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Planning for "openSUSE 2016"

By Jake Edge
December 4, 2013

The openSUSE project has hit a patch of slack time; 13.1 was recently released and 13.2 is roughly eight months out. That would be a good time for some long-term planning, at least according to Agustin Benito Bethencourt, the lead of the openSUSE team within SUSE. He put out two separate messages on the opensuse-project mailing list, both with subjects containing the phrase "openSUSE 2016"—clearly he is looking ahead a few years; he would like to see the rest of the project do the same. As might be guessed, there was a fair amount of discussion of Benito's ideas, but consensus seems a ways off.

Benito started with an overview of the current openSUSE "picture", consisting of the distribution's status vis a vis other distributions and its place in the Linux world. It is a picture of stability in terms of the number of users and contributors, and any signs of either growth or decline are fairly small. He posited that overall use of Linux on the server and desktop (separate from mobile and cloud) is growing, so that openSUSE's lack of growth could be seen as something of a wakeup call that something needs to change. He ended the lengthy note with three questions for participants about their "picture" as well as their perception of what others see when they look at openSUSE.

The argument Benito made was largely based on statistics gathered from various activities (downloads, updates, contributions, "social media", etc.). Some thread participants were not particularly moved by a statistical approach, with both Klaas Freitag and Togan Muftuoglu suggesting that focusing on the numbers is a waste of time. In addition, Muftuoglu suggested that the distribution should be a leader, rather than a follower, while Freitag thinks the problems stem from a lack of "do-ers":

I have the impression that we lost too many people who actually _do_ stuff instead of talking. The ones who are here and do stuff need more support. Not numbers, not talking, just together: Get Shit Done! Have more fun!

There also is something of an "us vs. them" conflict at the heart of the discussion. Benito leads a team of SUSE employees who work on openSUSE and some other community members are concerned about SUSE dictating the direction for openSUSE. Benito, for his part, has tried to assure everyone that he is looking for a discussion, not to dictate anything, but his tone put some off. For example, Andrew Wafaa was not pleased by the tone, particularly in a follow-up post by Benito:

The tone of your emails do not come across as participative, you come across all dictatorial - You have decided this is what you want and you are telling us to fall in line. That may not be what you intend, but that is certainly how it comes across to me - sorry for being honest.

But the SUSE openSUSE team takes care of many of the pieces required to get a release out the door. In fact, Robert Schweikert wondered whether the community without the SUSE team would be able to put together a release on an eight-month schedule—if so, what would that release look like? The question of how both the responsibility and the governing is split between the non-SUSE and SUSE contingents is an important one, he said:

Just as the openSUSE Team @ SUSE is not in a position to dictate where the community goes, neither is the community in a position to dictate what the openSUSE Team should spend it's time on. The crux of this is that this goes back to the "us and them" problem that keeps popping up. In the end that is really what has to be solved. All the other stuff are just symptoms of this very basic but difficult point.

It's not just non-SUSE folks that are not completely happy with the tone. OpenSUSE release manager Stephan "coolo" Kulow also expressed some dissatisfaction with Benito's communication style, but noted that the idea of discussing the future was a good one: "We can't just keep having release, party, release, party, ...". He referred to SUSE Engineering VP Ralf Flaxa's keynote at the openSUSE conference in July; that while "SUSE wants some things to happen within openSUSE", it also wants "openSUSE to be in openSUSE's hands" and not to dictate from on high.

Will Stephenson is concerned that creative distribution contributors have moved on to other pursuits, leaving the desktop and server distribution "scene" behind.

Like a Wild West town after a gold rush, much of the population of community innovators around Linux has moved on to hacking alternative Android ROMs like CyanogenMod, electrickery with Raspberry Pis, writing indie games in Unity, or just chasing the long tail of app store revenue, leaving a remnant population of corporate employees, graybeards and (laggard) newbies to desktop/consumer Linux - but not the people that create growth and invent novel solutions to people's problems.

He wondered if openSUSE should simply be content with the status quo or if it should try to "become an exciting and relevant place to be once again". In a follow-up message, he noted several areas where openSUSE could perhaps make itself more useful to its users: cloud, DevOps, and ARM. Those areas weren't chosen at random, but came from what SUSE highlighted in its press release for the 13.1 release. Focusing on those areas might make openSUSE an even more attractive target for investment from SUSE, he said. There was general agreement with that sentiment, but plenty of details to work out.

Meanwhile, in Benito's second "picture" message, he got more specific about some of his ideas. It was broken down into four areas: goals, an enhanced "Factory" release, targeting developers and every day end users with releases, and open governance. Each had a handful of bullet points to flesh them out, followed by five questions as a starting point for replies.

The goals he listed were largely agreeable to most, though there were quibbles. The most significant new pieces in Benito's message are the rolling, always installable Factory—a development release, like Fedora's Rawhide—and the target users, which is something openSUSE has long struggled with (not unlike other distributions). Targeting users and developers (e.g. non-open-source developers) was something that Per Jessen thought would mesh well with his company that has used openSUSE on the server and desktop for many years. Others seem less convinced of that particular focus, while still recognizing the need for one.

The tension between a rolling release and longer release cycles is one area that was brought up frequently. But it neatly solves the problem that some users need longer-term stability, while others are more interested in the latest applications and tools—often both are needed in the same companies, or even by the same users on different systems. Having both available in a single distribution would be attractive.

But, as Benito cautioned, it is important to distinguish between support and maintenance. The latter is what openSUSE provides, while support comes from an enterprise vendor (e.g. SUSE) for its distribution. Eventually, perhaps third-parties will provide support for community distributions as well, but "long-term support" is something of a misnomer for community distributions today.

The discussion continues, and has branched out to a separate development process proposal (with an accompanying interactive diagram) from Kulow on the opensuse-factory list. It is, essentially, an update to the "rings" idea from August, with newer ideas based on what has been learned in the interim.

While Benito's focus is a few years out (and what it takes to get there), Kulow's proposal is closer to hand, but they are still clearly related in some ways. To get to an always-usable Factory—thus a rolling release based on it—changes need to be made. Whether Kulow's specific ideas will prevail or not, most seem in favor of the goals. In fact, both the near and the far goals are gaining traction, though much is left to be fleshed out. The traditional Linux distribution model is under lots of pressures from multiple directions and it will be interesting to see where that leads for openSUSE and others as well.

Comments (7 posted)

Brief items

Distribution quotes of the week

When people ask me to describe Fedora's niche, I tend to say that we make a prototype of something that could be a really great operating system a year later. But we never stop and turn it into a really great operating system: instead we introduce another dozen shiny things that aren't quite finished yet and turn out another prototype. We never build a Toyota Corolla, we're perpetually building motor show prototypes - something with all sorts of shiny amazing features that isn't really intended to work satisfactorily in the real world. We're not interested in doing the last 20% of boring work to turn our super-exciting prototype into something Joe Normal will drive to work every day: we just want to keep building more super-exciting prototypes.

...

*but*, I'm not saying that's actually what we should do. I quite like building exciting prototypes. Building Corollas probably ain't as much fun.

-- Adam Williamson

We should recognise that it is inevitable that efforts to improve the atmosphere in our communication fora will encounter pushback from the very people who are most troublesome. When that happens, there is no need for us all to reply to explain how we disagree, and there is not much point doing so. Enough people seem to have made the community's overall feeling known, and we can stop now.
-- Ian Jackson

For reasons I've never quite understood the openSUSE distribution has always held an unusual place in my mind. Were someone to ask me about the most popular and user-friendly distributions I'd readily talk about Fedora, Ubuntu, Mint, Mageia and Debian. Chances are the openSUSE distribution would completely slip my mind. However, if someone were to specifically ask me for my opinion of openSUSE I would happily and heartily recommend the distribution. I don't know why openSUSE, as much as I respect it, doesn't stand out more in my thoughts. Perhaps the openSUSE project just doesn't attract as much news coverage as other open source projects.
-- Jesse Smith (Distrowatch review)

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