Summary: Status update about people who help SUSE and Mono, not even for a salary

THE OPENSUSE project keeps going under the leadership of people like Andreas Jaeger with his Factory updates and Jos whom he instructs to help organise the community (volunteers) by attending conferences, blogging, etc. He has just returned from the Desktop Summit. It's about networking.

Those who have kept track of OpenSUSE over the years will know that there has been a considerable decline. It also seems like several key members left silently or at least quietly. We just don't hear anything from there or about them anymore. Given the recent SUSE-Microsoft deal, it is not likely that the project will manage to recruit many new members, either.

SUSE now depends on some funding from Microsoft, which is funny because Google et al. too spent money on this project (e.g. GSoC and SaX). From the latter link:

3. Tried porting to openSUSE 11.3 ( Testers Required)

They are looking for volunteers to do their SUSE testing. This is what would essentially help Microsoft sell SLE* at the expense of free GNU/Linux distributions. Why would anyone want to do that?

One volunteer has just written about adding the patent liability which is Banshee to OpenSUSE:

A few days ago the Banshee developers have released another unstable release of Banshee, 2.1...3. I’ve submitted this version already to the Banshee:Unstable repositories and to GNOME:Apps for update in openSUSE Factory.

Well, the truth is, as Ryan keeps reminding us, Banshee is hardly being developed anymore (it is like Mono in that sense) and its lead developer just blogs about cooking, not development. He left Novell some months ago.

Given that some SUSE staff is leaving, Mono is virtually unheard of anymore, and OpenSUSE too is fading, why would anyone choose to join as a volunteer? There are communities like Fedora or Debian that are more deserving of outside contributors. ⬆