In the past few days, there has been a fair amount of concern raised by the Ubuntu community about the current state and direction of their project, in particular Canonicals role in it.

As my involvement with Ubuntu has only been the occasional installation to compare it to my Linux distribution of choice, I can't pretend to fully understand the issues and their history. But even with my limited understanding I am struck by the similarities with this situation and one I saw the openSUSE community go through a few years ago.

2009-2010 was an in interesting time for the openSUSE project. We were 'finding out feet' as a community, and relations with our sponsor Novell were not as great as they could have been. There was definitely a feeling among some of the community that Novell were holding them back, imposing "bureaucratic obstacles" and making it hard for individual contributors to meaningfully contribute to the project.

Sound familiar? To me these sound a lot like the recent concerns being levelled at Canonical by some of the Ubuntu community.

As 2010 rolled on, there was lots of talk in the openSUSE community of forming a Foundation, or finding other ways for the community to assert its autonomy from Novell. Then November hit and Novell found itself purchased by the Attachmate Group, and the announcement was made that SUSE would be its own business unit under the new owners.
I watched anxiously, wondering what the change would bring, would Attachmate/SUSE give openSUSE the freedoms the community wanted, or tighten the reins ala Canonical?

Things muddled along for a bit, but for me it was at openSUSE Conference 2011 when I began to realise change had begun. Michael Miller gave a great presentation that laid out that SUSE understood the importance of openSUSE, how they would work with us, but also how we were independent and free to do our 'own thing'.

Suddenly instead of community independence being seen as a negative, we were being told clearly that it's a positive, a driver for innovation, some of which SUSE would then adopt, others perhaps not, but either way we had their support.

Words are cheap, but actions were already under way. Community concerns had been listened to, and quietly, without any fanfare, things changed.

  • openSUSE moved all of its source to GitHub which has made it trivial for new contributors to start contributing code to the projects source trees, just as it was already possible for anyone to contribute packages through the Open Build Service
  • Community members were empowered and encouraged to take greater part in core parts of the distribution. Teams like openSUSE's KDE and GNOME teams are now 'community led', with SUSE employees involved as equal community members, rather than assigned employees-in-charge
  • The Travel Support Programme was launched, funded by SUSE but administered by the community, in order to make it easier for community members to attend FOSS events and hackathons, to help spread the word about openSUSE, and gain new ideas on how to improve the project.
  • SUSE has started hosting Hackathons, such as the recent Bug Fixing and Marketing/Artwork events, bringing community members together both face-to-face and remotely for intense, productive 'sprints' to help make openSUSE releases better.
  • And perhaps the best example has been SUSE's decision to sponsor openSUSE Conference 2013 in Greece, a conference which, for the first time, will be organised solely by community members (our 'Greekos')

So when I consider all this and weigh it against the current concerns of the Ubuntu community, I cant help be think that perhaps Canonical could learn a thing or two from SUSE. If not, I suspect many Ubuntu users may find themselves moving on to projects like openSUSE, which come to think of it, wouldn't be a bad thing at all ;-)