Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-project (265 mails)

[Martin Schlander <suse@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Den Wednesday 23 May 2007 15:28:51 skrev Cornelius Schumacher:
> Some members of the openSUSE team at Novell sat down and tried to write
> down the guiding principles of the openSUSE project. A first draft of the
> result is attached. It can also be found at
> http://en.opensuse.org/Guiding_Principles.

> Please take the current document as a draft and let us know what you think
> about it and  how it can be improved.

Let me first join the people who think it's a very good and useful idea - and 
also a good first draft.

I only have a few gripes about a section like this: 

"... create a distribution which is stable, easy to use and a complete multi 
purpose distribution for users and developers, for desktop and server use, 
for beginners and experienced users, for everybody."

I wonder if we could somehow elegantly put in some things that we _don't_ want 
to do. For example such as running great on 20 year old hardware or cloning 
MS Windows or Ubuntu. Those are the best I can think of right now, other 
suggestions for things we don't want to do are welcome. Saying we want to be 
everything to everybody, is almost the same as saying nothing. One purpose of 
the goals should be to "guide" people's expectations - to do that the goals 
must also exclude something. Maybe something like "We want to create an 
operating system with it's own identity, that has up-to-date functionality to 
run on modern computers".. or something.

Also I think some of the goals can be seen as contradictory - making an OS 
that's great for devs and grandmothers at the same time might prove 
difficult. Maybe we could balance it more by saying something like "we want 
to create a powerful, full featured OS, while making it fairly easy to use".
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