Dear openSUSE,
with this email I like to ask about the status of the openSUSE Projects Teams, such Education or Medical, as listed at [1], and see if openSUSE would support the founding of a new Project Team which would be openSUSE for Small and Medium Business, or short 'openSUSE SMB'.
With Invis-Server [2] which builds on the openSUSE distributions and the openSUSE community and tools we have a very successful and hardened offering for SMB, that is exclusively built on openSUSE. Stefan Schäfer, the Invis Server founder is a long standing openSUSE promoter and very experienced system integrator in real life SMB scenarios. He started many years ago to build Invis on (open)SUSE, and has moved his project consequently closer to openSUSE by using the OBS, building up community and promoting the work on various openSUSE- and other FOSS conferences.
As I am also interested in the SMB area doing my pet project Kraft [4] for more than 14 years now, Stefan and myself often worked together for example by giving talks together about the topic.
In the recent Hackweek we were thinking about how to make the whole activity more visible to a broader community and one idea was to found an openSUSE Project Team for SMB. We hope that this will increase the visibility of the solutions.
For the openSUSE project this is a perfect reference that demonstrates how valuable openSUSEs technical precision and ease of use are for these kind of "special usecases". For SMB, that is in place for years, with very practical experience in lots of installations.
We think and hope that there are other community members around who have experience in SMB, and a Project Team's task would be to collect the information, create and document solution proposals and hints, and promote openSUSE and the existing SMB solutions together.
What do people think about this?
regards,
Klaas
[1] http://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Teams [2] https://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Invis-Server [3] https://build.opensuse.org/project/show/spins:invis [4] http://volle-kraft-voraus.de
I don't think there are any active derivative project teams left (like Medicine or Education).
It seems that Medical is long dead, the medical mailing list is actually full of spam and no real posts.
As for Education, I believe this is a combination of a lack of manpower and issues with openSUSE not providing an easy to use live installer. IIRC at least one of the developers moved to Ubuntu MATE as a base because of this.
I think the most important thing is to first improve openSUSE in general to ensure solutions for SMBs are present -- perhaps one example that's been on the backlog is "samba-tool" missing from the distro.
I'd agree that having a group to voice concerns and issues with using openSUSE for SMBs would be useful to have though.
On 7 March 2017 at 08:01, Klaas Freitag freitag@opensuse.org wrote:
Dear openSUSE,
with this email I like to ask about the status of the openSUSE Projects Teams, such Education or Medical, as listed at [1], and see if openSUSE would support the founding of a new Project Team which would be openSUSE for Small and Medium Business, or short 'openSUSE SMB'.
With Invis-Server [2] which builds on the openSUSE distributions and the openSUSE community and tools we have a very successful and hardened offering for SMB, that is exclusively built on openSUSE. Stefan Schäfer, the Invis Server founder is a long standing openSUSE promoter and very experienced system integrator in real life SMB scenarios. He started many years ago to build Invis on (open)SUSE, and has moved his project consequently closer to openSUSE by using the OBS, building up community and promoting the work on various openSUSE- and other FOSS conferences.
As I am also interested in the SMB area doing my pet project Kraft [4] for more than 14 years now, Stefan and myself often worked together for example by giving talks together about the topic.
In the recent Hackweek we were thinking about how to make the whole activity more visible to a broader community and one idea was to found an openSUSE Project Team for SMB. We hope that this will increase the visibility of the solutions.
For the openSUSE project this is a perfect reference that demonstrates how valuable openSUSEs technical precision and ease of use are for these kind of "special usecases". For SMB, that is in place for years, with very practical experience in lots of installations.
We think and hope that there are other community members around who have experience in SMB, and a Project Team's task would be to collect the information, create and document solution proposals and hints, and promote openSUSE and the existing SMB solutions together.
What do people think about this?
regards,
Klaas
[1] http://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Teams [2] https://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Invis-Server [3] https://build.opensuse.org/project/show/spins:invis [4] http://volle-kraft-voraus.de -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org
Hello,
Am Montag, 6. März 2017, 23:50:57 CET schrieb Karl Cheng:
It seems that Medical is long dead, the medical mailing list is actually full of spam and no real posts.
If you notice such things, it's always a good idea to report them to admin AT opensuse.org ;-)
I just opened https://progress.opensuse.org/issues/17558 - but I'd prefer direct mails to admin@ over finding such reports somewhere on a random mailinglist ;-)
BTW: It might sound like a surprise, but we are actually working on the admin tickets and even got quite some backlog fixed in the last weeks :-)
Regards,
Christian Boltz
Karl Cheng wrote:
I don't think there are any active derivative project teams left (like Medicine or Education).
It seems that Medical is long dead, the medical mailing list is actually full of spam and no real posts.
The opensuse-invis is also largely inactive - one posting some two years ago.
I think the most important thing is to first improve openSUSE in general to ensure solutions for SMBs are present -- perhaps one example that's been on the backlog is "samba-tool" missing from the distro.
I've been running my business on openSUSE for 10+ years - the main issues we have had were scanner and printer related. Occasionally minor differences when upgrading OO/LO. Obviously we remain back-level to make sure everything works.
Hi Karl,
I'm Stefan from invis-server project.
Am 06.03.2017 um 23:50 schrieb Karl Cheng:
I think the most important thing is to first improve openSUSE in general to ensure solutions for SMBs are present -- perhaps one example that's been on the backlog is "samba-tool" missing from the distro.
"samba-tool" is part of the Active Directory functionality from Samba4. The official openSUSE Samba packages didn't contain this functionality caused by some openSUSE package guideline incompatibilities.
Our invis-Server Samba packages for openSUSE contains this Active Directory and samba-tool as well.
https://build.opensuse.org/project/show/spins:invis:unstable:samba https://build.opensuse.org/project/show/spins:invis:stable:samba
...and by the way. invis-Server project isn't dead, but caused by the teams not very good English skills we decided to use our own mailinglist otside the openSUSE project. (sorry for that).
Regards
Stefan
Klaas Freitag composed on 2017-03-06 22:01 (UTC+0100): ...
What do people think about this?
Might be a poor acronym choice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMB https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Message_Block "In computer networking, Server Message Block (SMB), one version of which was also known as Common Internet File System (CIFS, /ˈsɪfs/)"
Hi Felix,
your point. We should name a team like this "openSUSE small business team".
The double meaning of SMB isn't bad at all, caused by the relevance of the Server-Message-Block protocol for our invis-server project,
Stefan
Am 07.03.2017 um 02:09 schrieb Felix Miata:
Klaas Freitag composed on 2017-03-06 22:01 (UTC+0100): ...
What do people think about this?
Might be a poor acronym choice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMB https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Message_Block "In computer networking, Server Message Block (SMB), one version of which was also known as Common Internet File System (CIFS, /ˈsɪfs/)"
On Tue, 7 Mar 2017 08:39:30 +0100 Stefan Schäfer ml@fsproductions.de wrote:
Hi Felix,
your point. We should name a team like this "openSUSE small business team".
The double meaning of SMB isn't bad at all, caused by the relevance of the Server-Message-Block protocol for our invis-server project,
Stefan
Am 07.03.2017 um 02:09 schrieb Felix Miata:
Klaas Freitag composed on 2017-03-06 22:01 (UTC+0100): ...
What do people think about this?
Might be a poor acronym choice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMB https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Message_Block "In computer networking, Server Message Block (SMB), one version of which was also known as Common Internet File System (CIFS, /ˈsɪfs/)"
For those who are not a native English speaker, SMB is widely understood to small and medium business in the business world.
Peter
On 2017-03-08 03:00, Peter Linnell wrote:
For those who are not a native English speaker, SMB is widely understood to small and medium business in the business world.
Not to me, it means "Samba". I would rather think of "SOHO".
But I'm from the computer world.
On 03/08/2017 01:04 PM, Carlos E. R. wrote:
On 2017-03-08 03:00, Peter Linnell wrote:
For those who are not a native English speaker, SMB is widely understood to small and medium business in the business world.
Not to me, it means "Samba". I would rather think of "SOHO".
But I'm from the computer world.
SOHO is generally a slightly different concept that refers to say office equipment etc say printers for example that might be targeted towards people who have a small home office / work from home / have a company with 1 / 5 employees and a small office.
On the other hand a "Small to Medium" business at least hear could be anything from 1 to a couple of hundred people.
Peter Linnell wrote:
On Tue, 7 Mar 2017 08:39:30 +0100 Stefan Schäfer ml@fsproductions.de wrote:
Hi Felix,
your point. We should name a team like this "openSUSE small business team".
The double meaning of SMB isn't bad at all, caused by the relevance of the Server-Message-Block protocol for our invis-server project,
Stefan
Am 07.03.2017 um 02:09 schrieb Felix Miata:
Klaas Freitag composed on 2017-03-06 22:01 (UTC+0100): ...
What do people think about this?
Might be a poor acronym choice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMB https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Message_Block "In computer networking, Server Message Block (SMB), one version of which was also known as Common Internet File System (CIFS, /ˈsɪfs/)"
For those who are not a native English speaker, SMB is widely understood to small and medium business in the business world.
I rarely hear SMB, but occasionally SME. When I first read $SUBJ, I did not immediately think small-to-medium sized business (KMU) - I thought "surface mount <something>", but then quickly realized I was thinking SMD. I think it might be better to avoid the TLA and say "openSUSE Small Business Edition" for instance.
Hi openSUSE,
let's stop the discussion about the meaning about the acronym "SMB". What Klaas talked about was indeed "Small and medium business". The german acronym for this is KMU (Kleine und Mittelständische Betriebe).
What we (Klaas and me) want to talk about was the qualification of openSUSE Leap to fulfill a lot of needs of small business companies.
About 98% of all tax paying companies in Germany (an I think in he EU at all) have less than 50 employees. The IT infrastructure of a lot of them is a mess and dominated by Windows.
We the invis-Server Projekt (as an very unknown openSUSE Spin Off) build a cost effective server system for these companies. Klaas whith his "pet project" ;-) Kraft develops an accounting software for small business. With our projects we try to deliver cost effective IT for these small companies.
What we want to do is to start an openSUSE Team with other people of the openSUSE community who uses openSUSE to build up IT Infrastructure in small business companies.
With Klaases words: "We think and hope that there are other community members around who have experience in SMB, and a Project Team's task would be to collect the information, create and document solution proposals and hints, and promote openSUSE and the existing SMB solutions together."
Please substitute the acronym "SMB" with "Small and Medium Business". ;-) ... and let's talk about this.
Stefan
Am 06.03.2017 um 22:01 schrieb Klaas Freitag:
Dear openSUSE,
with this email I like to ask about the status of the openSUSE Projects Teams, such Education or Medical, as listed at [1], and see if openSUSE would support the founding of a new Project Team which would be openSUSE for Small and Medium Business, or short 'openSUSE SMB'.
With Invis-Server [2] which builds on the openSUSE distributions and the openSUSE community and tools we have a very successful and hardened offering for SMB, that is exclusively built on openSUSE. Stefan Schäfer, the Invis Server founder is a long standing openSUSE promoter and very experienced system integrator in real life SMB scenarios. He started many years ago to build Invis on (open)SUSE, and has moved his project consequently closer to openSUSE by using the OBS, building up community and promoting the work on various openSUSE- and other FOSS conferences.
As I am also interested in the SMB area doing my pet project Kraft [4] for more than 14 years now, Stefan and myself often worked together for example by giving talks together about the topic.
In the recent Hackweek we were thinking about how to make the whole activity more visible to a broader community and one idea was to found an openSUSE Project Team for SMB. We hope that this will increase the visibility of the solutions.
For the openSUSE project this is a perfect reference that demonstrates how valuable openSUSEs technical precision and ease of use are for these kind of "special usecases". For SMB, that is in place for years, with very practical experience in lots of installations.
We think and hope that there are other community members around who have experience in SMB, and a Project Team's task would be to collect the information, create and document solution proposals and hints, and promote openSUSE and the existing SMB solutions together.
What do people think about this?
regards,
Klaas
[1] http://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Teams [2] https://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Invis-Server [3] https://build.opensuse.org/project/show/spins:invis [4] http://volle-kraft-voraus.de
I'm deeply interested as this kind of collaborative effort will really increase the services I provided to those targets.
We have in fact beside the microsoft mess dominant position another challengers : the NAS Offers (bundle) provided by Qnap, synology or asustor are really attractive to end users (very small groups)
I've heard first time of invis at osc 2010 (or 2009) but never look to much forwards (beside my name sound german, my knowledge is poor).
So yes definitively interested.
On mercredi, 8 mars 2017 08.23:43 h CET Stefan Schäfer wrote:
Hi openSUSE,
let's stop the discussion about the meaning about the acronym "SMB". What Klaas talked about was indeed "Small and medium business". The german acronym for this is KMU (Kleine und Mittelständische Betriebe).
What we (Klaas and me) want to talk about was the qualification of openSUSE Leap to fulfill a lot of needs of small business companies.
About 98% of all tax paying companies in Germany (an I think in he EU at all) have less than 50 employees. The IT infrastructure of a lot of them is a mess and dominated by Windows.
We the invis-Server Projekt (as an very unknown openSUSE Spin Off) build a cost effective server system for these companies. Klaas whith his "pet project" ;-) Kraft develops an accounting software for small business. With our projects we try to deliver cost effective IT for these small companies.
What we want to do is to start an openSUSE Team with other people of the openSUSE community who uses openSUSE to build up IT Infrastructure in small business companies.
With Klaases words: "We think and hope that there are other community members around who have experience in SMB, and a Project Team's task would be to collect the information, create and document solution proposals and hints, and promote openSUSE and the existing SMB solutions together."
Please substitute the acronym "SMB" with "Small and Medium Business". ;-) ... and let's talk about this.
Stefan
Am 06.03.2017 um 22:01 schrieb Klaas Freitag:
Dear openSUSE,
with this email I like to ask about the status of the openSUSE Projects Teams, such Education or Medical, as listed at [1], and see if openSUSE would support the founding of a new Project Team which would be openSUSE for Small and Medium Business, or short 'openSUSE SMB'.
With Invis-Server [2] which builds on the openSUSE distributions and the openSUSE community and tools we have a very successful and hardened offering for SMB, that is exclusively built on openSUSE. Stefan Schäfer, the Invis Server founder is a long standing openSUSE promoter and very experienced system integrator in real life SMB scenarios. He started many years ago to build Invis on (open)SUSE, and has moved his project consequently closer to openSUSE by using the OBS, building up community and promoting the work on various openSUSE- and other FOSS conferences.
As I am also interested in the SMB area doing my pet project Kraft [4] for more than 14 years now, Stefan and myself often worked together for example by giving talks together about the topic.
In the recent Hackweek we were thinking about how to make the whole activity more visible to a broader community and one idea was to found an openSUSE Project Team for SMB. We hope that this will increase the visibility of the solutions.
For the openSUSE project this is a perfect reference that demonstrates how valuable openSUSEs technical precision and ease of use are for these kind of "special usecases". For SMB, that is in place for years, with very practical experience in lots of installations.
We think and hope that there are other community members around who have experience in SMB, and a Project Team's task would be to collect the information, create and document solution proposals and hints, and promote openSUSE and the existing SMB solutions together.
What do people think about this?
regards,
Klaas
[1] http://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Teams [2] https://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Invis-Server [3] https://build.opensuse.org/project/show/spins:invis [4] http://volle-kraft-voraus.de
What we (Klaas and me) want to talk about was the qualification of openSUSE Leap to fulfill a lot of needs of small business companies.
I ma,nage some such servers, with various distros from 13.1 to 42.2, and have a somewhat incomplete documentation here
http://dodin.info/wiki/pmwiki.php?n=Doc.OpenSUSE-small-ThirdEdition
but I understand nothing in German :-(
jdd
Hi jdd
Am 08.03.2017 um 11:51 schrieb jdd:
What we (Klaas and me) want to talk about was the qualification of openSUSE Leap to fulfill a lot of needs of small business companies.
I ma,nage some such servers, with various distros from 13.1 to 42.2, and have a somewhat incomplete documentation here
http://dodin.info/wiki/pmwiki.php?n=Doc.OpenSUSE-small-ThirdEdition
Wow, I've never saw that before.
but I understand nothing in German :-(
We have a similar problem. Our English isn't good enough to write a complete wiki in English, therefore it's in German:
http://wiki.invis-server.org/doku.php
But launching an openSUSE small business team may helps us changing ideas to all benefits and promote openSUSE Leaps qualification for productive use.
jdd
Stefan
Hi Stefan,
Am Mittwoch, 8. März 2017, 08:23:43 CET schrieb Stefan Schäfer:
let's stop the discussion about the meaning about the acronym "SMB". What Klaas talked about was indeed "Small and medium business". The german acronym for this is KMU (Kleine und Mittelständische Betriebe).
What we (Klaas and me) want to talk about was the qualification of openSUSE Leap to fulfill a lot of needs of small business companies.
About 98% of all tax paying companies in Germany (an I think in he EU at all) have less than 50 employees. The IT infrastructure of a lot of them is a mess and dominated by Windows.
Unfortunately, yes. Knowledge about alternatives, FUD, willingness to move away from mainstream are some of the reasons.
We the invis-Server Projekt (as an very unknown openSUSE Spin Off) build a cost effective server system for these companies. Klaas whith his "pet project" ;-) Kraft develops an accounting software for small business. With our projects we try to deliver cost effective IT for these small companies.
Had a look at your page, looks very promising. Interesting that odoo fits into that portfolio - the reasons why the main developers left some 10 years ago and founded Tryton have not disappeared AFAIK - mainly the not real open business model. But thats a different story for offline..... (Tryton is on OBS, by the way)
What we want to do is to start an openSUSE Team with other people of the openSUSE community who uses openSUSE to build up IT Infrastructure in small business companies.
With Klaases words: "We think and hope that there are other community members around who have experience in SMB, and a Project Team's task would be to collect the information, create and document solution proposals and hints, and promote openSUSE and the existing SMB solutions together."
Please substitute the acronym "SMB" with "Small and Medium Business". ;-) ... and let's talk about this.
Providing IT to SMB is not my main business, but would be interested to join the talk.
Cheers Axel
On Wed, Mar 8, 2017 at 2:23 AM, Stefan Schäfer ml@fsproductions.de wrote:
What we want to do is to start an openSUSE Team with other people of the openSUSE community who uses openSUSE to build up IT Infrastructure in small business companies.
I would like to join that team.
Currently my web/sftp/mail server is openSUSE based.
Also, I've used openSUSE as a file server (SMB/CIFS) over the years, but never as a domain controller. Nor accounting, etc.
My only language is English, so is that going to an acceptable restriction?
I use OBS a fair amount, so I could assist with some packaging.
I'm surprised step one of an install isn't to download an appliance from SuseStudio. Is that a option you've considered? I find SuseStudio pretty easy to maintain an appliance on, but my appliances don't install, just boot and run.
fyi: SuseStudio 100% builds on OBS, so step one of being a SuseStudio appliance maintainer is to be familiar with using OBS.
So where is the communication channel going to be?
Greg -- Greg Freemyer
On 8 March 2017 at 08:23, Stefan Schäfer ml@fsproductions.de wrote:
Hi openSUSE,
let's stop the discussion about the meaning about the acronym "SMB". What Klaas talked about was indeed "Small and medium business". The german acronym for this is KMU (Kleine und Mittelständische Betriebe).
What we (Klaas and me) want to talk about was the qualification of openSUSE Leap to fulfill a lot of needs of small business companies.
About 98% of all tax paying companies in Germany (an I think in he EU at all) have less than 50 employees. The IT infrastructure of a lot of them is a mess and dominated by Windows.
We the invis-Server Projekt (as an very unknown openSUSE Spin Off) build a cost effective server system for these companies. Klaas whith his "pet project" ;-) Kraft develops an accounting software for small business. With our projects we try to deliver cost effective IT for these small companies.
What we want to do is to start an openSUSE Team with other people of the openSUSE community who uses openSUSE to build up IT Infrastructure in small business companies.
With Klaases words: "We think and hope that there are other community members around who have experience in SMB, and a Project Team's task would be to collect the information, create and document solution proposals and hints, and promote openSUSE and the existing SMB solutions together."
Please substitute the acronym "SMB" with "Small and Medium Business". ;-) ... and let's talk about this.
Stefan
Am 06.03.2017 um 22:01 schrieb Klaas Freitag:
Dear openSUSE,
with this email I like to ask about the status of the openSUSE Projects Teams, such Education or Medical, as listed at [1], and see if openSUSE would support the founding of a new Project Team which would be openSUSE for Small and Medium Business, or short 'openSUSE SMB'.
With Invis-Server [2] which builds on the openSUSE distributions and the openSUSE community and tools we have a very successful and hardened offering for SMB, that is exclusively built on openSUSE. Stefan Schäfer, the Invis Server founder is a long standing openSUSE promoter and very experienced system integrator in real life SMB scenarios. He started many years ago to build Invis on (open)SUSE, and has moved his project consequently closer to openSUSE by using the OBS, building up community and promoting the work on various openSUSE- and other FOSS conferences.
As I am also interested in the SMB area doing my pet project Kraft [4] for more than 14 years now, Stefan and myself often worked together for example by giving talks together about the topic.
In the recent Hackweek we were thinking about how to make the whole activity more visible to a broader community and one idea was to found an openSUSE Project Team for SMB. We hope that this will increase the visibility of the solutions.
For the openSUSE project this is a perfect reference that demonstrates how valuable openSUSEs technical precision and ease of use are for these kind of "special usecases". For SMB, that is in place for years, with very practical experience in lots of installations.
We think and hope that there are other community members around who have experience in SMB, and a Project Team's task would be to collect the information, create and document solution proposals and hints, and promote openSUSE and the existing SMB solutions together.
What do people think about this?
regards,
Klaas
[1] http://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Teams [2] https://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Invis-Server [3] https://build.opensuse.org/project/show/spins:invis [4] http://volle-kraft-voraus.de
Stefan, Klaas,
I think this is an awesome idea! I congratulate you on your initiative and look forward to seeing what you come up with.
I have some ideas which I think could make this "openSUSE SMB" idea a real success
First, the technical stuff, I'd love it if the team could look at both openSUSE distributions, but especially Leap, and help make them exceptional options for SMB's
In my mind, that would mean - Identifying and ensuring openSUSE TW/Leap contain the packages SMB's need, and that they are suitably well maintained and polished. This could also mean contributing tests to openQA to ensure we keep them that way. - Ensuring openSUSE TW/Leap has suitable documentation for SMBs. This hopefully will just mean encoraging, supporting, and collating documentation that already exists in a relevant portal on the wiki for SMBs - Ensuring the 'User Experience' (or SMB Experience?) of openSUSE TW/Leap is nice, polished, and meeting the expectations of SMB users. This might mean tweaking and tuning things like patterns to make things like software discovery and quick-setup easier for SMBs. - Investigating how to market openSUSE directly towards SMBs. Idea's that immediately spring to mind would be including a clear section for SMBs on www.opensuse.org, clearly sharing our story of how Leap is a perfect choice for them.
Note, all of the above suggestions assume that the work this SMB team will do will be part of the existing openSUSE Distributions.
While I love and respect the work that the Medical and Education teams have and continue to do, I think it would be safe to say that their experience by running their projects as 'derivatives' ultimately ends up being too much work for them - and then backfires on the openSUSE Project as a whole as we often saw less direct contributions in the area of Education and Medical in the main distributions, which then causes a spiral of endless work..
Let's avoid that with this SMB idea, and try and do everything 'upstream' (ie. in openSUSE-proper) first and do our best to avoid a separate openSUSE-SMB flavour for now. I also don't like the idea of openSUSE directly competing with invis-server, especially as I think we need every single contribution those experts can give us to make this work.
If we go down this road and we find it necessary, if we start off on this road very tightly together we should be able to ensure we stay better in sync than deciding to make a derivative from Day1.
That's my 2c, I'm really excited to see where this goes
regards, Rich
On Wed, Mar 8, 2017 at 7:05 AM, Richard Brown RBrownCCB@opensuse.org wrote:
Note, all of the above suggestions assume that the work this SMB team will do will be part of the existing openSUSE Distributions.
While I love and respect the work that the Medical and Education teams have and continue to do, I think it would be safe to say that their experience by running their projects as 'derivatives' ultimately ends up being too much work for them - and then backfires on the openSUSE Project as a whole as we often saw less direct contributions in the area of Education and Medical in the main distributions, which then causes a spiral of endless work..
Let's avoid that with this SMB idea, and try and do everything 'upstream' (ie. in openSUSE-proper) first and do our best to avoid a separate openSUSE-SMB flavour for now. I also don't like the idea of openSUSE directly competing with invis-server, especially as I think we need every single contribution those experts can give us to make this work.
If we go down this road and we find it necessary, if we start off on this road very tightly together we should be able to ensure we stay better in sync than deciding to make a derivative from Day1.
Via SuseStudio, I've maintained my own Digital Forensic Boot CD based on openSUSE for close to 10 years. I may be the only consumer of that boot CD, but I've built a business around it by providing services in the field with it.
I don't consider it a derivative, but it does take the openSUSE base distro and add on to it packages from the security:forensic repo in OBS. (I also maintain that project).
I try hard to push all security:forensic packages into factory, but I can say it is often hard to get 100% of every package I use into factory, and it is simply not feasible to maintain the boot CD exclusively with an older releases stable/update repos. Even Leap 42.1 is currently far too old to use exclusively for my boot CD.
So while a stable platform, such as Leap 42.1 is definitely needed, using a OBS repo (or set of repos) to layer on additional up to date packages seems a necessity.
Greg -- Greg Freemyer
On mercredi, 8 mars 2017 13.05:36 h CET Richard Brown wrote:
If we go down this road and we find it necessary, if we start off on this road very tightly together we should be able to ensure we stay better in sync than deciding to make a derivative from Day1.
That's my 2c, I'm really excited to see where this goes
I totally agree with this vision. Actually I'm spending quite energy to make the world better at least in some repositories for software I've a direct need :-)
I would like to propose a round table about the subject during OSC, would be a perfect time for IRL meeting (with irc/online +).
But Richard, one of the first "shitty" things we will have to address is the lacking support of being a AD controler in our openSUSE package (which ditto are linked to the SLE one), I hope there's a chance with next SLE version to come to a new revision on each other position and or.
(To readers, I exaclty nows the technical problems behind, so don't waste bytes for that, if not to describe the state of art of actual software.) :-)
On 8 March 2017 at 13:05, Richard Brown RBrownCCB@opensuse.org wrote:
On 8 March 2017 at 08:23, Stefan Schäfer ml@fsproductions.de wrote:
Hi openSUSE,
let's stop the discussion about the meaning about the acronym "SMB". What Klaas talked about was indeed "Small and medium business". The german acronym for this is KMU (Kleine und Mittelständische Betriebe).
What we (Klaas and me) want to talk about was the qualification of openSUSE Leap to fulfill a lot of needs of small business companies.
About 98% of all tax paying companies in Germany (an I think in he EU at all) have less than 50 employees. The IT infrastructure of a lot of them is a mess and dominated by Windows.
We the invis-Server Projekt (as an very unknown openSUSE Spin Off) build a cost effective server system for these companies. Klaas whith his "pet project" ;-) Kraft develops an accounting software for small business. With our projects we try to deliver cost effective IT for these small companies.
What we want to do is to start an openSUSE Team with other people of the openSUSE community who uses openSUSE to build up IT Infrastructure in small business companies.
With Klaases words: "We think and hope that there are other community members around who have experience in SMB, and a Project Team's task would be to collect the information, create and document solution proposals and hints, and promote openSUSE and the existing SMB solutions together."
Please substitute the acronym "SMB" with "Small and Medium Business". ;-) ... and let's talk about this.
Stefan
Am 06.03.2017 um 22:01 schrieb Klaas Freitag:
Dear openSUSE,
with this email I like to ask about the status of the openSUSE Projects Teams, such Education or Medical, as listed at [1], and see if openSUSE would support the founding of a new Project Team which would be openSUSE for Small and Medium Business, or short 'openSUSE SMB'.
With Invis-Server [2] which builds on the openSUSE distributions and the openSUSE community and tools we have a very successful and hardened offering for SMB, that is exclusively built on openSUSE. Stefan Schäfer, the Invis Server founder is a long standing openSUSE promoter and very experienced system integrator in real life SMB scenarios. He started many years ago to build Invis on (open)SUSE, and has moved his project consequently closer to openSUSE by using the OBS, building up community and promoting the work on various openSUSE- and other FOSS conferences.
As I am also interested in the SMB area doing my pet project Kraft [4] for more than 14 years now, Stefan and myself often worked together for example by giving talks together about the topic.
In the recent Hackweek we were thinking about how to make the whole activity more visible to a broader community and one idea was to found an openSUSE Project Team for SMB. We hope that this will increase the visibility of the solutions.
For the openSUSE project this is a perfect reference that demonstrates how valuable openSUSEs technical precision and ease of use are for these kind of "special usecases". For SMB, that is in place for years, with very practical experience in lots of installations.
We think and hope that there are other community members around who have experience in SMB, and a Project Team's task would be to collect the information, create and document solution proposals and hints, and promote openSUSE and the existing SMB solutions together.
What do people think about this?
regards,
Klaas
[1] http://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Teams [2] https://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Invis-Server [3] https://build.opensuse.org/project/show/spins:invis [4] http://volle-kraft-voraus.de
Stefan, Klaas,
I think this is an awesome idea! I congratulate you on your initiative and look forward to seeing what you come up with.
I have some ideas which I think could make this "openSUSE SMB" idea a real success
First, the technical stuff, I'd love it if the team could look at both openSUSE distributions, but especially Leap, and help make them exceptional options for SMB's
In my mind, that would mean
- Identifying and ensuring openSUSE TW/Leap contain the packages
SMB's need, and that they are suitably well maintained and polished. This could also mean contributing tests to openQA to ensure we keep them that way.
- Ensuring openSUSE TW/Leap has suitable documentation for SMBs. This
hopefully will just mean encoraging, supporting, and collating documentation that already exists in a relevant portal on the wiki for SMBs
- Ensuring the 'User Experience' (or SMB Experience?) of openSUSE
TW/Leap is nice, polished, and meeting the expectations of SMB users. This might mean tweaking and tuning things like patterns to make things like software discovery and quick-setup easier for SMBs.
- Investigating how to market openSUSE directly towards SMBs. Idea's
that immediately spring to mind would be including a clear section for SMBs on www.opensuse.org, clearly sharing our story of how Leap is a perfect choice for them.
Note, all of the above suggestions assume that the work this SMB team will do will be part of the existing openSUSE Distributions.
While I love and respect the work that the Medical and Education teams have and continue to do, I think it would be safe to say that their experience by running their projects as 'derivatives' ultimately ends up being too much work for them - and then backfires on the openSUSE Project as a whole as we often saw less direct contributions in the area of Education and Medical in the main distributions, which then causes a spiral of endless work..
Let's avoid that with this SMB idea, and try and do everything 'upstream' (ie. in openSUSE-proper) first and do our best to avoid a separate openSUSE-SMB flavour for now. I also don't like the idea of openSUSE directly competing with invis-server, especially as I think we need every single contribution those experts can give us to make this work.
If we go down this road and we find it necessary, if we start off on this road very tightly together we should be able to ensure we stay better in sync than deciding to make a derivative from Day1.
That's my 2c, I'm really excited to see where this goes
regards, Rich
Greetings,
I usually work for Corporates and despite what it takes, it is hard to push openSUSE / SUSE in the door. Anyway, what's in an acronym? MS has SBS (Small Business Server going in 2010/2011. Novell has SBS (Small Business Suite) and a few others too. If the target is Small Businness Home Office, then we have SOHO, which is commonly known and does ring a bell.
I agree with Richard, no seperate distrib as such. What's in a name? To help out these small companies with probably no admin, I see this as a distinct image via SUSE Studio where all unnecessaty packages removed and other packages added (FileZilla, mlocate, skype? VLC, VNC, etc. ). Out of the box sort of thing and in various languages, click, download, burn and here you you go!
Then have a lot of fun :) Best, Jimmy
Hi Richard
Am 08.03.2017 um 13:05 schrieb Richard Brown:
On 8 March 2017 at 08:23, Stefan Schäfer ml@fsproductions.de wrote:
Hi openSUSE,
let's stop the discussion about the meaning about the acronym "SMB". What Klaas talked about was indeed "Small and medium business". The german acronym for this is KMU (Kleine und Mittelständische Betriebe).
What we (Klaas and me) want to talk about was the qualification of openSUSE Leap to fulfill a lot of needs of small business companies.
About 98% of all tax paying companies in Germany (an I think in he EU at all) have less than 50 employees. The IT infrastructure of a lot of them is a mess and dominated by Windows.
We the invis-Server Projekt (as an very unknown openSUSE Spin Off) build a cost effective server system for these companies. Klaas whith his "pet project" ;-) Kraft develops an accounting software for small business. With our projects we try to deliver cost effective IT for these small companies.
What we want to do is to start an openSUSE Team with other people of the openSUSE community who uses openSUSE to build up IT Infrastructure in small business companies.
With Klaases words: "We think and hope that there are other community members around who have experience in SMB, and a Project Team's task would be to collect the information, create and document solution proposals and hints, and promote openSUSE and the existing SMB solutions together."
Please substitute the acronym "SMB" with "Small and Medium Business". ;-) ... and let's talk about this.
Stefan
Am 06.03.2017 um 22:01 schrieb Klaas Freitag:
Dear openSUSE,
with this email I like to ask about the status of the openSUSE Projects Teams, such Education or Medical, as listed at [1], and see if openSUSE would support the founding of a new Project Team which would be openSUSE for Small and Medium Business, or short 'openSUSE SMB'.
With Invis-Server [2] which builds on the openSUSE distributions and the openSUSE community and tools we have a very successful and hardened offering for SMB, that is exclusively built on openSUSE. Stefan Schäfer, the Invis Server founder is a long standing openSUSE promoter and very experienced system integrator in real life SMB scenarios. He started many years ago to build Invis on (open)SUSE, and has moved his project consequently closer to openSUSE by using the OBS, building up community and promoting the work on various openSUSE- and other FOSS conferences.
As I am also interested in the SMB area doing my pet project Kraft [4] for more than 14 years now, Stefan and myself often worked together for example by giving talks together about the topic.
In the recent Hackweek we were thinking about how to make the whole activity more visible to a broader community and one idea was to found an openSUSE Project Team for SMB. We hope that this will increase the visibility of the solutions.
For the openSUSE project this is a perfect reference that demonstrates how valuable openSUSEs technical precision and ease of use are for these kind of "special usecases". For SMB, that is in place for years, with very practical experience in lots of installations.
We think and hope that there are other community members around who have experience in SMB, and a Project Team's task would be to collect the information, create and document solution proposals and hints, and promote openSUSE and the existing SMB solutions together.
What do people think about this?
regards,
Klaas
[1] http://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Teams [2] https://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Invis-Server [3] https://build.opensuse.org/project/show/spins:invis [4] http://volle-kraft-voraus.de
Stefan, Klaas,
I think this is an awesome idea! I congratulate you on your initiative and look forward to seeing what you come up with.
Thanx
I have some ideas which I think could make this "openSUSE SMB" idea a real success
I expected that. ;-)
First, the technical stuff, I'd love it if the team could look at both openSUSE distributions, but especially Leap, and help make them exceptional options for SMB's
agree
In my mind, that would mean
- Identifying and ensuring openSUSE TW/Leap contain the packages
SMB's need, and that they are suitably well maintained and polished. This could also mean contributing tests to openQA to ensure we keep them that way.
- Ensuring openSUSE TW/Leap has suitable documentation for SMBs. This
hopefully will just mean encoraging, supporting, and collating documentation that already exists in a relevant portal on the wiki for SMBs
- Ensuring the 'User Experience' (or SMB Experience?) of openSUSE
TW/Leap is nice, polished, and meeting the expectations of SMB users. This might mean tweaking and tuning things like patterns to make things like software discovery and quick-setup easier for SMBs.
- Investigating how to market openSUSE directly towards SMBs. Idea's
that immediately spring to mind would be including a clear section for SMBs on www.opensuse.org, clearly sharing our story of how Leap is a perfect choice for them.
Note, all of the above suggestions assume that the work this SMB team will do will be part of the existing openSUSE Distributions.
I'm with you. But this is a lot of work. which means we need a lot of people joining the team.
While I love and respect the work that the Medical and Education teams have and continue to do, I think it would be safe to say that their experience by running their projects as 'derivatives' ultimately ends up being too much work for them - and then backfires on the openSUSE Project as a whole as we often saw less direct contributions in the area of Education and Medical in the main distributions, which then causes a spiral of endless work..
Let's avoid that with this SMB idea, and try and do everything 'upstream' (ie. in openSUSE-proper) first and do our best to avoid a separate openSUSE-SMB flavour for now. I also don't like the idea of openSUSE directly competing with invis-server, especially as I think we need every single contribution those experts can give us to make this work.
We the invis-server team (I think, that I can speek for them all) hope that our work and project can move clother to openSUSE. We are not looking for competition, we are looking for integration.
We talked about this last year at osc. I think more than 75% of all packages we build in our OBS repos are only build caused by dependecies an because they are not part of the openSUSE distros
It would be nice if we had to maintain much less packages by our own. ;-)
If we go down this road and we find it necessary, if we start off on this road very tightly together we should be able to ensure we stay better in sync than deciding to make a derivative from Day1.
agree
That's my 2c, I'm really excited to see where this goes
regards, Rich
Maybe we should schedule a first meeting to start the Team.
Stefan
I want to say: Maybe we should schedule a first meeting at OSC2017 to start the Team.
Stefan
Am 08.03.2017 um 14:08 schrieb Stefan Schäfer:
Maybe we should schedule a first meeting to start the Team.
On 8 March 2017 at 14:08, Stefan Schäfer ml@fsproductions.de wrote:
Maybe we should schedule a first meeting to start the Team.
Douglas, when this is scheduled, please can we make sure we make as much noise about it as possible to ensure that anyone remotely interested in contributing to this SMB team can start getting involved?
Cheers, Richard
Hi,
I am happy to see that there is some interest in the idea :)
Am 08.03.2017 um 13:05 schrieb Richard Brown:
While I love and respect the work that the Medical and Education teams have and continue to do, I think it would be safe to say that their experience by running their projects as 'derivatives' ultimately ends up being too much work for them - and then backfires on the openSUSE Project as a whole as we often saw less direct contributions in the area of Education and Medical in the main distributions, which then causes a spiral of endless work..
I am not clear what you mean here. What is it that makes a 'derivate'?
The current Invis server builds based on openSUSE Leap and has currently 29 specific packages on top, as one can find in https://build.opensuse.org/project/show/spins:invis:stable
These are packages are mostly specific to Invis, such as the setup and special applications which are not in the interest of a generic distribution (I suspect). Most dependency packages are already in the underlying distros aka Factory I guess.
I think that this sounds like a proper way of doing it, or not?
Another aspect that should be discussed is that the Invis server based on openSUSE currently has it's own branding and it's own setup- and adminstration tool. I don't think that is a problem, do others?
Apart from these technical things, I believe that a huge block of work will be to do documentation that is neccessary, but even more to do marketing around this initiative. The nicest project does not help if nobody knows about it. And the group of pot. users is very hard to reach.
Maybe we should schedule a first meeting to start the Team.
Stefan and me will meet on Chemnitzer Linuxtage tomorrow, maybe somebody else is around? But indeed the oSC 2017 would be a great opportunity to do the first 'official' meeting and maybe kickoff?
regards,
Klaas
On samedi, 11 mars 2017 14.58:24 h CET Klaas Freitag wrote:
Hi,
I am happy to see that there is some interest in the idea :)
Am 08.03.2017 um 13:05 schrieb Richard Brown:
While I love and respect the work that the Medical and Education teams have and continue to do, I think it would be safe to say that their experience by running their projects as 'derivatives' ultimately ends up being too much work for them - and then backfires on the openSUSE Project as a whole as we often saw less direct contributions in the area of Education and Medical in the main distributions, which then causes a spiral of endless work..
I am not clear what you mean here. What is it that makes a 'derivate'?
The current Invis server builds based on openSUSE Leap and has currently 29 specific packages on top, as one can find in https://build.opensuse.org/project/show/spins:invis:stable
These are packages are mostly specific to Invis, such as the setup and special applications which are not in the interest of a generic distribution (I suspect). Most dependency packages are already in the underlying distros aka Factory I guess.
I think that this sounds like a proper way of doing it, or not?
Another aspect that should be discussed is that the Invis server based on openSUSE currently has it's own branding and it's own setup- and adminstration tool. I don't think that is a problem, do others?
Apart from these technical things, I believe that a huge block of work will be to do documentation that is neccessary, but even more to do marketing around this initiative. The nicest project does not help if nobody knows about it. And the group of pot. users is very hard to reach.
Maybe we should schedule a first meeting to start the Team.
Stefan and me will meet on Chemnitzer Linuxtage tomorrow, maybe somebody else is around? But indeed the oSC 2017 would be a great opportunity to do the first 'official' meeting and maybe kickoff?
regards,
Klaas
I was on osc17 irc preparation meeting and ask Doug to open a one hour session to do the official bootstrap, kickoff of this with I hope a lot of interested users, promoter, contributors in the fields.
Have fun @CLT
On 11 March 2017 at 14:58, Klaas Freitag freitag@opensuse.org wrote:
Hi,
I am happy to see that there is some interest in the idea :)
Am 08.03.2017 um 13:05 schrieb Richard Brown:
While I love and respect the work that the Medical and Education teams have and continue to do, I think it would be safe to say that their experience by running their projects as 'derivatives' ultimately ends up being too much work for them - and then backfires on the openSUSE Project as a whole as we often saw less direct contributions in the area of Education and Medical in the main distributions, which then causes a spiral of endless work..
I am not clear what you mean here. What is it that makes a 'derivate'?
I am not fond of seeing many separate openSUSE distributions. We have Leap and Tumbleweed with a comparable level of quality, and I fear having more distribution offerings with the name 'openSUSE' gives the project a negative reputation - at best one that has a confusing message about what it offers, at worst, a reputation for bad quality when the 'derivatives' do not meet the same level of quality of the official 'mainline' openSUSE distributions.
That said, I do understand the appeal of a 'derivative' that is specifically focused on more narrow use cases - see openSUSE JeOS for one such example which I think is done right.
In this case, and in the way I'd prefer for all cases, all of the packages are in the main Leap/Tumbleweed distributions, have all been quality checked through the usual processes to get them there, and therefore the only responsibility for JeOS is to polish, package and rebadge the distribution for that specific usecase.
This is a lot easier to do, especially in the long term, precisely because a lot of the heavy-lifting of the integration is taken care of as part of the traditional Leap/Tumbleweed processes.
Other derivatives, that have dozens, or hundreds, of additional, untested, unintegrated packages in their spin, give me cause for concern, especially when they do not implement processes and standards approaching the mainline Leap/Tumbleweed distributions, but still wish to use the openSUSE name. They also need a consistent and often increasing commitment to keep them running, as that large overlayed codebase will need continued rebasing as Leap and Tumbleweed move on. I see any 'derivative' that distributes a significant number of packages that are not in the main distribution at significant risk of failure over the mid to long term.
The current Invis server builds based on openSUSE Leap and has currently 29 specific packages on top, as one can find in https://build.opensuse.org/project/show/spins:invis:stable
These are packages are mostly specific to Invis, such as the setup and special applications which are not in the interest of a generic distribution (I suspect). Most dependency packages are already in the underlying distros aka Factory I guess.
I think that this sounds like a proper way of doing it, or not?
invis is a mostly good example of a derivative done right. 29 packages is certainly not bad. They invis team have proven themselves more than capable of maintaining that level of deviation for many years now. But I do not think it's ideal - I would like to see if the SMB team could look into getting that down to as close as 0. It sounds like Stefan is on the same page. This is all about integration and encouraging good proven practices.
Another aspect that should be discussed is that the Invis server based on openSUSE currently has it's own branding and it's own setup- and adminstration tool. I don't think that is a problem, do others?
I don't think it's a problem. But on the flipside, I'd love it if 'mainline openSUSE' was as good as invis for SMB out of the box ;)
Apart from these technical things, I believe that a huge block of work will be to do documentation that is neccessary, but even more to do marketing around this initiative. The nicest project does not help if nobody knows about it. And the group of pot. users is very hard to reach.
+1 Agreed
Maybe we should schedule a first meeting to start the Team.
Stefan and me will meet on Chemnitzer Linuxtage tomorrow, maybe somebody else is around? But indeed the oSC 2017 would be a great opportunity to do the first 'official' meeting and maybe kickoff?
Sadly I'm not at CLT, but I will be at oSC and most certainly want to help this initiative in whatever ways I can.
That said, I do understand the appeal of a 'derivative' that is specifically focused on more narrow use cases - see openSUSE JeOS for one such example which I think is done right.
It would be awesome if there was some documentation on "the right way" of creating a derivative of openSUSE {Factory,Leap,Tumbleweed}. Specifically I'd be interested in this so I could automate the completely-free-software-spinoff that we discussed at FOSDEM.
Le 08/03/2017 à 13:05, Richard Brown a écrit :
Note, all of the above suggestions assume that the work this SMB team will do will be part of the existing openSUSE Distributions.
using a pattern seems to be the good way, as most if not all the necessary stuff is already here and IMHO it's mostly a documentation problem
:-)
jdd
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