One quick comment – questions and so forth are welcome, though I may not be able to answer everything. I will be liberal in deleting anything trollish on this thread, though.

Prague openSUSE Team has recently written up the sum of areas that need improvement in openSUSE at http://en.opensuse.org/BrainStorming_Prague. We’d like to hear your comments for the issues listed there. That will definitely help us a lot to focus on the things you consider the most important ones. Thanks.

See more at How developers see openSUSE and How Can Community Influence openSUSE.

Zonker, two key areas that openSUSE needs to improve upon are in audio and video.

Pulseaudio, for better or worse, – has caused no end of problems for users. Either we need to seriously work on integrating it to the point where it works well for all users, or dump it until it does. Having users complain of exponential and sudden increases in audio volume is a lawsuit waiting to happen.

OSS video drivers for ATI especially need to hold priority. With the closed-source fglrx drivers leaving a wake of black-screen-of-death’s, the open source radeon and radeonhd drivers need to be merged and work on them accelerated. We have users with recent video cards such as the HD4850 who as of this date, still have no 3d and no exa. It’s a frustrating situation given the current work being done by AMD/ATI to release driver specs.

I’m hoping 11.2 signals the rebirth of openSUSE, I’m deeply saddened that talented and well respected people were let go. My personal opinion is that Novell in many ways are shooting themselves in the foot in terms of work done that eventually leads towards one of their key products, – SLED. Perspective is worth having sometimes.

Every company large and small will be contracting their costs and the biggest first and foremost is payroll. Let’s hope that openSUSE keeps it eye on the ball and continues steady improvement as usual.

Hey Joe,

I have taken a look at the BrainStorm page and I only agree with a few of the mentioned scenarios:

- The build process needs to be opened and more ‘Novell-independent’.

- A release cycle of 8 month instead of 6 would make sense.

- I would welcome a LTS version for releases which are based on the SLE common codebase

- It would make much sense to transfer oS into a foundation (like Wikimedia).

And please don’t forget: oS is already of the best and most user friendly linux distributions out there.

Best Regards
Marcus

Please correct me if I’m wrong but AFAIK Novell has 4000+ employees and of that “less than 100″ laid of people were ~30 openSUSE developers. So I think it is pretty fair to say that openSUSE has been hit disproportionately high although there sure enough is some fat elsewhere among those 4000+ Novell employees – PR & suits spring to mind since they aren’t good for anything anyways most of the times.

If you then also consider that Novell is still hiring Mono developers their “we are still dedicated to openSUSE” statement sounds less than just half arsed. Some of the laid off people were working for nearly a decade on SUSE and were a great link between the community and Novell. Also they were developing the base of SLE and SLE itself – considering the knowledge they gathered I doubt it will be possible to replace them.

So, considering there were just ~150 people on [open]SUSE they killed 20% of the whole workforce working on one of their core products (actually one of the handful that is not slowly dieing) which is just a shame.

Sad regards.

I’m very sadly disappointed with openSuse lately. My Linux Distro of choice for almost four years straight I’ve been with openSuse from 10.0 until 11.0. When I upgraded to 11.1 I ran into two deal-breaker bugs in the install (one was it over wrote my grub when I switched the order of the entries rendering the computer unusable the other was that after fixing the first problem, I made a new install that didn’t set up enough room in the root directory on the automated install). OpenSuse’s strengths for me were on it’s more stable than the competition. As a Gnome user I felt that openSuse should focus more on it than it did but as only 33% of the user I understood why it didn’t. After this notice of layoffs and the terrible experience with 11.1, I’m regretting having bought novell stock last year.
It seems to me that Novell seems to be opening itself up more and more for trouble. The M$ deal was bold and brought openSuse a lot of grief but I think it was the right thing to do; in the end as M$ is not a player to be ignored. And hey RH even made a deal this year too. But doing that deal burned a lot of the community, so switching the project to more community involvement at the time was an interesting move. It would take some time for the community to recover after that hit. Now at least in my case you’ve lost a user too. Where are you going with this? If Linux is the future of the company… shouldn’t that be the area least affected by layoffs?

Hi David.

Please do not forget that oS is a community focused product, so if you encounter bugs (in this case during upgrade process) you should write a bug report.

Also you can visit the MLs and Forums where you may get help on fixing that. Other Distribution (including Windows) have sort of bugs which even may lead into an unusable system state.

This should of course be no reason to retire a product.

Best Regards
Marcus

Another funny thing is that according to http://www.novell.com/news/press/novell-reports-financial-results-for-first-fiscal-quarter-2009 it says:

Novell reported $37 million of product revenue from Open Platform Solutions, of which $35 million was from Linux Platform Products, up 24% compared to the same period last year.

So it not only made the biggest part of the revenue but also was the only one that increased.

The award for the people who created this? ~20% were laid of …

I really hope the “genius” who was responsible for that decision gets fired ASAP and the laid of people get new job offers. If you want to cut fat to save money do it in some fields that are a waste of money, not in the few that still earn some.

And yes, I’m still dreaming of a better world.

I came to openSUSE very recently. As you may know, I ran Gentoo for a number of years and started using openSUSE right after the 11.0 release. I went through a rather lengthy evaluation process between Ubuntu, Fedora and openSUSE at the time. Ubuntu got the axe first because Hardy Heron was running 2.6.24, and I needed 2.6.25. Fedora 10 had 2.6.25, but didn’t see my wireless or sound. openSUSE 11.0 saw both the wireless and the sound, and to make things even better, the green background was much more pleasant than the ghastly blue that Fedora uses, or, for that matter, Ubuntu brown.

As an openSUSE user, what I want now is two things:

1. Stable KVM virtualization. Now that Red Hat has gone down the KVM path, and I think Ubuntu has too, I need to be able to run KVM on my AMD Athlon64 X2. I’ve had less than stable experience with it. Xen seems solid as a rock, but that doesn’t appear to be the way the marketplace is going. If I have to switch to Fedora to get KVM before it makes it into the official RHEL 5.4 and CentOS respin, that’s what I’ll have to do.

2. openSUSE Build Service, kiwi, and other tools for making custom derivative products need to be solid. One of the reasons … the main reason, actually … that I dropped Gentoo is that their release engineering process / team disintegrated.

So for now I am staying with openSUSE. I haven’t had any major desktop issues since the 11.0 release, which is when I started running it.

Well, Zonker had to write in favour of Novell using the most general words and not telling anything conrete about layoffs and the truth. I have highly appreciated Zonker, but this time I am sorry. There should be put out the exact number of layoffs and their names – they had been the important developers of openSUSE, hadn’t they? And the truth, I am afraid, might touch in some way the Novell-Microsoft connection. The high ends get complicated when happens success.

I think the community needs more and more detailed information about the lay offs. Just to prevent evil rumours.

Alojz:
“number of layoffs and their names”

I read somewhere that Binner (KDE Hacker) got fired.

ps.:

Maybe opensuse@conference.jabber.org is a good place to talk about it.

I was a user of opensuse from 10.2 to 11.1 and defended opensuse in forums whenever MS deal or mono was discussed.
now i cannot hold on to opensuse anymore….

Hearing about the layoff are very disturbing. I’ve been a long time advocate of the Novell platform, even though they basically lost the server end of things to being out “advertised” by M$. When they took over openSuse I really thought their days of “horrible decisions” was over. But here we go again. For Novell to layoff a significant portion of its Linux personnel, is just plain ignorant. Especially since it was the only thing left, that was still profitable. For a company to hold so much over it’s competitors in the way of technical expertise, stability, and product line… but still make such incredibly inane business decisions, is really beyond me. I find it hard to defend them, as a whole, anymore. As a developer and IT consultant for over 20 years now, I’ve gotten pretty good at seeing what technology is going to do, in the future. Novell needs to wake up. M$ is poised to have their butts handed to them, by a platform such as SLE and/or openSuse. And the state of the economy is going to help Linux’s marketability. In going forward, I worry more about those running the company, and making these decisions. Too many more like these will remove any possibility of Novell being a real tech player.

I am unsure at which point the “%20 of linux developers” became an arguable fact. It seemed born from statistical speculation. So thats a moot point to my mind. Until such time as zonker confirms those numbers.
So, whilst speculating….perhaps the community have made “employed developer cutbacks” a realistic option for Novell. The community contribute actively and aggressively. With each new release. Performing the work of hundreds of paid developers. Remember “OPEN”Suse. I would suggest a consolidation of community rather than crying on your poorly functioning multi media hotkeys….That is the way forward, the same way it began. To hear a *nix community complaining about a lack of corporate support seems a little ironic.

So as a positive contribution. ATI/AMD video support requires some focus. In reality, ATI need to step up to the plate more so than Novell. The problem exists across most distro’s. For me 10.2 and 10.3 were the most stable releases. But I have had no “roll back to previous version” issues with 11 or 11.1. Surely the current rapid hardware release cycles are a huge contributor to the problems most experience.
I too would also embrace a 9 month release cycle and more aggressive bug fixes via updates (in a perfect world).

M$ stand to let go of 1 in 20 of their global workforce. They make a damn site more than Novell do. And one could speculate that they dont really develop much at all. But they buy some nice code from time to time.

Oh yeah, then they take that nice code and sit it on top of another re-badged version of Windows 95 and you get stuck with another clunky application.

Yeah, and since Ford laid off some workers too, I’m no longer buying Ford products.

I’ve lost all respect for openSuSE, because they laid off people. It just pains me to see that lizard on my screen, knowing he’ll be laid off too.

I’m going to go to Ubuntu; at least they keep all their redundant people around whether they need them or not. I can sleep well at night knowing my distro was made layoff free, and that the software I didn’t pay a cent for came at their expense and not mine.

Zonker, I wish you’d be honest with this. Repeating official company lines doesn’t do the community any good. If you must write on the topic, write the truth, the whole (!) truth, and nothing but the truth. Or simply don’t write anything.

100 people world wide may not be much for a 4,100 people company. But 30 out of 150 openSUSE developers are 20%. That’s a whole different story.

Zonker, this article of yours is misleading. I’d even go so far as calling it outright dishonest.