Friday, September 24, 2010

openSUSE strategy is moving on


openSUSE strategy is evolving. The strategy team is working very hard to integrate all the input they get. We got some great ideas from our contributors as well as from users and even non-users.
I would be interested in further input from the upstream projects.
  • What do you expect from the openSUSE community? In which direction should out strategy point to improve our collaboration?
Please let us know your hopes and expectations in the comments or via mail (firstname.lastname  at gmail com).

P.S.: I would be great if you could spread that page to other upstream projects.

5 comments:

Fri13 said...

I must say I am littlebit worried that the strategy does not inform how the contributions are going to the upstream so everyone can get results and not just openSUSE community?

Thomas Thym (ungethym) said...

The strategy is not finished yet. That's why we ask. :-)
So if I understood you right, you expect from the openSUSE community to work close upstream (?) and make sure that the contributions end up upstream.

NoOne said...

1. Compete with Kubuntu and Mint to ensure that openSUSE remains the best KDE implementation.

2. Almost by definition, your power user will have specific needs: for example I install a ton of sound/MIDI packages. Implement a learning-based package management strategy for the power user with the goal of a stable distribution in mind. At the moment, I don't use Factory, but instead have about 20 repositories enabled and I constantly have to priority rank down repositories (with priority values greater than 100) in YaST to maintain a stable system. I cannot easily do this in Factory. I mentioned this to jengelh on lwn.

3. Ensure via testing that good proprietary packages (nVidia drivers, Java etc.) work when the distro is released. Keep it as a hidden feature to not upset the open source philosophy folks. Your pragmatic power user will appreciate you even more.

Unknown said...

After all the discussion on the strategy on the mailing list, on blogs, on IRC, you are asking again what are the expectations of the community? Isn't it clear already?

Wouldn't it be better to propose one realistic strategy, compatible with Novell needs, and trying to realize it?

I believe it would save a lot of time, and add credibility to this discussion, which already lasted too long and did not seem to lead very far, given that you still ask the same questions.

Thomas Thym (ungethym) said...

@NoOne: Thanks for your input.
@AlbertoP: Yes, there was much discussion. In my POV the expectations of the upstream projects is still missing. For me the process of strategy is vital. So involving all essential parts (not only the own community) is important.

And sure: We could ask Novell for a strategy. But openSUSE is a community project and therefore the strategy should represent the community. This process takes naturaly longer than a top-down strategy in an enterprize.