SUSE asks openSUSE to consider name change

SUSE has, in a somewhat clumsy fashion, asked openSUSE to consider rebranding to clear up confusion over the relationship between SUSE the company and openSUSE as a community project. That, in turn, has opened conversations about revising openSUSE governance and more. So far, there is no concrete proposal to consider, no timeline, or even a process for the community and company to follow to make any decisions.

The openSUSE name came about after Novell acquired SUSE, and then renamed SUSE Linux to openSUSE in 2006, at the same time it introduced SUSE Linux Enterprise products. The openSUSE project followed with a board appointed by SUSE in 2007. Since the inception of the openSUSE board, its chair has been appointed by the corporate entity behind SUSE, which has changed several times along the way, with the other seats elected by members of the openSUSE project. The project has always been "sponsored by" the corporate entity without a independent organization of its own to hold trademarks, manage infrastructure, or to accept donations and sponsorships.

On July 7, openSUSE board member Shawn Dunn started a discussion on the project mailing list with a request from SUSE to consider rebranding the project. This was a follow-up to a talk given at the openSUSE Conference 2024 making the case that it was time to pursue a new name for the project.

The openSUSE project has had a few occasions to ponder its relationship with the SUSE mothership of late. The openSUSE board has discussed an independent foundation and governance in the past, but that has not yielded results. Project member Patrick Fitzgerald founded a separate Geeko Foundation as a UK not-for-profit to handle money for openSUSE-specific activities. In 2023, the project had a contest to select new logos that caused a ruckus in the community. The project also faced uncertainty about the future of openSUSE Leap due to SUSE's plans for a new "Adaptable Linux Platform" (ALP). An announcement in January indicates that Leap will go forward, but the episode underscores the unequal relationship between SUSE and openSUSE.

A request

The talk, co-presented by Robert Sirchia and Richard Brown, was called "We're all grown up: openSUSE is not SUSE". Both are SUSE employees, but Sirchia said he was officially speaking for SUSE while Brown was taking the community perspective and not officially representing SUSE. Each made the case that openSUSE should be rebranded.

SUSE, said Sirchia, is committed to openSUSE but concerned about the SUSE brand being diluted, because "the combined breadth of SUSE and openSUSE offerings are hard to define and defend". The blurred line between SUSE and openSUSE has become "a constant conversation" that causes distractions and detracts from the work of the company and community. Even though SUSE controls the openSUSE trademark, Sirchia made it clear that it was a request to have a conversation about rebranding—not a demand—with no specific timeline to reach a decision. But, he said, it was a conversation that should be done openly, "not something done in a backroom", and all ideas were welcome.

Brown said that, "purely from the community side", he sees similar problems with the openSUSE brand causing "distraction and detraction". One of the areas of confusion he called out was with openSUSE Leap, which is based on SUSE Linux Enterprise. Since Leap shares packages with SUSE's enterprise products, SUSE may not accept contributions that it does not want carried over to its commercial products, which can be confusing and discouraging for openSUSE community members.

Brown suggested that individual projects should stop using the openSUSE name entirely, and to have projects go forward under their current names (e.g. Tumbleweed, Leap, MicroOS) and "maybe shove Linux after some of them". The larger openSUSE project, he said, should create an umbrella similar to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) with a uniform trademark policy, code of conduct, and shared resources and infrastructure, but with each project keeping its own identity under the umbrella. To that end he said that he was already planning to drop "openSUSE" from the openSUSE Aeon project that LWN covered in June. Neither Brown nor Sirchia put forward suggestions for what a new name for the umbrella organization should be.

Reactions

The request to consider a name change brought up some strong reactions on the mailing list. Axel Braun accused SUSE of "putting a gun on the project", and Lukáš Krejza said that it looks like SUSE wants to take advantage of the community's work without having to protect the community's trademarks. Krejza also asked what other changes were coming, and if this meant that SUSE's policy of doing development in openSUSE Factory first was going to change.

Jeff Mahoney, who leads SUSE's Linux Systems organization, which has more than 200 developers who contribute to openSUSE, said that the problem is not primarily the difficulty in protecting trademarks, but the "constant confusion" about where the lines are drawn between openSUSE and SUSE. Facebook page and forum administrator Jim Henderson also complained that many users don't know the difference between SUSE and openSUSE and that it takes multiple explanations to get the point across. Mahoney said that the "Factory First" policy was sometimes violated, but said it was swiftly fixed when that happened. Further, he said that there has been no talk of changing that policy and he wouldn't support such a change if the topic came up.

Douglas DeMaio sought to make a case for rebranding the project from a marketing point of view, and noted that sharing a brand meant that neither SUSE or openSUSE fully controlled their brand—to the detriment of both. He pointed out that if one entity had bad publicity, it also spilled over to the other. "For example, if openSUSE faces a security issue, customers might associate this problem with SUSE as well, even if SUSE is not affected." In addition, the brands might compete with one another or lose customers to "competitors with clearer and more distinct branding". In another message, he argued that openSUSE Leap had probably been harmful to SUSE's growth and asked the community to think of SUSE as "a big brother here trying to guide a sibling to a new, more successful place".

"No confidence"

As the conversation continued, it drifted beyond branding into the related topics of openSUSE's governance and the Geeko Foundation. During his talk, Brown had alluded to the board "reinterpreting its mandate and doing stuff that it shouldn't". The project's guiding principles state that the board is empowered to "provide guidance and support existing governance structures, but shouldn't direct or control development", but during discussion on the mailing list Brown claimed the board had exceeded this authority. He said that the board had "intervened and forcefully changed who was allowed to present" about the name change at the openSUSE Conference on behalf of SUSE. He also complained that the board had improperly intervened in forcing a continuation of openSUSE's MicroOS Desktop KDE after the edition had been removed due to a lack of maintainers. "I currently hold no confidence in the current openSUSE Board and think it's absolutely essential the openSUSE project establishes a new governance model."

DeMaio took the blame for a miscommunication about the talk, and asked to "just move forward". Attila Pinter said that the project had seen "quite a few communication errors or lack of communication" from the board and asserted that the matter deserved more attention than acknowledgment of fault. "Was there any specific reason why the Board decided who can and cannot give the presentation on the rebranding?" DeMaio brushed off Pinter's question in his reply. When Pinter followed up, DeMaio did not respond at all.

Gertjan Lettink weighed in on July 12 with an "open letter" to the board and project, saying that the project has to rebrand, but that there was "no good way the Board could drive the resulting changes coming up". He said that the board had failed to show "any real proactive leadership in some situations where it should have", which was why he resigned from the openSUSE board in April.

Clarification

Pinter expressed support for the rebranding, but said that if that effort moves forward "some aspects of the Geeko Foundation need to be clarified". Simon Lees agreed with Pinter, but said that the discussion needed to go beyond the foundation to the general structure of the project. Mahoney wrote that the three topics are intertwined and "if handled properly, present a unique opportunity for the project to re-establish itself".

Mahoney observed that openSUSE had a small community compared to similar projects like Fedora, Arch Linux, and Ubuntu. He said that there were a few reasons for that: the perception that contributing to openSUSE was "like working for SUSE for free", an unclear governance structure, and lack of a clear mission for openSUSE:

I don't have a strong opinion on the renaming, but it could be an opportunity to revitalize the project under a new name, new governance, and new independence. That, in turn, could make the project more attractive to new contributors and users who aren't SUSE employees. With projects that used to be wildly popular on the decline, it could be the right opportunity to make a splash.

Dunn replied that he was looking into governance of other projects and what openSUSE's could look like. "Because at the moment, there's just not anything else on the table, and we're all just kind of flailing our arms."

Henne Vogelsang wrote that Mahoney's list of reasons was incomplete, and misleading. "The reason we are only able to sustain a small (shrinking) community is that we, as a community, do not invest too much into growing our community. Full stop." The project, he said, should be focusing on improving its infrastructure, going out and recruiting new contributors, and work harder to make existing contributors happy. "My suggestion to all members of the openSUSE Community: Stop talking about grand ideas, get to work."

Dunn said that he couldn't disagree more. If Vogelsang's ideas for attracting new contributors were viable, Dunn said, "it would have worked by now." Tony Walker replied that he had moved to openSUSE after years as a Debian contributor and the looser structure of the openSUSE project gave him pause. The trend towards more formalization of communication, structure, and governance in the larger ecosystem has been a benefit, he said. "A lot of contributors and users find the stability of that structure very comforting."

Sponsors would also find a more formal structure comforting—specifically, one that separates openSUSE's money from SUSE's—according to several people participating in the conversation. Gertjan Lettink wrote that several offers of sponsorship for openSUSE were lost because sponsors did not want to send money to SUSE. Sarah Julia Kriesch related a similar tale.

Foundation

The Geeko Foundation, according to the "Geeko Foundation Update" talk from the openSUSE Conference 2024, has raised €25,000 in the past 12 months. Currently the money is used to fund travel sponsorships.

Even though the foundation is providing a way for individuals and sponsors to donate money without having it pass through SUSE, Martin Schröder pointed out that it's not the openSUSE foundation. The organization is not accountable to openSUSE's board or directly to the openSUSE community. Pinter asked whether the board had an agreement with the foundation, or if there was a document "that clearly defines the roles and boundaries of the foundation". He also noted that Fitzgerald holds 75% of the voting power for the foundation, and asked if there was a reason for this.

Fitzgerald replied that he was not aware that he held majority voting power. There are three trustees, he said, "and it was my /assumption /that control would be divided amongst them equally. I'll get back to all of you on this." As for an agreement with the board, he said that there was nothing formal but perhaps there should be. He also pointed to the organization's founding document and other filings. Lees said that, as an unofficial statement from an openSUSE board member, he sees it as a separate entity that helps fill needs on a case-by-case basis that the project cannot handle otherwise. "I think it makes sense for it to continue to exist in that role until these discussions around name governance and structure are settled."

Or else?

The discussion was started under the premise that SUSE was making a request, not a demand, of the openSUSE community. However, after a bit more than a week of discussion, it was strongly suggested there was a right and a wrong decision—and the wrong decision could have unpleasant consequences. On July 15, Brown wrote that if the project failed to act on SUSE's request to stop using the SUSE brand "we will be choosing to decrease the good will between SUSE and openSUSE". In that event, he said that it was unlikely that SUSE would escalate matters to force the name change: "What I would imagine is an outcome that's would actually far worse - Apathy and a tendency to put priorities elsewhere."

SUSE, Brown said, has other open-source projects that it sponsors around its products. If openSUSE shows that it is not aligned with SUSE's interests, he said that he expected SUSE would refocus its efforts on projects that are aligned:

SUSE doesn't want history to record that it was the big mean corporation that forced its community to do something. But just because things are being said nicely doesn't mean they should be ignored.

[...] Ultimately, I believe that if openSUSE continues to travel in a direction that hinders the SUSE brand, or ignores the need to address [its] governance issues, we need to be prepared for history recording that openSUSE drove itself to obsolescence by failing to listen to the needs of one of its largest stakeholders.

After Brown's email, several participants, including Pinter, Lees, and Fitzgerald, signaled agreement for the rebranding and need for governance changes.

Assuming the discussion concludes, or simply tapers off, with support for rebranding, the next steps are still unclear. Details such as timing, methodology for choosing a new name, whether SUSE might support a separate legal entity for the project, and many other related questions are still left unaddressed. One hopes, for the sake of the project's users and contributors, these questions are addressed sooner rather than later.