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By Jonathan Corbet
June 6, 2019
In mid-May, LWN reported on the
discussions in the openSUSE project over whether a separation from SUSE
would be a good move. It would appear that this issue has
been resolved and that openSUSE will be setting up a foundation as its new
home independent of the SUSE corporation. But now the community has been
overtaken by a new, related discussion that demonstrates a characteristic
of free-software projects: the hardest issues are usually related to
naming.
Creating a foundation
At the 2019
openSUSE Conference, the openSUSE board discussed governance options at
length. There will evidently be an official statement on its conclusions
in the near future, but that has not been posted as of this writing.
It would appear, though, that the board chose a foundation structure over
the other
options. A German registered
association (e. V.) would have been easier to set up than a
foundation, but an association has weaker restrictions so it could
potentially shift its focus away from the openSUSE mission.
Joining another umbrella group seemingly lacked appeal from the beginning,
as did the option of doing nothing and leaving things as they are now.
The stated purpose of the foundation is to make it easier for openSUSE to
accept donations and manage its own finances — things that are hard for the
project to do now. The foundation structure, in particular, allows the
project to enshrine its core objectives (such as support for free software)
into the DNA of the organization, making it hard to divert the foundation toward some
other goal. A foundation also allows openSUSE to retain its current
governing board and membership structure.
In the absence of an official statement from the board, details on the
decision and the reasoning behind it can be had by watching this YouTube
video of a question-and-answer session with the board at the openSUSE
Conference.
One motivation for the change that wasn’t highlighted in the board session, but
which was an undercurrent in the discussions leading up to it, is a desire
for more independence from SUSE in general driven by concerns about what
the company might do in the future. Such worries are not entirely irrational,
even though by all accounts SUSE management is fully supportive of openSUSE
now. A company’s attitude can change quickly even in the absence of
external events like a change of ownership. If SUSE were to be sold yet
again, the new owners could take a rather dimmer view of the openSUSE
project.
Time for a new name?
Such worries seem to be a key driver of the next possible change for the
project: as initially proposed by
Stasiek Michalski, the newly independent openSUSE project might well change
its name, its logo, or both. It goes without saying, though, that there is
no consensus behind any such change at this early stage.
The primary motivation for a name change is, as described
by openSUSE board chair Richard Brown, trademarks. Since “openSUSE”
contains “SUSE”, the company will have to retain a significant amount of
control over what the foundation can do with its own name, which
“makes such things rather complicated“. He later added:
Even without a legal entity, openSUSE already operates with
significant constraints around the use of its name, which you can
see in our
Trademark Policy and the examples I gave in my post.
If openSUSE keeps its current name, I would be absolutely shocked
if we manage the form the Foundation under the name “openSUSE”
without significant additional restrictions atop of the status quo.
One other consequence of the current trademark situation, Brown said, is
that the
openSUSE board spends a significant amount of its time dealing with
trademark issues, to the detriment of the rest of the project. In the
future, he
said, trademark restrictions could limit how the project could market
itself, “and Marketing is an area which I think everyone would say we
should be expanding upon, not limiting ourselves“. For these
reasons, Brown is in favor of picking a new name as the new foundation is
created.
Others agreed, and supplied some additional reasons; Alberto
Planas Domingue, for example, argued that a new
name would allow the project to cast off an (in his view) reputation as a
“traditional distribution” and highlight the interesting new
technology that it is built around now. Jim Henderson added that
there is a fair amount of confusion among users about the distinction
between the SUSE Linux
Enterprise and openSUSE distributions; a name change could help to clear
that up.
Unsurprisingly, others feel that a name change would be a bad idea. Board
member Simon Lees, for example, pointed
out that SUSE has given the board “quite some guarantee”
that the project would be able to use the openSUSE name for as long as it
needs to. Should the relationship with the company deteriorate, the project
will have time to consider a name change, and the additional press that
would result from such a situation would be helpful in establishing the new
name.
Others agreed with that position and added to it. Sarah Julia Kriesch argued
that openSUSE is a well-known name that should not be discarded without a
reason. Ancor Gonzalez Sosa said
that a name change now would give the impression of a bad breakup with
SUSE, which is not the case. Michal Kubecek worried that a
renamed openSUSE would become “Yet Another Linux
Distribution“; the Fedora
project, he said, suffered from its name change. Marcus Meissner said that a
name change would cause the distribution to lose many of its users:
“The brand is the most important part on keeping the distribution
alive. Throwing it away means throwing the distribution away,
sorry.” Robert Schweikert said
that the project lacks the funding to make a name change stick, and said
that such a change is unnecessary if the primary objective of the
foundation really is to make financial matters easier to deal with.
No consensus
The discussion has been remarkably civil for what is an inherently
controversial topic — openSUSE seems to be made up of a lot of pleasant and
respectful people. Hopefully that atmosphere will sustain itself as the
discussion drags out and eventually comes to a vote. There is no sign of
an emerging consensus at this point; a decision might eventually have to be
made without one. However it happens, it is likely to take time, and the
project is likely to continue to use the openSUSE name for years even if a
name change happens. As Brown put
it:
If we change the name, I’d expect the “
Foundation” would have some agreement with SUSE to continue using
the openSUSE Marks for the purposes of a smooth transition.
This is the kind of decision that may take weeks or months to agree
upon, but could take years to fully implement.
For what it’s worth, changing the logo seems to be rather less
controversial — though some community members are adamant that the green
color should be retained. A separate discussion, along with a possible
replacement, can be found on this issue-tracker
page.
One interesting aspect of this discussion is that at no point has anybody
suggested a replacement name; if the people behind the proposal have one in
mind, they are keeping it to themselves for now. That would be wise; a
decision like this is hard enough without the additional complication of
picking a new name at the same time. Should it come to a name change,
though, expect another thread as the community works out what the new name
should be.
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