Archive:Board meeting 2022-04-11

Minutes of openSUSE Board Meeting Minutes 2022-04-11

Attendees: Axel, Neal, Gerald, Gertjan (Knurpht), Syds, Maurizio, Stefan Behlert, Lubos Kocman, Doug DeMaio Guests: Luna, Emily Excused: Atilla Minutes: Neal

Status on Open Letter

Axel prepared email to send, ran into LibreOffice bug, waiting on a few folks and will send tomorrow.

Adaptive Linux Platform (SLE-next)

Stefan: SUSE wishes to inform openSUSE about the next SUSE Linux Enterprise code stream. It's currently codenamed ALP to indicate significant rethinking of the future of SUSE Linux Enterprise. Notably, the biggest change is the entire codebase will be developed in the open in the Open Build Service. Members will be able to contribute and SUSE engineering will be developing it entirely in the open (modulo embargoed changes and sensitive security things). The goal is to make a true open SUSE Linux Enterprise platform.

The plan is to launch the next SLE platform in fall 2023, which is ambitious, but we're hopeful.

The change of the architecture leads to a change from products to solutions. The host OS will generally be small, while layered stuff supporting workloads will lifecycle separately. This will allow different aspects of the system to lifecycle accordingly.

The development has started already and a working ALP is functional and useful for use and contribution. There will not be an alpha/beta release, and instead it will be continuously developed and maintained in OBS running up to the formal release. The goal is to change everything, it will not be like how things were in the past, and hopefully it will be better than ever before.

Lubos: Has started getting feedback about the future of desktop in SLE.

Syds: Is it immutable for the host OS?

Stefan: It depends on what the customers want to set up, probably. One advantage of what we're doing is that we can start looking at how to support combinations in supported/unsupported content well. Believes in the Linux desktop. :)

Is not sure how this affects existing products yet. Most likely the current plan will continue?

Lubos: Idea is Leap 15.5 will be be based on SLE 15.5, maybe next Leap will be based on ALP, depending on how things go.

Neal: We can reuse the Leap feature process for coordinating ALP development.

Lubos: People might be afraid of the new thing, so Leap Micro might be a nice bridge between Leap 15 and ALP.

Stefan: Not sure which OBS project it is yet.

Maurizio: How is this going to work from a contributor point of view?

Stefan: Not sure. Frederic Crozat and Jiří Šrain will know better i think.

Neal: Is very excited about this and wants to get more hands-on with it.

Gerald: It's very important that we will be able to offer a continuity of experience and not scare off regular users.

Lubos: We should track work on providing an upgrade path.

Gerald: In many ways, this is an evolution of what we've done in SUSE Linux over the decades. We've always tried to open things up more and making it more participatory.

Stefan: There may be a bit of a bump because the x86_64 microarchitecture level is planned to be bumped to x86_64-v3 (6th generation Intel, 1st generation AMD Ryzen).

Latam Event

Two persons from Brasil, joined the Thursday Weekly meeting last week (7th April 2022) and wanted to create an openSUSE event in Latin America

Emily: Idea around it is to grow the mindshare and presence of openSUSE beyond Europe. Lubos: Also would be good to grow SUSE mindshare there for usage and employee base.

Freewear

Freewear collects some % of the money for openSUSE things bought for the openSUSE Project, where to put the money?

Neal: We could put the money into the fund for supporting contributors to travel for openSUSE? Axel: We could donate to friendly projects (e.g. Fedora, KDE, etc.). Doug: It could also go into funding giveaways for contributor swag.

We'll figure out what to do with this at some point, the preference is to donate to projects, but we trust Doug to come up with a good solution.