On 11/28/2013 07:17 AM, Will Stephenson wrote:
On 28/11/13 10:47, jdd wrote:
Le 28/11/2013 09:47, Per Jessen a écrit :
In one way, it would be nice to know what SUSE would like to see, in another we should be able to take responsibility and set some direction ourselves.
don't forget the external load: personal computer are challenged by smartphones and tablets, this will hit us soon or later
This has already happened.
Well, I would say it is an ongoing process. On the end user side more an more people will move to alternate devices. I am not one to subscribe to the either or mentality often described in the press and I believe that there will be desktops in many peoples houses in the future. However, the growth of this market will certainly be slow. More and more people will find their way to Chromebooks, there is a reason M$ is running negative adds, they see their bottom line being effected already, and more devices that were thought of as additional or secondary devices will be tablets etc. However, I am not certain that maters all that much to us. Was having the "end user", or maybe I should say the "typical consumer" ever really part of our target audience, not from my point of view. In the long run, the people that will remain desktop users are developers. I for one will not write my code on a tablet ;) Thus I am with Andrew, questions we should pose are directed on how we can attract more developers to use openSUSE as their desktop of choice. Considering that all the Andoid stuff is Java and our Java stack is less than stellar I'd say we are not off to a good start.
Like a Wild West town after a gold rush, much of the population of community innovators around Linux has moved on to hacking alternative Android ROMs like CyanogenMod, electrickery with Raspberry Pis, writing indie games in Unity, or just chasing the long tail of app store revenue, leaving a remnant population of corporate employees, graybeards and (laggard) newbies to desktop/consumer Linux - but not the people that create growth and invent novel solutions to people's problems.
Well, some of this goes to the heart of the statement in the original mail by Agustin: """" If we agree that the overall number of users of Linux based server + "traditional" desktop OS (let's remove the mobile/embedded space and cloud for now), is growing, not following the "market" growing trend might be perceived as a wake up call, a clear sign that improvements needs to be done. But if we agree that we are playing in a risky and challenging field, stability can be perceived as a healthy sign. """" However, I do not see this as a black and white zero sum game as it is being presented. I believe that we have a base stable "market", this "market" will continue to grow at a rate that stable markets grow. This "market" will probably be dominated by servers that provide the infrastructure for all the "new" devices that are constantly flooding the end user space. At the same time we are part of a "market" that is changing extremely fast while people fly by the seat of their pants trying to figure out what works and what might work in the relatively short term future. This makes it a risky and challenging field. I think we are on both sides of the river so to speak and the better we are at building a bridge that can handle shifts on either side, the better we will be as a whole. Linux has woven itself into the fabric of everything. This also implies that to keep everything running people will need distributions to do the boring work of the world. For this a reliable release cycle that doesn't get fiddled with every other year is important. Then there are those that work in on the new frontier, those want the "latest and greatest" to invent new and exciting stuff. Repeating myself, for both camps we are in a great position already. That doesn't imply that taking a look in the mirror every now and then is not a healthy thing to do, but collecting a bunch of statistics and then drawing conclusions from them while painting the world in black and white will probably not open up the path we possibly should be walking.
I'm not bashing openSUSE specifically here, this evolution has hit every distribution and community FLOSS software projects like KDE and GNOME.
Yup, but there will always be people that are willing to spend their time working on the plumbing that keeps everything else running. We need to figure out how to find more of them. As a distribution we will always have a large part of our work be the "boaring and mundane", innovation in mature technologies slows down. Later, Robert -- Robert Schweikert MAY THE SOURCE BE WITH YOU SUSE-IBM Software Integration Center LINUX Tech Lead Public Cloud Architect rjschwei@suse.com rschweik@ca.ibm.com 781-464-8147 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org