Lately there was some confusion regarding our communication. We, at the openSUSE Team@SUSE are deeply aware that our communication needs to be improved. So in the hope to make everything clear again, here is the summary to clear up what is really going on and what was not happening.

Long story short:

• There WILL be openSUSE 13.2 in November 2014
• 13.2 WILL have security and maintenance support provided by SUSE
• We WILL have coolo as release manager for 13.2
• SUSE is NOT decreasing manpower put into openSUSE
• Everybody from the community is welcome and encouraged to be involved with, and if they want to, take over some parts of the release process and we will support you the best we can in doing that

Now for the long story.

Our team and only our team – openSUSE@SUSE – is going to work on improving ‘tooling’ side of the openSUSE project until August. These changes will benefit openSUSE by making it easier to produce better releases in the future.

Nothing changes for the rest of SUSE. SUSE is not abandoning openSUSE. The rest of SUSE will still do the same things they were doing until now and continue to keep openSUSE awesome. This includes Maintenance, Security, Infrastructure, and many other teams besides the openSUSE Team at SUSE who actively support the openSUSE project.

What is our plan?

Our plan is to make sure that future openSUSE releases are easier for everyone to produce. As we grow we could keep putting in more and more full-time release managers (if we find them somewhere), but this approach is probably unsustainable and, more importantly, goes against our desire to empower the community to do more as part of openSUSE.

Therefore, we decided to improve our tools to ensure that making a release is much more straightforward and reliable and we can reduce and distribute the workload needed for integration and release. To make this happen we need time and everyone from the team to work on adapting the tooling side. We also would welcome volunteers to help us with tools and with the following release(s).

With the release date now set in November (mirroring roadmap for 13.1), first milestone should be released in May. That is a perfect oportunity to go to openSUSE Conference in Croatia where we can meet up, gather volunteers to help and discuss how to work. Remember that openSUSE Travel Support is in place to sponsor everyone who needs financial help to get to the event.

Hopefully now we cleared things up a little and we are really sorry again for our poor communication – We’re going to work on it.

Your truely confused openSUSE Team