Interview with the openSUSE board

Pascal: We agree to that definition. The only potential issue with it is the name "Members". We had a long discussion on our opensuse-project mailing-list (that is open to everyone) about a proper name (and the process too), but we didn't manage to come up with something less ambiguous. Fedora's "Ambassador" title wouldn't be too bad, but actually even more confusing as it is not the same role. Unfortunately there is no red line we can cross between "non substantial" and "substantial", which is why the Board discusses and votes on each membership request. Typically, membership is granted to individuals who have been contributing to the community since more than half a year, in domains such as packaging, translating, authoring content on the Wiki, hacking, helping out by answering questions or administrating mailing-lists, our forum, or on IRC, etc... This is by no means an exhaustive list. We are looking for verifiable contributions though, and we will discuss how to proceed for granting Member status in the future, as the current process doesn't scale that well. Several other options were discussed on our opensuse-project mailing-list when we initiated the idea.

Bryen: This will always be a continuously evolved definition as we identify people who contribute to the project as a whole, or in part, in new ways we might not have thought of previously. Myself, I became a member for my advocacy for a11y (accessibility through computing) and encouraging others to think about the needs of people with accessibility issues. I talked about it, I provided relevant information and I participated regularly in openSUSE meetings. I see "continued and substantial contribution" as someone who opens doors to making openSUSE a more relevant platform for users.

Henne: Novell is investing a lot in openSUSE. Nearly the whole technical infrastructure of the project is taken care of by Novell. Novell is also putting a lot of manpower and money into the project. But of course we could always use more, the project is unsatisfiable in that regard. So is Novell adequately supporting openSUSE? Yes. Could Novell do more? Definitely. Should Novell do more: Yes please.

Bryen: One of the things that attracted me to the openSUSE Community was the active participation of Novell developers within the project. They continue to make themselves accessible and over time, they have given the reins to other people from the community and empowering us all to do more for the project. While I think Novell could stand to do a bit more promoting of openSUSE to the general public, I think they've done a fine job with Community Manager Joe Brockmeier. In many ways, I think it is premature to determine whether Novell *needs* to do more. It's only been a week since the polls closed for our new Board and we've had a good outcome of voter turnout at 75%. This makes it the first time that our Board has a community-backed mandate and a strong one at that. So it isn't a question of whether they've done enough thus far, but more a question of what more will they do now that Novell sees how strongly vested Community members are in the project as stakeholder.

Pascal: But this doesn't mean it's one-way. The non-Novell contributors in the community also do a lot, most of them during their free time, as in almost any FOSS project. The community is very important to Novell, and I believe that the relationship should be seen as being equal partners.

Michael: Could Novell do more? Of course as everybody could do more. But would it make sense? I doubt it. Rather than having even more support by Novell I'd love to see more sponsors stepping up to base the openSUSE project on broader shoulders and loose the dependency on one sponsor.

Bryen: The only time I've ever really seen any resistance from Novell is when they are unable to provide adequate manpower and support for a particular feature or request. But beyond that, there seems to be great transparency by the teams within openSUSE. If we were to go down the path towards greater community control, it is more about whether there is adequate manpower within the community to provide the support it needs. I don't think Novell is resistant to that at this time, but ultimately, it is about increasing membership where we can all work together seamlessly.

Pascal: I don't believe that Novell exerts too much control over the project. It's rather the opposite. It is important to understand that this is an evolving process, where we started from (more or less) everything closed except for a few when S.u.S.E. GmbH was acquired by Novell to the point where Novell pushed for opening up many things around openSUSE when it launched opensuse.org three years ago. More and more domains and teams have opened up towards the community, and the community has grown with it. Right now, we're rather in a position where Novell is actually looking for more contributors from the community, with existing open processes (open discussions on our mailing-lists, source code available in public Subversion repositories, etc...).

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.

Michael: With regards to more community control I think we (the project) need to define clearer rules how to contribute and I'd love to see co-maintainership for more and more packages, long term even core packages.

Pascal: I believe that 5 individuals form a good team size to effectively get things done. The background of each member also happens to strike an interesting, diverse and good balance of opinions and influences both from within Novell employees as well as from the non-Novell employees in the community. This is clearly very healthy and can only lead to better representation of the community's opinions.

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).

Bryen: What is important is that we ensure adequate representation of the community and that the community is heard. As the Community grows, we might have to revisit the size of the Board and consider adding adequate representation.

Henne: I also have the feeling that on the topic of Novell and openSUSE there is a big misconception. There really is no versus in that relationship. In fact the openSUSE community consist of people that support the openSUSE project and its goals. Some of those people are employed by Novell, some of them are not. So its not "corporate vs. community" but rather "community equals corporate and non-corporate". Also, the openSUSE Board isn't the dictator of this project. The project consists of many many different areas where people lead and make decisions on a daily basis. Some of those people are employed by Novell, some of them are not. So to execute control over this Board does not give you control over the openSUSE project. Just over the openSUSE Board.

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.

Henne: I think we all agree with our election officials that his was a special rule for the first election (see Board Election page. So this will not continue for future elections. There were 25 non-members eligible. How many of them voted is not public.

Bryen: The non-member voters really represented a small fraction of the electors as a whole. 25 out of 237. There were certainly mixed feelings across the board about the idea of franchising votes, but the idea was noble by the election committee to find ways to further identify potential members and increase membership. Since one of the Board's mandates is to grow the Community, I don't see the need for franchising votes in upcoming elections. By the time the next election comes along, we should have done significant work in reaching out to more new potential members.

Henne: As with any other open source project: Be there or be square! Seriously, its as simple as showing up and participate. That's one of the beauty's of free and open source projects. To contribute to our user support just subscribe to one of our mailing lists, join one of our IRC channels or login to our forum and help people as best as you can; as described here.

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.

Bryen: I think my personal story is the best example of all. Of all the members on the Board, I'm probably the least technical. I'm more of an active user than anything else. How did I get involved? I attended meetings on IRC, advocated a11y, got involved in education by forming the openSUSE Helping Hands project and as co-editor of the openSUSE-Tutorials.com web site.

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.

Pascal: I'd like to add that while a number of things are in place, we clearly have to work even further on lowering the barriers for people who are willing to contribute. Even better tools, better documentation, even more translations. As always, and as for any other FOSS project, there is always room for improvement.

Michael: I can just support Pascal's opinion that it would be beneficial for us to lower barriers and provide a clearer description in what and how everybody can contribute and present our existing tools better. Especially implement some cross-functionality like better integration of our Bugzilla and the openSUSE build service for instance.

Henne: Collaboration is our foundation. We would cease to exist if we wouldn't collaborate with everyone else in the free an open source community. Among them are, of course, also other distributions. Whether openSUSE project members hack with members of the Debian or Slackware projects on some upstream project like the Linux kernel, or that we coordinate when it comes to security issues with everyone else on vendor-sec, or that we try to consolidate tools we use like we do with Fedora on smolts.org. There are of course also the big collaboration projects we support like the Linux Standard Base or freedesktop.org. So we are collaborating heavily with other distributions already and we will continue to do so in the future.

Bryen: Generally speaking, collaboration is an integrated feature of open source, so yes, collaboration exists across the board between openSUSE and other distributions.

Pascal: I'd like to see that going even further. As one of the organizers of the FOSDEM conference, one of our primary goals there is to foster cross-pollination between projects with similar goals and domains. While difference and choice are some of the key features of FOSS (yes, I believe that having many distributions is very healthy), there are situations where working together on a few things makes sense. There isn't always a point in reinventing the wheel. Sharing development efforts and commoditizing tools for contributors is clearly something I'd like to see happening more often.

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.