On Tue, Aug 25, 2009 at 12:03 PM, Sven
Burmeister
Am Dienstag, 25. August 2009 17:21:37 schrieb Gerald Pfeifer:
On Mon, 24 Aug 2009, Sven Burmeister wrote:
I think you missed the point. I was talking about perception of decisions and not how they actually come about. I may repeat myself: "If people inside and outside the community do not see openSUSE and SLE as mostly unrelated, then this question is surely not a distraction but crucial to understand how decisions regarding any Novell product or investment are perceived by others and hence their impact on the discussions lead in the community."
Yes, and perception is not going to change and match reality as long as SUSE Linux Enterprise is being dragged onto the scene. :-)
Ok, so you think perception is different to what Novell claims. That's a first step, i.e. to acknowledge that there is a gap.
*Some* people perceive things differently. It's an open question whether that perception is widely shared or not. If a large percentage of people perceive openSUSE and SLE decisions as connected, then it may need addressing. The reality is that for the purposes of this discussion, one does not affect the other, and discussing SLE is a distraction because our decision won't influence SLE here.
In fact, trying to change perception by not talking about it will, as in politics, always end in a huge blow, i.e. the point where reality hits phantasy.
In politics, as in other things, sometimes not talking about something is the wrong thing to do -- and other times it's exactly the right thing to do. Even asserting a negative (no, these two decisions are not connected) helps perpetuate the meme by keeping it alive. (Why are they bothering to say something about this issue? I guess the two things must be connected if they have to say they're not...)
But I take your point, according to you, if one does not mention SLE within the opensuse community the outside will follow that lead and think that they are separate as well. I guess only time will tell whether that works.
I suspect that the "outside" of the community is much more likely to
already think (rightly) that the decision processes are separate. I'm
sure that's not universal, but if you look at people who might care
about Linux a bit, but don't follow openSUSE specifically, they
probably haven't spent much time either way thinking about the
connection of SLE/openSUSE at all.
Generally, when I have conversations about openSUSE with people who
are new to SUSE in general, I have to explain the connection between
the two (i.e., that openSUSE is the foundation of the SLE products)
and how the two differ. There's not a strong predisposition to assume
anything.
Best,
Zonker
--
Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier