On Thursday 05 March 2009 06:13:51 member greenarrow1 wrote:
[...] I have been reading articles recently about Novell specifically their financial condition and, of course, OpenSUSE. I to am beginning to wonder where OpenSUSE lies with Novell and are we just test subjects for their improvement of SLED and SLES. Is Novell trying to get
You get everything in openSUSE that is in SLED and SLES as well (unless it's closed source software that is not freely redistributable). openSUSE 11.1 contains already nearly everything that SLE{D,S}11 will have and those things that are missing (since SLE gets released later) might hit openSUSE 11.1 as updates or have been added to the factory tree targetting openSUSE 11.2. openSUSE is an own distribution where we make also changes that are not needed for SLE at all but are needed for the openSUSE community.
computer makers to place SLED on their systems and where does that take OpenSUSE in this area? Are we going to be just a home user experiment or can we come up with a strategy to entice users to use our operating system as a main part of their daily routine in using their computers? If we push to hard and users start adopting OpenSUSE and Novell loses users for SLED what will Novell do with OpenSUSE?
Novell likes to have an independend openSUSE. If we make openSUSE that perfect that nobody wants SLED anymore, then Novell has to rethink it's business model. The business model of SLE is making money not only with selling of a product but with the support offerings for it. If openSUSE becomes better than SLED, Novell will cope with it. So, yes, please discuss where we all want openSUSE to go - and please respect that Novell cannot do everything itself.
These are just some of the questions we as the community need to start looking at. Since I have never read exactly what was in the take over of OpenSUSE by Novell I do sometimes think about this for our future.
openSUSE is what the community makes out of it - and I consider myself and Novell part of the community.
I am not saying this will happen but what if Novell falls upon dire financial straits is there anything we can do as the community to keep OpenSUSE going without Novell telling us to stop and desist? Or better written do we have plans if anything like this does occur?
We have opened up process and tools - and still have to do more here - so that people outside of Novell can build the distribution without access to the internal network. Now this needs to be taken advantage of. I see already some parts like Carlos doing a KDE 3.5 LiveCD, people maintaining the Contrib repository but that's just the beginning. The project is constantly changing and opening up - and sometimes those small changes cause pain or do not get noticed on a daily basis.. Btw. Peter, it's openSUSE with a small "o", Andreas -- Andreas Jaeger, Director Platform / openSUSE, aj@suse.de SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, GF: Markus Rex, HRB 16746 (AG Nürnberg) Maxfeldstr. 5, 90409 Nürnberg, Germany GPG fingerprint = 93A3 365E CE47 B889 DF7F FED1 389A 563C C272 A126