I would like to add my own comments to Robert's email
On 3 February 2014 00:15, Robert Schweikert
On 02/02/2014 05:45 PM, Greg KH wrote:
On Sun, Feb 02, 2014 at 08:46:36PM +0100, agustin benito bethencourt wrote:
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Where is the openSUSE board in this whole mess?
We (the openSUSE Board) received this announcement the same way everyone else did, in these mailinglists. I think this is generally a 'good thing' - as a Board we want to work in the open as much as possible, following the same model we wish to encourage for the whole project; I don't want the Board to become some secret filter stuff gets sent to before public release. I do think it's possible to work 'in the open' without including ''really scary announcements' that cause significant uncertainty for our Project. But that requires certain principles to be followed, or else stuff like this happens.
A lot of the issues being discussed are technical in nature, what is the work flow, how is factory maintained/developed, what does the release process look like? As such the board charter is to stay out of the technical stuff. This can be changed, but needs a community discussion and decision.
And I think this situation has brought to light an issue - some 'technical' decisions have 'project-wide' implications Changing how Factory is put together is a technical decision I think everyone can agree would be left to those actually working on Factory (ie. not the Board) - while it of course has a 'project wide' implication, it's mostly contained to those doing the work on Factory, and in the spirit "of those who do, decide", I think it's best that the Board keep their nose out of it. However, "the entire team that works on X is going to work on Y for 6 months" is a decision which has project-wide implications - it hits our users, it hits our other contributors, and I think there is to be a case to be made that it transcends the simplistic argument that "it's a technical decision". This decision has impacts that I'm only just starting to realize, like the fact that as part of the GNOME team I'm going to now have to help support 12.3 for longer than we had planned for. The openSUSE Team isn't the only team who potentially could have such a big impact on the Project (I can imagine the chaos us in the GNOME team could cause), but thankfully I can think of no other example where it's been the case of a team working in this way, and handling it's communication about it's decisions in this way (and I hope we'll never have one) But should they occur again, perhaps the Board should be more closely involved in those kind of situations BEFORE they hit the lists, at the very least to advise and guide those wanting to make those changes, and (probably just as useful) be involved in actually transitioning and mitigating the impact on the Project - something I think we could have done with in this case. Maybe we need a bigger stick. To be honest, I'm not sure about much on this topic, just my displeasure with the current situation and my desire to change it, quickly. This is something I expect we'll discuss at our Face 2 Face meeting this coming weekend.
It seems that they were not part of this announcement and given their individual responses, the non-Novell/SuSE members seem really opposed and upset as well.
It's as if the board really isn't part of the guiding process for this project, and that's not a nice feeling to be perpetuating,
Agreed, it's not.
We as the board have advised on a number of occasions that the actions we were observing for the path being taken would easily be interpreted as divisive, would create uncertainty and unrest. In the end this is all we can do. As the openSUSE board we are just members of the community, we do not have the right or power, nor should we have such, to tell people what to do or to decree gag orders. We can only encourage people to be considerate of their actions and abide by our guiding principals.
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