The future of openSUSE-Education

The openSUSE-Education project tries to support schools using openSUSE. We create and describe additional software-repositories for educational projects and we created Add-on medias and finally a live DVD from the regular openSUSE distribution.

As you can see in our timeline, we achieved quite a lot in the past years, had fun and meet a couple of very nice people out there in our spare time. But the main team members moved on to new projects, with the hope that we would one day find some time to work more on openSUSE-Education again. This does not seem to happen - at least not for the foreseeable future.

While we currently still spend a lot of time to get over 460 packages in the Education project up to date and building, we could not find any volunteer to take over the maintenance of our webpage (which will be down end of this month), the hosting of additional repositories help users with questions in the forum or even someone who wants to create the next Li-f-e or add-on media. We could of course leave everything as it is right now and call it good enough. But we don’t think that would be fair to our users who are expecting a well thought through environment for educational activities where all details have been taken care of and maintenance and support in any form are available for them.

While we still work on the packages in the Education repository, based on our time, new contributors are absolutely welcome to take over the openSUSE-Education project and shape it to their liking. The old guard will be happy to assist the new volunteers wherever needed and possible.

We will wait until the release of openSUSE Leap 15.0 before we will ask the openSUSE board to officially revoke openSUSE-Education as an openSUSE project. This will be the final end of the  openSUSE-Education project - and we hope that this step will not be necessary.

It’s been a fun ride for all of us and we very much hope that this won’t be the end of openSUSE-Education but instead a new beginning for this great project.