openSUSE Linux seeks own direction, more autonomy from Novell

The developers behind openSUSE are drafting a new “community statement” as part of a broader effort to define a technical strategy for their project. The purpose of the community statement is to describe the kind of collaborative environment that the project wants to create as it refines its technical focus.

A year after acquiring commercial Linux vendor SUSE, Novell decided to open the popular SUSE Linux distribution and transition it to a community-driven development model. This resulted in the formation of the openSUSE project, an open source development effort that is sponsored by Novell. The project’s direction is guided by an elected board of three Novell employees and two independent community contributors.

The openSUSE project is generally aligned with Novell’s business interests, but it has asserted its autonomy on several occasions. One prominent example is the openSUSE community’s decision last year to make KDE the default desktop environment for the distribution. Novell has consistently been respectful of the community’s wishes and autonomy.

Novell’s priorities have evolved considerably over the past few years, subtly changing the nature of the company’s relationship with the openSUSE community. Novell was initially investing a lot of effort into building an enterprise Linux desktop business on top of the openSUSE technology stack, but the company is increasingly shifting the focus of its desktop Linux development to the netbook market. Novell has worked closely with Intel on the MeeGo project and has contributed a lot of software to the MeeGo netbook variant.

Novell and the openSUSE community haven’t grown apart, exactly, but it’s clear that each has developed a broad set of non-overlapping aspirations and technical interests that extend beyond their shared goals. The openSUSE project has matured and is more than just an experimental testbed for dogfooding the next enterprise SUSE release. It makes sense for the project to start defining its own goals.

The statement

The new community statement predictably articulates the kind of goals that you would expect to see from an open source project. It emphasizes the importance of inclusiveness and diversity and acknowledges the need to reduce “bureaucratic obstacles” and empower individual contributors in order to attract more involvement.

The second section of the statement, which describes individual actions that the openSUSE community wants to pursue in order to achieve its goals, is more substantive. One of the bullet points calls for the formation of an openSUSE Foundation. Other ideas include providing mentoring for new contributors and holding regular conferences and events.

The foundation concept is particularly intriguing. Foundations for open source projects are useful because they serve as a central legal entity for collecting funds, managing licensing issues, and providing vendor-neutral governance structures. The downside of creating a foundation is that it can create some administrative overhead and accounting complexities.

You can look to Fedora for an example of why foundations aren’t always desirable for a community-driven Linux distro. The Fedora community explored the possibility of creating its own non-profit foundation many years ago, but abandoned the idea due to concerns about the constraints it would introduce on how much financial and technical assistance Red Hat could supply to the Fedora project. I imagine that openSUSE and Novell would face some similar challenges if they attempted to move forward with establishing an openSUSE foundation.