On 09/29/2009 11:42 PM, Dominique Leuenberger wrote:
On 9/29/2009 at 15:31, Basil Chupin
wrote: The question therefore has to be asked: what *DO* Novell/openSUSE staff contribute to the openSUSE distribution - apart from "You will have to fix the bug"?
Why do we keep considering Novell anything else than just a community member with big commitment?
Because Novell went out its way to acquire SuSE for its own benefit and not for the sake of a "community" effort.
I think I'm allowed to say that, even if I am not a Novell employee, I feel this to be 'my' distribution. I feel as an integral part of the community and participate in different ways, offering a lot of time. As such: Novell offers the same to the openSUSE distribution as other contributors (I'd say even more: nobody else I've talked to offered us a BuildService and the infrastructure for example)
You seem to treat this thing akin to a religious experience where "community" is some group of people adhering to one of the multitude of beliefs relating to some code of moral conduct as propounded by some religious enterprises. It is nothing of the sort. I have been an "adherant" and an "apostle" of SuSE (now openSUSE) for many years until recently. I am getting very, very close to converting to being an 'atheist' when it comes to oS.
About the case itself: Per is doing a great job in submitting reports and as I've seen he's also one that follows up on additional queries (not everybody does so unfortunately... Very often you see a 'file and bye' approach). But wouldn't it be great if we could just convince Per to go one step further? It's not that he is 'requested' to do so, but very often just giving often enough a hint in the right direction motivates people to look at something new / more.
Don't take the 'help fix it' as offensive. It's a rather natural way of 'suggesting' that everybody can learn something new. Of course it might well be that Per does not have the time to invest in this specific case, or not the will. BUT maybe he is willing and just does not know how to get started for such a case? Why would we (community) not want to have him help out with all his knowledge, which, as hopefully nobody doubts, is of great value?
Take this as a call for contribution: we all can help, in whatever way you can even think of... Programming / fixing code bugs is one way, reporting another appreciated. And many more tasks can be listed.... very often the step from reporting to fixing is actually not that big a gap as expected (not every fix involves code changes for example... ).
Per has been contributing for quite some time now but - and I do not even begin to assume that I convey his thoughts in any accurate way - I feel that he is now getting just a bit peed off (MY words, not his) about the situation with oS as it has been developing in recent times. I know that I am. I am not a programmer. I have no programming skills. All I can do is to report about hassles. And I do *NOT* mean having to submit "bug reports" about something which does not even work to begin with when it should work and should have been tested by the programmers/developers before the sheebang was released for download by the public- and cost the public time and money to download the crap (example: CDs which were (?)~400MB big when they should have been ~700MB big). 5 years ago I had pride in waiting to get my copy of the latest SuSE and I had spoken with confidence to my friends using anything other than SuSE about the joy of using SuSE. Now I keep my mouth shut, and if asked about Linux I point them towards Ubuntu/Kubuntu and, in recent times, towards Arch Linux.
Dominique
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