Challenges in 2015

Champagne Showers by Merlin2525You might have noticed that I decided to run for the openSUSE Board. And as we shortly have a new year and everybody is evaluating the past and the future, I will do the similar, mainly focusing on few of the challenges that I see laying in front of the openSUSE Board in 2015.

SUSE/openSUSE relation

I heard it being mentioned several times over and over. SUSE and openSUSE are two different things. But at the same time, they are pretty close. Close enough to be confusing. We have similar yet slightly distinct branding. Similar yet slightly distinct name and we have a clear overlap in terms of contributors. For people inside the project, it is easy to distinguish the entities. For people outside, not so much.

There was a nice talk by Zvezdana and Kent on openSUSE Conference about our branding. Part of the talk and one thing that people notice about openSUSE and SUSE is our logo. SUSE keeps updating it and it’s getting different over the time. On the other hand openSUSE logo stays the same. One open question from the talk was how to fix it. Either start diverging with our branding or get closer together. I know this is mainly question for the artwork team, but as will affect all of us, there should be broad discussion and as it involves logo and trademark, there need to be SUSE and board involved.

Apart from the logo/branding, there is also a technical aspect of the relation. We all say that openSUSE is the technical upstream of SLE. Things are being developed and tested in openSUSE and then adopted by SLE. But sometimes it is vice versa, as SUSE needs to develop some feature for SLE or one of it’s service packs and push it there. And as SLE and openSUSE schedules are unrelated, sometimes they can’t push it in openSUSE first. Even after the release openSUSE and SLE starts diverging and come together once in five years or so when it is a time to release a new SLE. It’s kinda shame, that we can’t help each other more often. It would be great to get SLE and openSUSE closer together in mutually beneficial way. But this is not going to be an easy nor fast discussion, again involving quite some teams/people. And I believe the Board should act as mediator/initiator in this discussion as well.

openSUSE Release

While talking about the release, we still have officially 8 months release cycle (or more precisely whenever coolo says so release cycle). It would be nice to have some decision that since we release two last releases after 12 months, maybe we are switching to one year release cycle. Or decide to stick with eight months. Or go for something completely different. But again, the point is, this is the hard discussion to have, but I beleive we have to start it and have a clear outcome of it, so people can kinda count on it. There is not much for board to do in this apart from calming heated discussion, but maybe it would make a sense to delay start of this discussion after the SLE openSUSE relation discussion (which probably needs to have board involved) and take the results of it into account. I personally think it definitely makes sense to at least align SLE and openSUSE schedules a little bit…

Conference

Last year we had a great conference in Dubrovnik. It was an awesome place, quite some interesting discussions as every year, but unfortunately not that many people. I liked it and hats off to the organizers, but we need to figure out what went wrong and why not so many people showed up in person. I hope for the best in Hague and that this years conference will see again plenty of people, but although the last conference was great, loosing people attending our most important event – openSUSE Conference – was also kinda disturbing… So we will see what happens in the Hague.

The rest

I’m sure there will be other challenges as well. In fact, even I would like more stuff to happen in the current year. But for those things, I don’t need a board, I can do or at least start them myself. Those few that I just mentioned are only those that I see as important, in need of some involvement from the board and being not yet entirely solved from the last year. Hopefully all of them will be solved in next year and we will have different problems, like how to find even the most subtle bugs as all other ones are solved and how to change the world for the better and whether is there still anything left to improve after everything we did in 2015 🙂