On 8 February 2016 at 18:38, John Andersen <jsamyth@gmail.com> wrote:
And what would that achieve? KDE eV, GNOME Foundation, etc, do not hire developers.
And that's precisely the problem, as you pointed out in your longer posting up-thread.
There are already ways to contribute to KDE complete with paypal button, and I've done so at least once a year.
But, if that money is not going to KDE developers (and I do not believe it does), then it doesn't resolve the issues your suggesting your money would solve if it was instead going to openSUSE
The Opensuse site accepts code and hardware. And believe me they wouldn't want the hardware I cast off.
But no way to contribute to Opensuse for paying developers, or maintainers to fix and maintain older stuff, or even tackle bug reports. Opensuse has no "visible means of support" which means its existence is probably subject to the whim of the ownership of Suse, which have seemed progressively less and less likely to be interested with each change of hands.
Opensuse has historically been a testbed for SLES/SLED, but now, with Leap, it seems less so, and more like a Remora, hitching a ride on a shark, and as such dead-weight as viewed by Suse ownership, and the current ownership of Suse has proven themselves a pretty mercenary bunch over the last 20 years that I have had dealings with them. I suspect if the comptroller of Microfocus catches a cold, Opensuse could find itself a fatality.
I really don't like responding to these conspiracy theories, because it provides nonsense like this a credibility it doesn't deserve But for the record, Leap has the full backing of SUSE. It's origins started with an idea that originated within SUSE R&D before being presented to the community, which evolved the concept from that point, but (luckily for SUSE) kept the core concepts which SUSE were hoping to see There is a video recording where I presented this idea at oSC15 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BH99TSrfvq0 To boil the whole thing down to a very crude (and incomplete) picture Leap is a distribution which helps SUSE develop their next service packs (ie. SLE 12 SP2 will be learning lessons from Leap 42.1, while we simultaneously develop SLE 12 SP2 and Leap 42.2 at the same time). Leap is also a perfect platform for SUSE to target the development of their new technologies on, it's shared heritage with SLE enabling it to help their Enterprise orientated development while also contributing directly to openSUSE Tumbleweed is the distribution which helps SUSE develop their next SLE releases (ie. SLE 13 will be based on a snapshot of Tumbleweed some day in the future) So there should be absolutely no question regarding the importance of openSUSE to SUSE.
Side Issue: Why does no one produce a derivative distro based on Opensuse? Yet Arch, arguably a much smaller organization, has dozens of derivatives, some of them rather impressive (Manjaro). Is Opensuse just so good that there is no room for improvement? Does someone actively work to prevent this?
There are openSUSE derivatives. Ignoring the thousands on SUSE Studio the examples that spring to mind are: GeckoLinux - https://geckolinux.github.io/ InvisServer - http://www.invis-server.org/ Paragon OS - http://www.paragonos.net/ No one actively works to prevent derivatives of openSUSE, but I can share one funny story that I think goes some way to explain why openSUSE doesn't have a huge pile of derivatives There once was a distribution called Fuduntu, a fedora based distro that tried to provide a very user focused experience (ala Ubuntu) They decided to discontinue their distribution and instead rebase as a derivative on openSUSE They approached us, asked us a bunch of questions, met a bunch of contributors, all of whom were very welcoming and friendly to this new group of developers who had a very clear vision of what they wanted to do In fact, we were so welcoming, that the developers decided that it wasn't worth the effort of having their own distribution, and they became openSUSE contributors And we're very happy to still have them :) We're the kind of project that does our best to accept as many changes as we can from as many different people as we can, without only a sensible, common sense approach to shared standards, quality, policies, procedures, etc. If we had many derivatives, I'd be worrying that we were doing something wrong - we should be the kind of project that people can influence in the direction they want by contributing to, not by making their own. - Rich -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org