So word from the new Big Cheese, Herr Braukmann, is openSUSE is vital to SUSE – newsflash, this isn’t new or surprising ;-) In the same breath SUSE is vital for openSUSE, again nothing new here. One problem though, there are many elements that still see them as void of each other and don’t trust or believe in the community. Hopefully with the re-organisation this will start to change.
One thing that SUSE has marketed for a long time is that it has the highest number of ISV software certified to run on their platform. Great! One question though – how as an openSUSE user can we help/benefit from this huge number of applications? Well most of the time if you want to use that software you have to build it from source with somewhat outdated documentation, and for the rest of the time you just plain can’t use it as they don’t make things easy.
Yeah, I know life would be boring if it was easy. But does it need to be this difficult?! In a word – NO. Let’s not forget, we have the spiffy knock your socks off Open Build Service, so why not get them built in there and share the love for all?
Well the ISV may not want freeloaders using their products, they want money so naturally want you to buy the product. That washes for some ISVs, but not all. There are many that have a Community Edition or similar, which is ideal for us.
Why would openSUSE users want any of that bloated corporate rubbish? Well I would like easy access to some of it for testing and maybe even using. Officially SLES is my employer’s preferred distro, so being able to quickly and easily knock up a test instance would be great. Also it works to the ISV’s advantage, they get exposure. Most geeks are curious, and if they professionally have to deal with Linux they tend to be very curious. If a new product comes out that plays buzzword bingo, a CTO or similar will want the new shiny, so as responsible geeks it’s our duty to be able to slap the suit back down and tell him the real truth about the product.
I would love to see packages from the likes of Alfresco, OpenBravo, Zimbra etc. available for us to use and test. So any chance some of the SUSE suits that deal with ISVs can help out? Many of these products leverage Tomcat, and my packaging skills with the cat aren’t that good (actually almost non-existant :-) ).
This is an area where we lack and one of our competitors spanks us – Ubuntu has a partner repository that enables many of these types of productsto be installed by users. We must match this, and then once we have matched it we must better it. We don’t want to be spanked, we want to spank others!! (the spanking thing worked in my head, so I’m going with it ![:-)][2] )
So any chance of any help from anyone?!