Changes at openSUSE

After some confusing communications (example) the folks at SUSE have come clean on a change for the openSUSE distribution: paid SUSE staff will no longer work on creating openSUSE releases. It is claimed that the amount of work going into openSUSE is not decreasing, it is just being put into other areas. Meanwhile, the community is trying to figure out how to "release without full time paid worker bees". The current plan seems to be to put out 13.2 in November, with SUSE still providing security support thereafter.

Update: see also this note from Greg Freemyer. "The openSUSE team @ suse therefore has decided to take a 8-month period to push away from day-to-day issues and instead focus on the improvements needed in [the Open Build Service] and openQA to handle the requirements caused by the success of OBS."

Changes at openSUSE

Posted Jan 31, 2014 17:12 UTC (Fri) by hadrons123 (guest, #72126) [Link] (5 responses)

I don't use OpenSUSE. But it looks like less resources for openSUSE than before which in not a good news. By the way how is novell/attachmate doing? We never get any news on that?

Changes at openSUSE

Posted Jan 31, 2014 21:31 UTC (Fri) by niner (guest, #26151) [Link] (4 responses)

Have you actually read the linked emails? Quote:

"There is no decrease in SUSE's involvement in openSUSE! As mentioned in
Robert's mail, it's simply that the openSUSE team at SUSE is choosing to
focus on other openSUSE topics that release engineering, in order to
improve the quality of openSUSE. That includes openQA, workflow in OBS,
etc."

Changes at openSUSE

Posted Feb 1, 2014 3:06 UTC (Sat) by welinder (guest, #4699) [Link] (3 responses)

> "There is no decrease in SUSE's involvement in openSUSE! [...]"

I read that and thought "if they add any more spin to that text then Earth must stop rotating to compensate". In other words, "yeah, right".

Obviously I could be misreading the tea leaves.

M.
(I used SuSE from about version 4 up to and including, for a short time, version 12. That Gnome was just too painful to deal with.)

Changes at openSUSE

Posted Feb 1, 2014 13:29 UTC (Sat) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (2 responses)

You used *GNOME* with *SUSE* ????????????

A distribution (one of the few) that has always favoured KDE ?????????

Either you were using the wrong distro, or the wrong desktop :-)

Cheers,
Wol (who started using SuSE with 5.x, and still sometimes does)

Changes at openSUSE

Posted Feb 2, 2014 11:15 UTC (Sun) by ebassi (subscriber, #54855) [Link]

SUSE's support of GNOME has been greatly improved over the last few years; the latest stable SUSE ships with a fairly vanilla release of GNOME 3.10, and it's one of the best packagings out there, along with Fedora.

plus, SUSE is still on the GNOME Foundation's advisory board, and it's always a delight working with them.

Changes at openSUSE

Posted Feb 3, 2014 12:38 UTC (Mon) by ovitters (guest, #27950) [Link]

I prefer using GNOME on distributions which have a different focus. Mandrake+Mandriva had a very high KDE focus. Which resulted in an almost upstream GNOME experience. I thought openSUSE was the same, usually almost upstream and good quality. Don't understand that some mentioned it is very buggy. For Mageia, I noticed their download page now has GNOME first though I think KDE is checked by default (more people look at KDE than GNOME). Mageia the focus is solely based on the amount of work put into it.

Changes at openSUSE

Posted Jan 31, 2014 23:23 UTC (Fri) by joyuh (guest, #95216) [Link] (13 responses)

Who are the members of this "community" they speak of?

Why do they work for free to enrich a specific company (SUSE, which is not even one of the market leaders, Red Hat and Canonical) and improve a relatively obscure commercial distribution, rather than contributing to an open project like Debian?

Changes at openSUSE

Posted Jan 31, 2014 23:32 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

Because they want to should be a sufficient reason to satisfy you.

not wanting to get involved with the Debian politics is probably a common one.

not agreeing with the Debian definition of "open" is another (but related) one.

people shouldn't need 'reasons' to work on the projects that they are interested in.

Changes at openSUSE

Posted Feb 1, 2014 1:49 UTC (Sat) by imgx64 (guest, #78590) [Link] (1 responses)

Actually, SUSE is a "market leader", just not in markets you're interested in. For example, its market share is larger than Red Hat on IBM hardware (and there's a lot of money to be made there).

Changes at openSUSE

Posted Feb 1, 2014 13:32 UTC (Sat) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

Dunno figures, but it could well be the market leader in non-US markets too. I certainly found its Internationalization support for English was much better than Red Hat.

(In case that statement sounds odd, don't forget I spell things like "theatre" and "colour" ... - and we don't have letter paper over here.)

Cheers,
Wol

Changes at openSUSE

Posted Feb 1, 2014 2:22 UTC (Sat) by mrdocs (guest, #21409) [Link] (8 responses)

Well the community has been around for a long time, even when SUSE was independent pre-Novell. It is again an independent business unit of the Attachmate Group. SUSE has never been stronger. Since I have joined we have gone from about 700+ employees to close to 900.

"...a relatively obscure commercial distribution".

Go to any really large enterprise and you are probably going to find SUSE somewhere. Some examples:

Look under the hood of any Teradata EDW and it is SUSE underneath.

Some 70% of all SAP ERP systems running on Linux are SUSE.

Some 80% of Linux on Mainframe is SUSE Linux. SUSE did the orginal port of Linux to mainframe with IBM.

VMWare Esxi embeds SUSE Linux in every copy.

I could go on and on, but with those are but a few good examples.

SUSE often does not get the credit and visibilty in North America as the others do, but it is a leader and innovator in many many areas. Who ported Linux to 64 bits ? SUSE and AMD.

Disclaimer, I do work for SUSE, but before that I was a customer and then joined the community around 2005. The community is vibrant and I know SUSE does really care that the community is successful and values their participation.

SUSE has not backed away one iota, but its a reorg to make things work better for everyone _and_ give the community more control over the distro.

Changes at openSUSE

Posted Feb 1, 2014 4:34 UTC (Sat) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link] (2 responses)

"Who ported Linux to 64 bits ?"

Hmm. On Alpha, in 1995? Linus Torvalds and Jon "maddog" Hall?

Changes at openSUSE

Posted Feb 1, 2014 11:05 UTC (Sat) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

My understanding from what I've read of interviews of Jon "maddog" Hall, is that he said his part in it was that he got DEC, where he was a manager, to long-term lend an AXP machine to Linus.

Changes at openSUSE

Posted Feb 1, 2014 14:30 UTC (Sat) by niner (guest, #26151) [Link]

He obviously meant x86_64

Changes at openSUSE

Posted Feb 1, 2014 6:25 UTC (Sat) by kay (guest, #1362) [Link]

not to forget Novell Netware succesor Open Enterprise Server (OES) ...

Kay

Changes at openSUSE

Posted Feb 2, 2014 2:06 UTC (Sun) by lsl (subscriber, #86508) [Link] (2 responses)

> VMWare Esxi embeds SUSE Linux in every copy.

Can you expand on that? VMWare does ship lots of code with a Linux origin (mainly drivers I think) in ESXi but where does SUSE come in here?

Changes at openSUSE

Posted Feb 2, 2014 5:55 UTC (Sun) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

I'm not sure if the claim is that the ESXi service console is built using SuSE Studio tools or OBS. The ESXi Linux environment is pretty spartan, it's not really clear to me how it's built.

It is true that the VMware management appliance VMs are built with SuSE/Tomcat/Postgresql replacing the Windows/Tomcat/MSSQL standalone VirtualCenter software.

Changes at openSUSE

Posted Feb 10, 2014 12:00 UTC (Mon) by robbe (guest, #16131) [Link]

mrdocs is wrong on this point. ESXi does not include/build on SUSE.

Where VMware uses Linux, it will probably be SUSE, though. The most notable example being the non-Windows version of vCenter.

Changes at openSUSE

Posted Feb 3, 2014 20:09 UTC (Mon) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link]

Well, my impression at a company selling software that runs on Linux in the enterprise space is that SuSE's market presence (overall) is decreasing and has been for 6 years or so (steadily). Presence in Europe is definitely higher than in the US.

Personally I loved the distro from around 5.0 until 7-ish, and then departed for Debian (I also worked there from around 5.3 to around 6.4ish).

Changes at openSUSE

Posted Feb 1, 2014 15:33 UTC (Sat) by jke (guest, #88998) [Link]

> Why do they work for free to enrich a specific company

Your false premise is that if I work for a particular distribution then I can ONLY improve that specific distribution. There's no such restriction in any sensible distribution. If I send a patch upstream to Linus, I'm not improving my distribution. I'm improving Linux. If I send a patch to curl, I'm not improving my distribution. I'm improving curl. Or Bash, or GIMP, or Pidgin, or any of the other thousands of things that make up a distribution.

It takes a shallow, stupid, distribution to keep patches to themselves and avoid working in upstreams.

Yes there are areas that are generally specific to a particular distribution but those represent the minority of the overall work being done. Most of the work still happens upstream with participants from a plethora of different distributions and not exclusively the most popular ones.

The idea that all distributions work in isolation of each other is a bit silly.

Changes at openSUSE

Posted Feb 1, 2014 12:27 UTC (Sat) by toscalix (guest, #95313) [Link] (1 responses)

Hi,

I am Agustin Benito Bethencourt, openSUSE Team Lead at SUSE. I would like to clarify the following:

1.- SUSE has not only NOT decreased the number of SUSE employees working on openSUSE Release, but we have increased it. There is no plan to change that.

2.- We are not focusing our work in other areas. What we are doing is improving Factory, the integration phase of the openSUSE Release.

3.- Hence SUSE's compromise with the next openSUSE Releases has not changed.

If you have any further questions regarding this issue, please do not hesitate to contact me by mail or visit our booth at FOSDEM.

Agustin Benito Bethencourt
abebe@suse.com
openSUSE Team Lead at SUSE

Changes at openSUSE

Posted Feb 5, 2014 0:51 UTC (Wed) by xorbe (guest, #3165) [Link]

Thank you for that info!