I certainly respect your opinion. I don't really know enough about the "community" to agree or disagree with it. I'm not convinced that a "community", aside from Novell employees, actually exists.
Finally, I do respect the sentiment you expressed, "put up or shut up ...." , even if expressed somewhat rudely. I am more than willing to "Put up" if a community independent of Novell actually exists. If not, I won't be here very long. Either way, I won't annoy you too much more :).
I'm testing the waters here! I am considering making a substantial commitment of time without compensation. I do apologise if my openly expressed doubts about OpenSUSE have disturbed you or anyone else. I have no desire to be disruptive. I have no desire to donate my labor to Novell or it's successor either!
Charles Wight
I think many don't realize that Novell tends to hire people from the community. People that have shown passion for the project, open source, etc. For many of us this isn't just another day job. Its something we really enjoy doing. "My opinion is that OpenSUSE can never really be a community project if it depends on one corporate sponsor, whether it be Novell or another entity." As for the single sponsor thing... That's just silly. Based on what you have said, Fedora, openOffice, ubuntu don't have 'real' communities. Believe it or not there are several Novell employees that have nothing to do with anything linux/suse/open source that donate their time to the project. I think if you were to be more actively involved and contributing that you'd see there are many non Novell people contributing. I think you'd also find several former suse/novell employees that still contribute. Do you realize that firefox for example is completely done by a community member. One of the most active gnome packages/integrator is not a Novell employee. I'm not as familiar with the kde side, but I'd be very surprised to not see many community contributors. Also, this own single sponsor thing is somewhat a myth I think. Just because Novell is the only one that contributes 'money' to the project doesn't make it the only sponsor. Go over to the buildservice list and look at all the contributions given by cray computers and intel. Heck there was even a guy from intel review other intel employee's patches. We can thank cray for ldap support in the build service. I believe there was a company that donated a substantial amount of computing power to the build service. Not to mention that the build service is backed by the linux foundation. With working with nokia and intel on meego I'm sure there have been contributions to the distro directly or indirectly. This doesn't even get into the hours people have spent putting other things together. Look at funkypenguin. The countless our a non novell person put into getting meego into openSUSE. I don't know for sure, but I don't think the guy that built lxde into openSUSE was an employee either. None the less, I'm just about 100% that wasn't on the list of features that Novell would be interested in funding had it been a Novell engineer. I almost feel like its a slap in the face the way you degrade the suse engineers' efforts. The out right claim that we are only in it for the money. Especially when you having said it yourself haven't contributed anything. For someone that hasn't stepped up to help, you are sure talking big... Are you planning on running mail servers, forums, wikis, blogs, build service, etc. The infrastructure is huge and definitely expensive if you think about just the man hours, bandwidth, hardware, and facilities. So, in the end why don't you pick a project and contribute other than making unfounded accusations and complaints. I certainly don't like to be told that I'm doing this for the money or that my contributions were worthless before I joined Novell. I'm sure the others that spent countless hours feel the same. Cheers, Stephen PS. Accessibility, gnome, kde, bug triaging, package maintaining, documentation, wiki reviews/updates, forum questions to be answered, fate features reviewed, new projects tested, 11.4 testing, and a dozen other things would more than likely happily accepted your contributions to the project. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org