First of all, don’t get me wrong. I have my Turris Omnia now since a couple of weeks and I’m really excited about the hardware. Sure, the software had some bugs in the out-of-box state, but nothing that couldn’t be resolved by searching these forums since most people had already encountered and solved the same problems. I also understand that the source/commits/etc are all available from github.
With that said, I am however slightly disappointed by the current development process. This forum is full of users that talk among themselves, with the occasional input from a developer - much like a product forum for a “normal” commercial product. There is no way to know the release status of the next version (which by now includes a large amount of fixes), what the roadmap is, what is being discussed within the devel team, etc.
To give a few examples:
https://github.com/CZ-NIC/turris-os/issues/5
A fix was quickly committed, but it’s not available for anyone not able to compile their own kernels. There’s also (AFAIK) no list of known bugs in the current version of TurrisOS maintained anywhere, so any new user trying out StrongSwan will encounter this bug.
(yes, that was my own pull request) Develop a patch, submit a pull request, wait a week, notice that the same functionality has already been implemented by the dev team meanwhile. And get told “We already had the plans (and some PoC code) for it when you submitted the PR”. I mean, it was a friendly reply, but seriously, anyone wishing to contribute to TurrisOS shouldn’t have to guess at the plans and current development work of the core dev team.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that while Turris meets all the formal requirements of being open source, it fails miserably in getting people involved, excited, keeping them up to date, luring new developers into the fold, etc.
A first step would be to have a proper mailing list and to make sure that the dev team actually uses it for communication, including internal communication rather than whatever means are currently used.
(Again, please take this for what it is - constructive criticism of how Turris development could be improved).