On Thursday 05 August 2010 18:10:54 Lubos Lunak wrote:
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.
Ok, I'll take the Lunak test for the platform proposal (http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Distribution_platform_strategy):
In 2 years:
The openSUSE distribution will be the number one distribution in the market of technical users. It comes with a stable base set of software, which is also used by SLES, MeeGo, and a number of other strong distributions, including first-class KDE and GNOME distributions. Depending on where the world moves to there might also be a strong cloud- or mobile-oriented distibution, or a developer focused one, or whatever the current trend will be in two years. All those distributions benefit from the quality and the functionality of the technically excellent openSUSE tool infrastructure. The community around the openSUSE distribution and its focused sub-teams have a lot of fun with creating successful distributions and the many users which use them.
The gains:
openSUSE keeps most parts of its current user base and extends it to a lot of other people who currently go for special distributions, Mac, or are still on Ubuntu or Fedora. By focusing on a great tool infrastructure for packaging and distributing software, it attracts upstream developers, which grow the contributors community. By providing a platform for distribution development, it enables companies and communities to use and contribute to openSUSE for their own distributions instead of having to spin their own or use another one as a base. These people will grow the openSUSE community.
The loses:
Users who have no technical understanding will not find the required help with openSUSE and might switch to a distribution more focused on their needs. Bleeding edge users might find openSUSE too stable and might switch to a distribution more focused on their needs. Contributors who only want to cover one specific use case for a distribution might switch to a distribution more focused on their needs.
Who will do the work:
Most current contributors will find a place either in the main distribution or
in one of the distributions based on it. By providing a distribution platform,
we'll address people who are interested in distribution development, that's
exactly the people who are able to help and join the community. So those who
use the platform will take part in doing the work needed for the base and the
infrastructure. By addressing technical users we grow the community of users
which is capable to get involved with distribution and tool development. So
they will help to do the work as well.
=> WIN.
--
Cornelius Schumacher