On 26 October 2017 at 07:56, Per Jessen
Roger Price wrote:
My impression is that you will need to present very strong arguments to convince the board to change tack.
I think anyone who comes up with an improved home page will be considered.
Indeed But this is not the correct mailinglist to discuss this topic This is opensuse@opensuse.org - openSUSE's support mailinglist. This is not a support topic Please relocate this discussion to opensuse-project@opensuse.org (if you wish to discuss the Project's direction, Board's decisions and such) or opensuse-web@opensuse.org (if you want to actually discuss the openSUSE website) As both are in question, I will however breach with my new protocol of not providing insight into the workings of the project on this list to provide a little more context as to how the current openSUSE website and the Projects direction came to be. Before I start, a general reminder - the Board is openSUSE's _elected_ leadership body, responsible for leading and steering the Project. 5 of the 6 seats are directly elected by the community. Only a maximum of 2 of those seats can possibly be held by employees of the same company (eg. SUSE). The openSUSE Membership can force a re-election of the Board, if 20% of the membership request it. The 6th seat is appointed by SUSE as the Board's Chairman. The current Board Chairman (myself) was a community elected Board member before being appointed, and a user / community contributor for 8 years before being employed by SUSE 4 years ago. The 5 elected Board members can, at any time, request that SUSE replace their Chairman. The Board (as the Project as a whole) is independent from SUSE and only the Chairman has a responsibility to represent SUSE's needs on the Board. Therefore any suggestion that the Board makes any decision on behalf of SUSE is misrepresenting the function of the Board, the facts that the Board answers to the community, the Chairman answers to the Board as much as SUSE, and the openSUSE Project is independent from SUSE. Over the years we (the Project) have repeatedly looked at the statistics of our userbase and release downloads to give us an indication of the general health of the openSUSE Project. The Board has used this statistics in part of their decision making processes, but as should be obvious from the story below were not the only factors in play. By the end of November 2014 there were some clearly apparent problems with the Project. Since 2009 - our number of monthly downloads of our distributions had steadily declined, suggesting a constant apathy in the adoption of the Project's main output - our number of downloads around each release had steadily declined, suggesting that each release was failing more than the last at gathering significant traction with the broad "Linux of everyone" target audience the openSUSE Project had at the time - our number of unique users of our official download repos had steadily increased, suggesting however that we had a steady, loyal, and growing userbase When taken on balance this mean that openSUSE could be argued to be _at best_ stagnant, or at worst in a shallow decline. This led the Board to do significant analysis of the results, asking lots of our users lots of questions. The conclusion of the Board at around 2014, and since reinforced by subsequent Boards, was that the Project was failing to connect with the Board "Linux for everyone" target audience, as shown by the declining download numbers. However, the strong and stable repo userbase numbers gave us some hope. The Board's analysis of the users found a pretty clear and obvious trend - one of our strongest usergroups that were consistently adopting, keeping, and growing their openSUSE usage were developers, power users, and sysadmins. And of course these userbases were also highly represented in Tumbleweed/Factory, which was growing well at the same time. Put simply, this was the primary motivation for the Board pushing the Project in the direction we have, focusing on these userbases. Since making that decision, we have seen openSUSE's downloads and userbase numbers for both Leap and Tumbleweed grow. We have also seen the number of projects beyond the distributions under the openSUSE umbrella grow. I personally have no doubt we made a good decision based on the information we had to hand, and I think we did a good job of rationalising the facts and figures with the Board's personal and intimate knowledge we had of the Project, as we are all part of it. In parallel to the above analysis and the raw numbers, there were other factors at play, especially in the openSUSE Leap part of the story. No one can deny that the 12.2, 12.3, 13.1, and 13.2 releases were very problematic to develop. The delays and close calls speak for themselves. The simple fact was that the Project was struggling to find volunteers to actually help produce the distribution. This often led to significant delays. By the release of 13.2, despite the fact we did manage to get the release out of the door, there were so few contributors left working on the release that we basically had no one left to do any future releases. In the end of 2014 and early 2015, as Chairman, I was faced with the very real and depressing problem of having to find a way of informing the community that there would be no more releases of the openSUSE Distribution. I kept this problem privately between me and the Board at the time, in the hope there would be a solution to save me from having to do that. I spent a lot of time trying to find new volunteers to step and drive future releases, with no real success. This was despite the fact that openSUSE Tumbleweed was going very well, with a very strong number of contributors, merging with openSUSE Factory, and growing it's userbase at an incredible rate. Luckily, within SUSE there was their own efforts to find a way of making the SLE sources more readily available and more useful to a broader ecosystem than just the existing SUSE developers and partners. Along with a number of SUSE employees who are also openSUSE contributors (including within SUSE Management), we were able to steer things within SUSE that the idea morphed into the direct provision of the SLE sources into OBS, with the suggestion to the community that the community base a stable distribution on those sources. In a prototypical form I presented the idea at oSC 15, and from that point on it was driven by the community. It has since evolved into what everyone now knows as openSUSE Leap. Instead of openSUSE no longer having a stable distribution due to lack of contributor interest, Leap has found new contributors in addition to the ones we effectively 'stole' by milking SUSE's SLE efforts for everything they were worth. It is also a development model which is easier for our contributors more interested in Tumbleweed to still work with and help shape and maintain Leap in a sustainable way. And as a result Leap has been a bigger success than I had ever hoped for. As long as we had the contributors to keep building it, I would have been satisfied with Leap continuing the 'trend of stagnation' or 'slow decline' that the old stable releases were suffering from, and we could have relied on Tumbleweed to provide the growth that openSUSE needs to keep on getting new blood into the Project. But instead of that, Leap has bucked the trend and exceeded my expectations. 42.1 and 42.2 both showed signs of halting the stagnation/decline, and both showed signs of increase in the metrics we measure. 42.3 was the first release since 2009 to totally reverse that trend and grow significantly in it's own right across every metric we have been able to measure so far (Release downloads & repo users). This is despite Leap 42.3's marketing, on purpose, taking a significantly LESS detail orientated approach. Instead of bombarding uses with endless detailed outputs of every package version, complex deep diving sneak peaks and other such breakdowns we used to do for every release (and like people are advocating here for the website), we purposfully took an approach to 42.3's release marketing to follow the same approach as the current website. Like the website, we focused Leap 42.3's marketing on the general 'themes' of the release. It's closeness to SLE. The general topics of how and where we expect users to find Leap 42.3 useful. And the results have been greater than we expected. The numbers of users, and the sustainability of the development process, both speak for themselves (and we need both for openSUSE to continue long term) So, to summarise - the general direction of Leap was seen by the Board as a natural decision in the light of the realities the Project faced at the time - these realities included what could be described at best as 'stagnation' or at worst as a 'steady decline', depending on how you wanted to cut the numbers. - the alternative to Leap would have been the cessation of openSUSE producing a regular release distribution, due to lack of contributor interest. - since launching the new openSUSE website we have seen both increases in downloads & users to both openSUSE Tumbleweed & Leap - Since 2015, the Project is growing in a way that we haven't seen since 2009 - Leap 42.3's marketing campaign seems to reinforce the hypothesis that saturating potential users with too much information can actually hinder growth, even when your target audience is Developers, Sysadmins & Power Users. - The website is fully open source and contributions are welcome at https://github.com/openSUSE/landing-page And so, that is the story behind what is going on here. While obviously I think the history invalidates some of the concerns raised in this thread, I'm open to discussing those points further, but not on this mailinglist, and this is not the correct place, as already stated. Please relocate this discussion to opensuse-project@opensuse.org (if you wish to discuss the Project's direction, Board's decisions and such) or opensuse-web@opensuse.org (if you want to actually discuss the openSUSE website but not contribute to it directly on https://github.com/openSUSE/landing-page) Regards, Richard Brown openSUSE Board Chairman -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org