cyberblob

As ususal, many things that people say when it comes to distros are somewhat anecdotal. I am no different here and I would love to back up my claim with some empirical data. But I am left with simply having a good impressions of forum discussions and from discussions at conferences (that I watched on video).

You are actually asking interesting questions about openSUSE, imho good questions to ask about any distro. Fortunately, in case of openSUSE it seems to me that there are answers available.

For me its clear, that SUSE is very involved behind the scenes, simply because a lot of employees also work on openSUSE. But that is not a bad thing (#Ubuntu # Canonical).

But in general, have a look here: https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Board

It says e.g.

The board should provide guidance and support existing governance structures, but shouldn't direct or control development, since community mechanisms exist to accomplish the goals of the project

and

The board members are elected by the community and the chair person is appointed by SUSE.

Hence, I have the feeling they are being fairly open about the involvement of SUSE and their structure in general. Also they claim to have community mechanisms to guide development. I can not judge on those, as it would require some more digging, but I would assume they are intact and functioning as openSUSE is progressing in its development.

Hope this helps you.

Thanks for your reply! Afaik Canonical still is located in the UK, but that said, UK is still somewhat different for data privacy in comparison to mainland EU; But again its mostly the feeling of diverting to something different, due to several reasons. They are being open about telemetry and I still think Ubuntu is a great distro. So lets say I just think openSUSE is even better ;)