1. I think some people from the openSUSE community has perceived this first mail as a negative criticism to the project and their contributors. Cold analysis based on numbers do not provide a complete picture of the project... but provides a good one, in my opinion. I wrote the below mail/article thinking about a better future, not to revisit a past I am part of. 
2. A summary of the proposals was published in an openSUSE Team blog post. Please read it to get in context. As stated in that article, this first mail/article has as goal to share the motivations behind the later published proposals, trying to open a discussion about our current state that can lead us to agree on a picture we can use as starting point.
3. At the end of the article/mail, I proposed some questions. If you are interested in answering them (I would appreciate it), please:

• Subscribe to the openSUSE-project mailing list. Check how to do it first. 
• Make your comments as a reply of this thread.

Otherwise, in order to keep the debate centralized (for record purposes also), I will post/summarize your answers and comments also in that mailing list.

----------
 


INTRODUCTION/GOALS

• Share a picture as a starting point of discussion.
• Use the discussed picture as a reference to agree on actions we all can/want to execute. 

FIRST STEP: PIECES OF THE PUZZLE

One of the first things we did was digging into numbers that provided us information about the status of the project. Data cannot be the only source to create a complete picture, but it is helpful as first step.

• Alberto Planas talk at oSC13: openSUSE in Numbers[1]
• Alberto Planas' slides from the above talk[2]
• First openSUSE Team blog post: Numbers in openSUSE[3]
• Second openSUSE Team blog post: More on statistics[4]
• Jos post about numbers[5] 

1.- Downloads



2.- UUIDs (installations that update regularly)

• Looking at the number of machines that regularly update against openSUSE repositories (daily, weekly and monthly), we can easily conclude that the situation is very stable. The speed of growth (daily and weekly stats) or decline (monthly) is low.
• What the graph do not show is the acceleration. It has been negative (small in value) for quiet some time now.
• When looking at the architectures, we see that x86_64 is more popular than i586. This behavior is accelerating, as confirmed in the download numbers collected for 12.3
• When looking at the mediums where those installations come from, we clearly see three dominant ones: .iso (dvd version), ftp (net installs) and Live CD.
• There is a relevant detail that Alberto mentioned in his talk. More than half, almost 2/3, of openSUSE installations are not using the last version many weeks after Release date. There is also a significant amount of installations using unmaintained or Evergreen versions.

3.- Factory and Tumbleweed installations/"users"

4.- Contributors to factory and devel projects


5.- Social media and comparison with Fedora


SOLVING THE PUZZLE


ADDING CONTEXT TO THE PICTURE

YaST switched to the GPL license back in 2004, but there were still a lot of obstacles to easy contributions to the project. There was a bunch of changes in the past to improve contribution to the project, like switching from the openSUSE subversion server to GitHub, generating documentation to doc.opensuse.org or having public IRC. But we are not satisfied and do even more steps to make it easy to contribute to YaST.

The most visible action in the last year was the conversion from YCP to Ruby. We found that having a special language just for YaST made some sense in the past, but now becomes useless and makes obstacles for newcomers which must at first learn a language before they can change anything. Ruby is a well known language with a nice ecosystem around including benchmarking, profiling, debugging or testing frameworks. The latest mentioned testing framework is quite important, because good test coverage allows reducing of fear from changes. For tests we chose the well known framework RSpec, so people coming from the Ruby world know it and others find it intuitive.

Related to tests are also continuous integration that tests code after each code change and automatically sends new packages to the devel project and to Factory if needed. We make our CI node publicly visible on the openSUSE CI server, so everyone can see if build succeeded and what is the reason if it failed.

We also decided to help newcomers with a quick introductory documentation. One page recently updated to reflect the current state is about code organization which helps newcomers to orient in current YaST modules. The content is a bit terse and a minority of pages links to some old tutorials and documentation, but we take care to quickly react to questions and suggestions.

Another change is deletion of the internal YaST IRC channel and now all communication happens on the #yast Freenode channel. This change really increases the chance that you catch YaST developers on IRC. Others ways are the YaST mailing list, Bugzilla, GitHub or openSUSE feature tracker.

So let’s start hacking YaST and if you find any obstacle, contact us, so we can remove it.

Hello,

During the past two weeks we have seen ann influx of data, projects and ideas going around through the community. We have engaged in discussing some greater changes for our distribution and community in the search for higher acceptance and performance of our distribution of choice.

The comments on our mailing lists about the possible changes on the horizon make me think that there is a lot being asked of us. While many that participate in openSUSE might think that it is ok to the let the times roll with us as mere spectators, this request for change has become a wake up call for many of us. We may need to gather our strength, voice our opinion, change the status quo of our contributions. If anything, this proposals have stirred many of our minds and revived the passion that makes openSUSE a personal favorite.

Not only the request about changes and realignment have made this happen, but also events and people that participate of the openSUSE community are currently working on making a very successful event for our conference in Dubrovnik, Croatia next April.

The openSUSE Conference is a long-standing event for our members and enthusiasts to meet and gather around common goals and to promote our distribution. It is also an opportunity to showcase much of what we do on our own for the project.
I have involved my self in this organization, providing a few ideas for design and promotion. I hope that the results of this team's efforts are looked upon with gratitude, for while this is not coding, we still do a lot of our work spending countless hours to make this event a success.

Another important event happening at the moment are the openSUSE Board Elections. This time we have a few aspirants for the position running with what they can offer for the rest of the community. It surely shows a higher level of commitment to want to help the project as a whole to move forward for the future.
I humbly ask that if you have not yet cast your vote for this election, that you do so. Your favorite candidates are still waiting for your support and if you feel that this is elections process does not care for what you have to express, think again.

I say this because of the times that we are facing. Think of this because now the industry is exploring more ways that Linux can be present in a massive way for many more people than ever before. This is what has prompted our discussion about the future of openSUSE. SteamOS, for example has just launched with a promising future based on Linux. Many other distributions are now exploring going mobile or be embedded in smaller everyday devices that we will end up using.

Because of the changes in the industry is that I ask that you vote. Help the board at openSUSE hear your particular voice through votes. Let us know what you would like to see happen with openSUSE. Our candidates will thank you deeply.

Thank you!
Andy (anditosan)

For more information click here!

That is a great idea. A kids toy and a barcelona souvenir all in one! Those conform the Barcelona skyline and I just bought one for myself as a souvenir since I am moving from Barcelona at the end of the year.

I think this is a very nice and innovative idea designed in Barcelona by mitoi .

The ownCloud community released ownCloud 6 a couple of days ago. That was another big release and we want to celebrate!

Please, everybody who is interested in ownCloud, like to learn more, give feedback or just want to meet other people from the community, you are invited to show up at Coworking Space in Nuremberg, Josephsplatz 8, on december 18th, 6pm.

We will have a relaxed evening with a little discussion, maybe short demos, cakes and stuff, and fun. No heavy talks and serious faces!

We are looking forward to meeting you.

There has been some some talk recently about the Flash situation on Android 4.4. While it’s no secret that Adobe discontinued support for Flash on Android a while back, there are still a lot of folks using it on a daily basis. The Firefox for Android team consistently gets feedback about it, so it didn’t take long to find out that things were amiss on KitKat.

I looked into the problem a few weeks ago in bug 935676, and found that some reserved functions were made virtual, breaking binary compatibility. I initially wanted to find a workaround that involved injecting the missing symbols, but that seems to be a bit of a dead end. I ended up making things work by unpacking the Flash APK with apktool, and modifying libflashplayer.so with a hex editor to replace the references to the missing symbols with something else. The functions in question aren’t actually being called, so changing them to anything that exists works (I think I used pipe). It was necessary to pad each field with null characters to keep the size of the symbol table unchanged. After that I just repacked with apktool, installed, and everything seemed to work.

There is apparently an APK floating around that makes Flash work in other browsers on KitKat, but not Firefox. The above solution should allow someone to make an APK that works everywhere, so give it a shot if you are so inclined. I am not going to publish my own APK because of reasons.

This week, the openSUSE team blog is written by Agustin, talking about the proposals the team has done for openSUSE development.

A few months ago the openSUSE Team started a journey that achieved an important milestone last Tuesday, Nov 26th 2013. We have worked on creating a picture of relevant areas of the project in 2016 together with some of the actions we think should be taken during the following months to achieve it. To stop working and raise your head once in a while to analyze what is around you and setting a direction is a very good exercise.

The process we followed

The first step was working on data mining. After many hours of analysis, we identified some clear trends that helped us to establish a solid starting point to begin to work with. Once that phase was over (this is an ongoing process, in fact), we worked for a few weeks/months in trying to define that future picture interviewing several dozens of people. We refined that first attempt through several iterations, including many of those who participated in the original round and others who didn’t. Susanne Oberhauser-Hirschoff was the person who drove that process with Agustin.

We soon realized that discussing high level ideas in a community used to “Get shit done” was going to be easier if we complement them with some more down to earth proposals, specially in technical aspects. We cannot forget that, after all, openSUSE is a technical (and very pragmatic) focused community.

So, in parallel with the already mentioned refinement of the big picture, we started discussing within the team the actions needed to take to make the big picture a reality, the openSUSE development version a.k.a Enhanced/New Factory. After many hours of (sometimes never ending) discussions, we agreed on the ideas we are currently being published, together with the motivations behind them.

Another aspect we tried to bring to the discussion has been a strong dose of realism, trying to ensure that whatever we came up to was compatible with the nature of the project. We have also put focus on making sure that the initial proposal is achievable. So as part of community, we understand very well we cannot succeed alone. We need to work with you. So we just opened with the community a process analogous to what we went through within the team. It might be different in form but similar in principles and goals.

What are we going through these days?

These days the proposals are being discussed in different mailing lists. We are collecting feedback, discussing it, summarizing it, adapting the proposal to it … trying to reach agreements before defining what to do next.

What the proposal looks like?

We divided the proposal in a series of smaller proposals we are publishing in the project mailing list, where the general community topics in openSUSE are discussed, and/or factory ML, where the more technical discussions take place.

1. openSUSE 2016: taking a picture of openSUSE today
   This mail summarizes the analysis phase we went through. We have tried to provide a simple picture of openSUSE today so the following articles can be justified to some extend.
2. openSUSE 2016 picture
   This text summarizes the proposed picture for the end of 2016 (in three years). The goal is to set a direction for openSUSE


openSUSE Development Workflow

3. O Factory – Where art Thou?
   Stephan Kulow summarizes the Action Plan for the first aspect pointed in the previous picture: the new Development process (Factory).

The following articles describe in more detail some relevant (also new) elements pointed in the previous article, since they are new or modify the current process significantly. Some of the articles are in the queue to be published.

4. One of the options for staging projects
   In this mail Michal Hrusecky provides some details and examples on how the new staging projects might work in the future.
5. openQA in the new proposal
   This text, written by Ludwig Nussel, explains the principles that should drive the inclusion of openQA in the Factory development process, according with the proposed workflow.
6. Karma for all
   This mail, written by Ancor González, summarizes our ideas to include a social feature in the process to help achieving Factory goals.
7. Policies, or why it’s good to know how to change things
   The new process needs to be adaptive. Antonio Larrosa proposed a way, taking what other projects do in this regard as reference.

There might be an eighth article describing some smaller, still relevant, ideas. After publishing the “content”, we will release one last article providing a information about how to achieve these ideas, describing also our compromise in terms of effort and pointing out the challenges we perceive in the plan from the execution point of view.

We would like to invite you to the debate if you haven’t raised your opinions yet.

The time has come when The Document Foundation will elect a new Board of Directors. As you might already know, there are many good candidates. And since I clearly think I am the best of them, I am writing this to ask you to vote for me. Some of you might know me a bit already, but it is never bad to present myself.

My name is Fridrich Štrba, national of Switzerland and Slovakia, happily married with Susan since more then 12 years and father of 3 wonderful children: Patrick (9), Miriam (6) and Nathanael (3).

My story with LibreOffice started around 2004, with its predecessor, OpenOffice.org. I was just trying to contribute to libwpd which is the horse-power of our WordPerfect import and the OpenOffice.org integration was an interesting thing to contribute to. And since then, my love story with our project went through different stages, but we are still together and sometimes even happy.

I have been mentoring Google Summer of Code students since 2006 and recently I was co-responsible for several import filters for reverse-engineered formats (i.e. Visio, CorelDraw, MS Publisher). I can frankly say that my development and marketing work around the filters are a huge part of the reason why LibreOffice is called the "Swiss army knife of file-formats". We managed quite recently to bootstrap a vibrant community of filter-writers and the the amount of supported file-formats will only grow.

Between 2007 and 2013, I was highly blessed to be working on LO as my day-job, employed by Novell, then SUSE. Since September 2013, I am again a volunteer as many of you. This new-acquired independence is an advantage. I have no monetary interests of any kind in LibreOffice and, if elected, I will take decisions only and only considering the good of the project as such.

The advantage of my election would be that I am part of various native language communities. I speak several languages and can understand the aspirations of the corresponding communities. Besides that, I was part of the Membership Committee from 2010 and the last year, I was its Chairman. In this quality, I was able to push forward my vision of diverse and open and inclusive community that goes beyond personal sympathies or aversions. And this is the vision I desire to pursue if you give me your trust.

And since it is written "You don't have because you don't ask", with this message I ask you to cast your vote for me.

The time has come when The Document Foundation will elect a new Board of Directors. As you might already know, there are many good candidates. And since I clearly think I am the best of them, I am writing this to ask you to vote for me. Some of you might know me a bit already, but it is never bad to present myself.

My name is Fridrich Štrba, national of Switzerland and Slovakia, happily married with Susan since more then 12 years and father of 3 wonderful children: Patrick (9), Miriam (6) and Nathanael (3).

My story with LibreOffice started around 2004, with its predecessor, OpenOffice.org. I was just trying to contribute to libwpd which is the horse-power of our WordPerfect import and the OpenOffice.org integration was an interesting thing to contribute to. And since then, my love story with our project went through different stages, but we are still together and sometimes even happy.

I have been mentoring Google Summer of Code students since 2006 and recently I was co-responsible for several import filters for reverse-engineered formats (i.e. Visio, CorelDraw, MS Publisher). I can frankly say that my development and marketing work around the filters are a huge part of the reason why LibreOffice is called the "Swiss army knife of file-formats". We managed quite recently to bootstrap a vibrant community of filter-writers and the the amount of supported file-formats will only grow.

Between 2007 and 2013, I was highly blessed to be working on LO as my day-job, employed by Novell, then SUSE. Since September 2013, I am again a volunteer as many of you. This new-acquired independence is an advantage. I have no monetary interests of any kind in LibreOffice and, if elected, I will take decisions only and only considering the good of the project as such.

The advantage of my election would be that I am part of various native language communities. I speak several languages and can understand the aspirations of the corresponding communities. Besides that, I was part of the Membership Committee from 2010 and the last year, I was its Chairman. In this quality, I was able to push forward my vision of diverse and open and inclusive community that goes beyond personal sympathies or aversions. And this is the vision I desire to pursue if you give me your trust.

And since it is written "You don't have because you don't ask", with this message I ask you to cast your vote for me.