Hi All, On 27 August 2016 at 16:57, Anton Aylward wrote:

Every year, the marketing team from Novell come round various cities doing their show and tell. They usually include a few 'partners', always, it seems, IBM. They always hand out a folder of DVDs for the latest installation. I have a collection of these panning the better part of a decade on my shelf :-)

Novell have had little or nothing to do with the openSUSE Project for many years now. Novell purchased SUSE in 2004. As part of Novell, SUSE was operated much like a separate department in the organisation, with most operations and senior management being indistinguishable from the rest of Novell. I would certainly consider this period as a period which Novell was directly involved in the daily life of the openSUSE Project. Novell was purchased and became part of the Attachmate Group in 2011. The Attachmate Group consisted of several discrete business units. SUSE was one such business unit, with its own senior management team, product managers, R&D, and so on and so forth. Some common sales, marketing and infrastructure operations were shared between business units, but essentially since 2011 SUSE has been an independent organisation setting its own direction as part of a larger family of companies. or to put it another way, since 2011 SUSE, not Novell, has been the primary patron of the openSUSE Project Now more recently, Micro Focus purchased the Attachmate Group and formed the Micro Focus Group. The Micro Focus group consists of two business units. "Micro Focus" (consisting of the Micro Focus, Novell, NetIQ, Attachmate, Borland brands - ) and SUSE (consisting of SUSE). While of course we happily share some common resources between these two business units, the nature of SUSE's business is very different than the rest of Micro Focus (SUSE provides Subscription services ontop of Open Source products compared to Micro Focus providing traditional software licenses and maintenance on top of mostly Closed Source products) and so SUSE's own Sales, Support, Training & Marketing teams are all growing in addition to everything else which is growing (ps. we're hiring.. https://jobs.suse.com ) So please, don't expect too much in regards to SUSE marketing from Novell/Micro Focus - we're one happy family, but the nature of the relation has changed dramatically in the last 5 years. SUSE Marketing significantly contribute to openSUSE, we regularly attend events together and swap and share merchandise and more for mutual benefit. For an example you can see below. In addition to all that, openSUSE is, as it always has been, an independent project able of setting its own destiny. We expend large amounts of the money provided by SUSE & other sponsors on openSUSE merchandise which we distribute internationally, quite often at significant cost. SUSE also contribute a dedicated openSUSE Marketing Expert to help coordinate such openSUSE-specific marketing efforts - his name is Douglas DeMaio and you can contact him at ddemaio@suse.com . Much of our marketing efforts are discussed on the opensuse-marketing@opensuse.org mailinglist, that is what it is there for. Because of the astronomical costs of international import of much of this merchandise (often doubling the overall cost if not more), and the sad reality that customs officials in some countries often impound whatever we're trying to send to our advocates, the openSUSE Board started the Local Material Production Reimbursement programme some time ago. https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Local_Material_Production_Reimbursement This allows openSUSE contributors to make small amounts of openSUSE materially locally, which helps reduce the costs and the shipping lead time. Zvesdana, Cynthia, and Ken, our awesome designers also put together a whole guide on our official branding colour schemes and assets, including the assets we use for creating official openSUSE USB sticks, Pens, and more - https://opensuse.github.io/branding-guidelines/

They've also given out USB sticks. These have copied of the presentations and more marketing material, spec sheets and such. They have been 2G sticks.

This last year there was no USB stick. I asked why and was told that interested parties could download same from the web site. I'm not sure that such economy makes sense.

I tried making the point that if you multiply the number of attendees (there were between 150 and 200 at the event here in Toronto) by the number of cities and look at the cost of printing up the folder and pair of DVDs they handed out, and then compared that to the cost in bulk of a 16G DVD with a 'live' version of LEAP/SLED/SLES and a download icon, and all the marketing material as PDF and HTML, the sticks being green with a logo and name and url, it actually works out cheaper. You can, guys, verify this for yourself. There are quite a number of sites on-line that offer this service; make up one image and supply the GIF of the imprint on the side of the stick. Yes, you could probably make a 'live' in 8G but 16G lets you run it for real and save the result. As Antonio points out many people can use this safely at work or at an internet café. Having a decent 'save' space allows customization and configuration of preferences, email set-up, and more.

You may think that the reaction from the marketeers at the SUSE Linux Day when I suggested this was a sort of 'deer in the headlights'. You'd be wrong. It started with stony silence. once I presented the cost figures I had an argument on my hands. it was an odd sort of argument. It never touched on my parentage or personal habits, but then again it never touched on economics ether. It seemed to revolve around just the opposite of what Antonio claims. But then again I'm not sure; dealing with sales-critters and marketing critters is often confusing, especially if they have a great deal of technical knowledge, and these guys really know their product! They really do!

I think a LiveUSB is a great project, a great way of memetically (aka 'mind virus') infiltrating Linux and specifically SUSE into a ecosystem.

I'm just sorry I can't help Antonio with his specific problems.

I was in Toronto all of last week at LinuxCon, representing SUSE & openSUSE at our joint booth on the floor of LinuxCon. I personally gave away hundreds of openSUSE branded USB sticks, each of which were 8GB in size. And stickers, and metal openSUSE pins, and more stickers. All of which were arranged through Douglas. I would have taken more, such as the awesome Tumbleweed and Leap T-shirts we have these days, but our stock was a little low because he was at Frosscon at the same time in Germany giving them away ;) And we'll be at LinuxCon Europe in October doing it all again before SUSEcon in November, and probably more if people volunteer to represent us at events - now you know where to do so :) Hope this clears things up for you and sets your expectations in the right direction. Regards, Richard Brown openSUSE Chairperson -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org