houghi wrote:
[...] The way you read it, it as if the developers are not welcome here and should just listen to what Novell tells them. That is how I read your posting and I hope I read it wrong.
Yes, you're wrong. Everybody is welcome, I think all of us highly appreciate quality postings from developers. However, I think you are not aware of how it works in a commercial company that makes business based on software products - your statements lack from my point of view some realism. I am pretty sure that not all of Novell's employees share the opinion of the management. Nevertheless, they have to follow the company policy - or they have to quit (well, we have already seen some SUSE guys leaving Novell, and there were quite a lot of rumours why this has happened - I don't want to enter into that subject as I have no idea about the real reasons). We have seen in another posting that "The Ximian group has not existed for a long time, it was split into various groups after the Novell acquisition, and they have merged, transformed and shifted into various areas" (citing Miguel de Icaza). As you can see here, Novell split up the group - this seems to be a company decision and as a developer you might not even been asked whether you back this decision. I think that the community and independent developers might have much more "freedom" in the openSUSE project to do whatever seems to be a good idea. Nevertheless, we as the community should not forget the other commercial and much more professional side, otherwise I think the community's point of view would not be realistic and we would lose some credibility. This, however, does not mean you have to give up your dreams - some of them just might not come true ;-) Cheers, Th.