As said in my previous mail, I have a strong feeling that the discussions are often pointless and lead nowhere. It seems to me that this is partly also because the strategies, as currently formulated, do not offer a good way to lead somewhere. Specifically, their either poorly or completely fail to address fundamental practical issues, such as the following questions: - who will do the work? - what will openSUSE actually gain from it? - what may openSUSE lose because of it? I hope we can all agree that these are very important questions related to the strategies. Also, to actually better understand the strategies, I think it would be very good if they gave examples and answered the question - what will openSUSE look like in 2 years? For example, looking at the mobile/cloud strategy, let me try to give answers for that strategy, as I see it: In 2 years: With the mobile/cloud strategy, openSUSE will include as much software as possible that connects to web-based services, and those are the preferred solutions. Other solutions are included, if possible, but they are secondary. The distribution makes it very easy to connect to these services and work with them. [This should be longer, but since it's not an area I understand well, I will stop. The 'focus on' and intro sections provide some information for this]. The gains: As a result, openSUSE will attract users who use the web and mobile devices extensivelly, web developers, professionals who work in areas related to cloud/mobile. Number of packages that are necessary for the primary focus will be considerably smaller, because a lot of functionality will be provided by something on the web and not by openSUSE itself, thus reducing the required effort. The loses: Users who prefer solutions that are not heavily web-based may leave openSUSE for another distribution with a focus that suits them better. These people may be developers who focus on other areas than web development, desktop users (i.e. those that prefer local mail client and so on). Who will do the work: I don't know. People focused on the web are more likely to work on something web-based and will be presumably not very good at maintaining a distribution, nor interested very much in it. People who already are contributors or who may become ones are more likely to be driven away by this strategy, possibly eventually leading to existing contributors not being able to handle even the reduced work. => FAIL. So the strategy, as I understand it, is in practice unsustainable and as such a complete failure, even though in theory it may look nice. This may be just because I don't understand the mobile/cloud area well, but that's how I see it. If I'm wrong, create better answers to the questions in the wiki. I suggest that every strategy proposal is extended to provide answers to these important questions. Without it, the discussions are just fluff talk and there is no good base for actually judging the strategy proposals. PS: Just in case it's not clear, there's no point in discussing my analysis of the mobile/cloud strategy itself. -- Lubos Lunak openSUSE Boosters team, KDE developer l.lunak@suse.cz , l.lunak@kde.org -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org