Distributions

There are still a few areas where we're still at the beginning of opening up (actually rather at the point of starting to think about ways to do that properly), such as having non-Novell employees co-maintain core distribution packages or the openSUSE reference guide. As said, it's in flux, and certain things take time, but Novell definitely hasn't been standing in the way, quite the contrary. And while Novell ultimately has the most resources in certain or even most areas of the project, especially in building the distribution and providing security maintenance during the openSUSE release lifetime, there is always room for discussion.

One notable example was the thread about whether KDE 3 should be removed from openSUSE 11.1, as KDE 4 is where almost all KDE developers put their efforts in. At first, Novell's product management position was to drop KDE 3 because it would mean supporting it for 2 years. But the discussion lead to a compromise, as many believe that KDE 4 wasn't quite ready enough. In the end, openSUSE 11.1 will still have KDE 3, but KDE 3 will be dropped in 11.2. The KDE3 maintenance during the lifetime of openSUSE 11.1 will be taken care of by Novell employees. So, again, while Novell commits most of the resources, the opinion of the community is important to them, for obvious reasons.

I can also imagine that at some point, that differentiation between Novell employee and non-Novell employee Board position shall be removed. Remember that it is our first elected Board. We take some decision and define some processes because we believe that they offer a good balance. Actually, the idea behind that separation was to make sure that there were two seats occupied by non-Novell employees (and not less).

We understand that this is a controversial topic. But you shouldn't get too theoretical while reflecting upon it. It is very tempting but this is a total non-issue in reality. We are not trying to find the best theoretical possibility to govern a project. We are hackers that try to get things done.

To contribute to our documentation go and help organizing and authoring in our Wiki. To help to translate the openSUSE distribution into your language join one of our various translation teams and translate strings to your native language.

To contribute to the distribution use the openSUSE Build service. And those are just the four main entrances into our project. You can have it as specialized as helping openSUSE HAM users to transmit via radio, spinning your own version of openSUSE for educational use or create artwork to be included in the distribution. The same holds true for decision making. All of the different areas make their own decisions. So to influence decisions you go there, participate and voice your opinion.

Decisions that concern the overall project are always discussed at the opensuse-project mailing list or are a topic in the bi-weekly opensuse-project meeting. So you just go there and do the same. It is really as simple as that.

Users can become members through advocacy, promoting openSUSE regularly at local events, getting online and providing support to new users in IRC and the forums. It's really not that difficult to become a member and you don't have to be a technical genius to become a member.

While openSUSE is definitely a brilliant distribution in many regards and while we have a healthy community that consists of great people, we still have a lot to do, and so do the other distribution projects. They're not less good nor less deserving, we all have our strengths and weaknesses, so we should work together to make Linux and FOSS a better experience to everyone. If you're feeling at home with another distribution, great, contribute there! And if you think you'd like to contribute to our distribution or to our community, you are definitely welcome here too. And if you believe there are domains where we can work together, please get in touch with us at board -AT- opensuse.org.