OpenSUSE adopts a new code of conduct
OpenSUSE adopts a new code of conduct
Posted Apr 9, 2022 14:41 UTC (Sat) by Lurchi (guest, #38509)In reply to: OpenSUSE adopts a new code of conduct by pebolle
Parent article: OpenSUSE adopts a new code of conduct
Although openSUSE provides a very fine Linux desktop distrubution, whose KDE offering is definitely the best there is (not bolted on like Kubuntu or Neon), the "market" is somewhere else, i.e. in the data center.
IMHO the only part where (open)SUSE lacks is good press. Unfortunately it is much harder to get good news coverage when you provide a solid release several times a week (Tumbleweed) instead of two times a year.
Posted Apr 13, 2022 0:27 UTC (Wed)
by pebolle (guest, #35204)
[Link] (22 responses)
I couldn't find any information on market share or likewise in that link.
A bit of searching told me that MSFT's revenue will be approaching 200B in its fiscal year ending in 2022. SUSE's numbers are harder to get, but its last quarter's revenue was apparently 155M. Not even 1% of MSFT's revenue.
My "rather small" for SUSE's market share still looks correct.
Posted Apr 23, 2022 10:47 UTC (Sat)
by jospoortvliet (guest, #33164)
[Link] (21 responses)
There are really only two relevant Linux distribution businesses, Red Hat and Suse. Deb based distro's are irrelevant from a revenue/business point of view. Last time I saw reliable numbers, RH had about twice the market share of SUSE, between them they have about 90% of all commercial deployments. I'm sure things have moved a few percent in one direction or another but I doubt the big picture has changed at all.
Posted Apr 25, 2022 19:10 UTC (Mon)
by pebolle (guest, #35204)
[Link] (20 responses)
My concern is the pretty obvious issue that people working on Free Software have managed to split their rather small market share into ever smaller, incompatible rounding errors. Instead of confronting that issue some people choose to spend their time on creating third rate legalese.
No goalposts were moved stating that concern.
Posted Apr 25, 2022 19:54 UTC (Mon)
by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946)
[Link] (19 responses)
You appear to be under the impression that people working on drafting code of conduct can choose to spend their time to increase the marketshare of the distribution. Marketshare isn't necessarily a goal that everyone working on a community distribution is hoping to increase and it isn't obvious that have clear communication on what type of conduct is expected in a community distribution is antithetical to that goal. It also assumes a top down resource allocation strategy where individuals can be told to work on a single central goal. What is far more likely is all that volunteer resources aren't fungible in this way. These are very different skills and people can choose to spend their volunteer time however they want. You might as well as be complaining that people working on a distribution wallpaper aren't fixing your pet package manager bugs.
Posted Apr 25, 2022 21:01 UTC (Mon)
by pebolle (guest, #35204)
[Link] (18 responses)
Correct.
> Marketshare isn't necessarily a goal that everyone working on a community distribution is hoping to increase [...]
If you're into Free Software that's certainly a goal. And even for those that are not, what's the point of being some niche product? Purity?
> It also assumes a top down resource allocation strategy where individuals can be told to work on a single central goal.
No, it doesn't. It's merely pointing out that busywork is what it is: a waste of time.
Posted Apr 25, 2022 21:57 UTC (Mon)
by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946)
[Link] (13 responses)
No it is certainly not a goal for everyone. Anyone can develop free and open source software for a large variety of reasons besides marketshare. Maybe it is a hobby, maybe they are just scratching their own itch, who knows. Most free and open source projects I suspect have marketshare not in their mind at all.
> No, it doesn't. It's merely pointing out that busywork is what it is: a waste of time.
Yes it does because otherwise you have to agree you can't just tell volunteers what to do. What is busywork for you is interesting and engaging work for others. Calling what others considers to be important as busywork will get you ignored.
Posted Apr 26, 2022 16:10 UTC (Tue)
by pebolle (guest, #35204)
[Link] (12 responses)
Whatever the motivations of individual developers are, the goals of the Free Software movement are crystal clear. And this is an issue where open source and free software actually can't be lumped together: "For the Open Source movement, non-free software is a suboptimal solution. For the Free Software movement, non-free software is a social problem and free software is the solution."
How does this not translate to a 100% marketshare if you're into free software?
Posted Apr 26, 2022 18:25 UTC (Tue)
by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239)
[Link] (7 responses)
Posted Apr 26, 2022 18:45 UTC (Tue)
by pebolle (guest, #35204)
[Link] (6 responses)
"Your project seeks to solve a social problem. Its strategy to do so might even work. However, your project doesn't have a Code of Conduct. This means large parts of the population are dissuaded from involvement. Therefore I rather not have your project try to solve that problem, however effective it may be."
Posted Apr 26, 2022 18:48 UTC (Tue)
by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784)
[Link]
Posted Apr 26, 2022 19:09 UTC (Tue)
by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239)
[Link] (4 responses)
Posted Apr 26, 2022 19:59 UTC (Tue)
by pebolle (guest, #35204)
[Link] (3 responses)
The social problem that free software seeks to solve is non-free software. Whoever solves it - Amish housewives, Nordic fishermen, Thai monks, Afrikaner farmers, Detroit choir boys - is immaterial to that movement.
Posted Apr 26, 2022 20:00 UTC (Tue)
by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Apr 26, 2022 20:25 UTC (Tue)
by pebolle (guest, #35204)
[Link] (1 responses)
How do these Mormon youth and Iranian girls make it impossible for most people to feed starving people or exercise their freedom to use software?
Posted Apr 26, 2022 20:30 UTC (Tue)
by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239)
[Link]
Posted Apr 26, 2022 18:35 UTC (Tue)
by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946)
[Link] (3 responses)
It's fine for you to subscribe all the way to this ideology and believe this follows but you must recognize that plenty of software gets produced by people who don't subscribe to this "movement" and this includes major contributors within several GNU projects, often funded by the same companies that produce a lot of proprietary software. So making the assumption that what they are working on, often voluntarily, is "busy work" because you don't see the connection between what they are working on and marketshare is obnoxious.
Posted Apr 26, 2022 19:13 UTC (Tue)
by pebolle (guest, #35204)
[Link] (2 responses)
If distributions do not strive any more to make free software or open source - pick your favourite - ubiquitous they should be clear about that. I suggest "Freetime Linux OS", "openHOBBY", "Uvebeenfooled" and "Debate, The Universal debating society".
Posted Apr 26, 2022 19:42 UTC (Tue)
by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946)
[Link]
Declaring it "busy work" and "third rate legalese" goes far beyond raising doubts.
> If distributions do not strive any more to make free software or open source
They do make plenty of software without necessarily subscribing to your ideology on marketshare. They also do plenty of other related work including artwork, translations, documentation, communication, marketing, infrastructure management and so forth.
Posted Apr 27, 2022 9:18 UTC (Wed)
by kleptog (subscriber, #1183)
[Link]
The number of people working on free/open source software is in the millions, maybe even hundreds of millions. The number of people ascribing to any kind of Free/Open Source software *movement* is tiny. Linux distributions generally don't ascribe to any particular movement. Each distribution has its own goals, just as any organisation has its own goals.
And even if you as a user use any particular distribution, that doesn't mean you ascribe or even like the goals of the distribution you are using. Debian is driven by its Social Contract. It promises to provide software according to its own guidelines. At no point does it say it is promoting any particular movement. OpenSUSE has it's own goals. There is no deception: people don't use a Linux to be part of some kind of movement. They do it because it helps them in some way.
What you are suggesting is about as absurd as suggesting that anyone drinking coffee is part of a Coffee Drinking Movement, or that anyone driving a car is part of a Car Driving Movement. People have their own reasons for doing things.
Posted Apr 26, 2022 6:46 UTC (Tue)
by flussence (guest, #85566)
[Link] (2 responses)
https://lwn.net/Articles/667610/ is a really fitting response to that, especially in this context.
Posted Apr 26, 2022 15:50 UTC (Tue)
by pebolle (guest, #35204)
[Link] (1 responses)
"The goal of GNU was to give users freedom, not just to be popular." So the "bad decisions" he warns about in that quote are probably things like allowing proprietary extensions, reuse in proprietary programs etc. To get more popular is not enough reason for those sort of things: he only endorses them when they are in the strategic interest of free software.
But the utopia he advocates clearly involves a 100% marketshare of free software.
Posted May 5, 2022 21:54 UTC (Thu)
by flussence (guest, #85566)
[Link]
People making a career out of throwing rocks and gatekeeping is a strong signal too, but not the one they think it is.
Posted Apr 26, 2022 21:40 UTC (Tue)
by timon (subscriber, #152974)
[Link]
> If you're into Free Software that's certainly a goal. [...]
This reminds me of a piece of GNU philosophy that's relevant here:
> It is misleading to describe the users of free software, or the software users in general, as a “market.”
OpenSUSE adopts a new code of conduct
OpenSUSE adopts a new code of conduct
OpenSUSE adopts a new code of conduct
OpenSUSE adopts a new code of conduct
OpenSUSE adopts a new code of conduct
OpenSUSE adopts a new code of conduct
OpenSUSE adopts a new code of conduct
OpenSUSE adopts a new code of conduct
OpenSUSE adopts a new code of conduct
OpenSUSE adopts a new code of conduct
OpenSUSE adopts a new code of conduct
OpenSUSE adopts a new code of conduct
OpenSUSE adopts a new code of conduct
OpenSUSE adopts a new code of conduct
OpenSUSE adopts a new code of conduct
OpenSUSE adopts a new code of conduct
OpenSUSE adopts a new code of conduct
OpenSUSE adopts a new code of conduct
OpenSUSE adopts a new code of conduct
OpenSUSE adopts a new code of conduct
OpenSUSE adopts a new code of conduct
OpenSUSE adopts a new code of conduct
100% market share?
> [...]
> But the free software movement is a social movement, not a business, and the success it aims for is not a market success. We are trying to serve the public by giving it freedom—not competing to draw business away from a rival. To equate this campaign for freedom to a business's efforts for mere success is to deny the importance of freedom and legitimize proprietary software.