On Wed, Aug 24, 2005 at 04:59:57PM -0600, Andreas Girardet wrote:
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.
Well. I don't know how code travels from the fedora into the EL code base, but I know the idea behind the opensuse project, and you're only partly correct with that statement. To explain, I have to look into the future a little bit and talk about features which do not exist yet. Please keep that in mind, and be patient with us during the next months in which we will still be developing the infrastructure needed - and maybe change plans as we go due to new information and better ideas. 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 point in time, we can't promise you to integrate anything you do into the core distribution. That's why the openSUSE project will be much more than the core distribution. Why should you depend on our decisions what to include on the iso images? The solution is not to make even more CDs, or to introduce a democratic process to decide what packages get "blessed" by inclusion into the distribution. 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). 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. Sonja -- Sonja Krause-Harder (skh@suse.de) openSUSE core team Research & Development SUSE Linux Products GmbH