Pascal et al, I thought I would share an offlist email I recieved back in September from the Community Developement Manager of another distribution as it is quite appropriate, as the parent company created an open source distro that they base the commercial offerings on. You can guess which one.
----------------------- "Keep pushing like this. It took us a *long* time -- 18 months -- to build the necessary infrastructure for participation around <distro>. openSuSE will succeed only if you keep calling questions like this. Honestly, it's largely a question of gaining experience. See, here's the thing: <Company>, despite being good at picking packages and building distros, was *not* initially good at shaping a community. It took time and experience to make progress with <distro>. It'll take openSuSE the same thing -- but also pressure from folks like you. OpenSuSE is good for everyone. Keep working on them. :) <name witheld as it was offlist> ------- So even if we can expect that it will take similar time, it does require efforts like Pascal describes and won't just happen by itself by waiting. Peter 'Pflodo' Flodin.
