Thanks Sonja for a great email. And well done on beta3 .....
Again Fedora model is not openSUSE model. It is quite different. We actually get to say what is the actual commercial release, but Fedora is codewise not really related to EL.
Yes, the opensuse project model is different from the fedora model (as we perceived it from the outside), but the difference is a different one ;- ) We want to offer a way to extend the distribution with additional and / or experimental packages, to build a customized distribution with these (as you are already doing without any help from us anyway ;- )), and to use our build infrastructure for your packages, with all the added conveniences like frequent rebuilds against the latest distribution and guaranteed satisfied package dependencies.
This all does not mean that your work and your packages will end up on the retail box or even the OSS version. As this code base is what all other products, including enterprise stuff, will fork from at some
I do not see a contradiction in here to what I said. The difference to Fedora I mentioned lies in having the same base code as the retail product. I would hope this would stay the same in the future as I believe this is one of the strengths right now, that everything is "Code 10" and should stay that way until 11 and so on. It is great to hear that the plans are to extend the OSS release with additional features, that is what I expected and to start an effort off already in that direction I started SUPER. point
in time, we can't promise you to integrate anything you do into the core distribution.
I understand and I certainly do not expect packages to automatically end up in the retail box as the development process you need for a commercial product is very different from the hack and burn extensions a community based approach can have. I also do not expect us to actually start maintaining tons of base packages as the proper development cycle needs to be retained and I have kind of had it with maintaining thousands of base packages ;) .... I rather leave that up to professional SUSE coders. I do understand all that and it makes all sense. The difference to Fedora stands however since we are the precursor to the Enterprise Products and Fedora is a completely separate distro and code base. I do think that our model is stronger and will yield in huge future successes, since it streamlines effort and keeps code compatibility instead of splitting effort and creating compatibility hazzles.
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Our solution - so far: our goal - is to make packaging and
distributing
software easier, and to offer a place to announce and distribute the resulting packages to the world, as part of openSUSE (the project), though not necessarily of SUSE Linux (the core distribution).
What you are saying is: SUSE Linux OSS will hence contain additional packages done by the community, that won't be found in SUSE Linux Retail and vice versa, that is what my understanding was so far. And that is why I have started with SUPER to start with those additional "features" and "packages" by still being fully compatible with the SUSE Linux OSS and Retail releases. SLES will then fork from that as a stable and long term patched branch, but is still compatible in the "Code 10" model I have read about. All good! I love this model. Clear and effective and by keeping things on "Code 10" certifications for external vendors will be easier and internal and community development will be streamlined. Innovation can happen in the OSS release and in add on projects like SUPER and others to come. I think this is what will make us rock the windows boat! Streamlined and effective Innovation. Channelized Open Source effort instead of forking and splitting at every little occasion is the key to success and the "Code 10" philosophy is totally in line with that. Please do correct me if I am wrong as I do tend to misinterpret statements sometimes ......
To get back to the original topic: yes, there are legal questions. Yes, they are being discussed. No, I won't make any statements about them on this list (and would like to recommend others posting from the respective company account not to do so either). And personally I, too, would be happier if everybody would just use OGG. Oh, well.
I am looking forward to any future statements regarding this as I find the desktop currently highly crippled without decent media support. Regardless of ideological and geek arguments like ogg is better than mp3, the commercial reality is that Windows plays all that by installing commercial of shareware players and if we don't, than why would anyone switch to our distro? After all in our official announcement we said we would become the most usable and user friendly distro. To be that there is no choice and we must find a legal way to integrate patented technology at least in our commercial releases. And be assured that I will in pure Open Source spirit do something about the current situation in my own way as I cannot stand having to reboot into another distro just to be able to play DVD's or my music collection ....... really not fun ...since I do want to run Code 10 fulltime ...... Anyhow ... Guten Nachmittag to Germany ... I will go to sleep now. The southern hemisphere is switching off. :D Regards, Andreas openSUSE is SUPER: To help in the SUSE Performance Enhanced Release project visit http://www.opensuse.org/index.php/SUPER