The launch of openSUSE

The opening up of the SUSE distribution was bound to happen, sooner or later. Maintaining a major distribution is a major bit of work. But major distributions have user communities which can help with that work, and which can be the source of no end of good ideas as well. Bringing in the user community can improve the distribution, ensure wider testing, and, as a bonus, further bind those users with the distribution. People tend to be more enthusiastic about software which they have helped to shape and polish. Red Hat figured this out some years ago, and most other major distributions are created with a great deal of outside involvement.

SUSE Linux is now attempting to follow a similar path through the openSUSE project, which was officially announced on August 9. OpenSUSE will play a role similar to Red Hat's Fedora; it is a free distribution, developed with community input, which will help to drive the development of SUSE's high-end commercial offerings. Unlike Fedora, however, openSUSE will continue to be available as a retail, boxed product. In this way, Novell hopes to make the distribution as accessible as possible.

Since openSUSE is new, it lags Fedora in a number of ways. At the top of the list would be the lack of an ongoing development version of the distribution. The announcement of openSUSE included a beta release for openSUSE 10.0, which is a step in the right direction (see our review on this week's Distributions Page). The occasional beta release, however, is not the same as a bleeding-edge development repository along the lines of Rawhide, Debian unstable, or Ubuntu's "breezy." Your editor, who has not had a successful Rawhide update in some time, currently finds his enthusiasm for development repositories to be at a relatively low point. But the fact remains that making the current development version of a distribution available facilitates early testing and feedback. It also provides an experience some users want: riding the leading edge of a fast-moving distribution is a great way to taste - and participate in - the vitality of the free software community as a whole.

The openSUSE "how to participate" page shows some parallels with the early Fedora days. The first and foremost way for people to participate at this time is to test packages and report bugs. Interested people are also encouraged to submit patches, write documentation, or apply for a job. There is currently no way for outside developers to apply changes or provide packages themselves; the roadmap page states that "a first version" of a build server will be made available in early 2006. Given the frustration experienced by would-be Fedora developers, the openSUSE folks would be well advised to get that infrastructure in place in short order.

Some things are missing from the openSUSE site altogether. There is, for example, no discussion of how openSUSE will be governed. Who will make decisions on distribution policy, which packages will be included, etc.? Fedora, instead, launched with detailed plans for various sorts of advisory boards - and promptly ignored them all. More recently, Red Hat has been talking about loosening its firm grip on Fedora; very little has been said, instead, about just how independent openSUSE will be from Novell's management.

Also missing is any discussion of the security update policy for openSUSE releases. SUSE's security response tends to be rapid and thorough. The same has traditionally been true of Red Hat, but Fedora brought with it a new policy on security patches. Updates tend to come quickly from Fedora, but the short period for security support makes Fedora a relatively difficult platform for any sort of production use. That suits Red Hat's goals nicely, of course - Red Hat is wanting to sell its enterprise support offerings. It would not be entirely surprising to see openSUSE take a similar path; hopefully the project will post a security update policy in the near future so that its users will know what to expect.

If the openSUSE project is to be successful, it must find a way to attract developers and users, and to keep them happy. There is quite a variety of community distribution projects out there, and many of them do not have any apparent conflicts of interest with corporate goals. OpenSUSE will have to distinguish itself from those other distributions somehow. The openSUSE FAQ gives a hint as to how the project's leaders are hoping to proceed:

The "only" claim is certainly debatable, but, with SUSE Linux as a base, the openSUSE project has a solid base upon which to build in that direction. There will always be room for a well-designed, robustly-built, user-oriented Linux distribution.