stopka wrote:
Hm, I'm a bit worried about your perception of what the openSUSE Board is. Titles, although meaningless inside our community, certainly help with talking people in other organizations where they matter more. I understand your reasoning. But if this is the thing you want to make happen for openSUSE, maintaining a "cloud" stack, are you sure you will find time for the *real* things, apart from the title, our community needs you to do for the board? Sounds like a major undertaking to me that will not permit much else, you do have a day job don't you? :-) Henne -- Henne Vogelsang http://www.opensuse.org Everybody has a plan, until they get hit. - Mike Tyson
On Fri, Dec 4, 2020 at 6:57 PM Henne Vogelsang <hvogel@opensuse.org> wrote:
I would not call it a "cloud stack", that is something I leave to SUSE itself as I said, the scope would be much more narrow and limited to IaaS, which these days is not called "cloud" anymore, that is what we called "cloud" in 2011 / 2012.
Sounds like a major undertaking to me that will not permit much else, you do have a day job don't you? :-)
As a matter of fact, I don't, my schedule got a little way too busy when my clients started opening those business continuity plans in March, but my primary source of income since 2018 comes from capital investments, I do consulting because I like solving problems under unreasonable deadlines on projects and/or programs that are already on a critical path. I try to maintain between 25 - 50% FTE equivalent time as billable hours. I would probably have to abandon some advisory roles, or limit my involvement in other communities. You have certainly also noticed on my platform the agenda point "Strongly push towards recruitment of new contributors, perhaps through some sort of incubator program", there have already been several attempts within the community to bring over oVirt to openSUSE, although abandoned after some time. In addition, I have shared the GAIA-X program on this list, which could provide sources of funding if openSUSE would be a separate foundation, which would be bound towards specific initiatives, such as the one proposed here, so there may be an ability to have full-time dedicated resources assigned to the initiative paid for by EU grants, management of which would under the new structure be again part of the board members duties.
participants (14)
-
Adrien Glauser -
Gerald Pfeifer -
Henne Vogelsang -
jdd＠dodin.org -
Knurpht-openSUSE -
Lubos Kocman -
Mark Stopka -
Mark Stopka -
Patrick Shanahan -
Per Jessen -
Richard Brown -
Simon Lees -
Thorsten Bro | openSUSE Member -
Vojtěch Zeisek