all mine!

The Eagle has Landed

2012-01-16T14:41:00.000+01:00

Not talking about the moon landing, just saying I'm home! Camila and myself have landed in Berlin. It has been a lot of work - the Netherlands is not so far, just 700 KM, Brazil is over 10 times that... But now we're settling in. Ikea has the art of making-it-easy-to-build-your-own-furniture licked to such an extend that the level of frustration is absolutely trumped by the sense of accomplishment after building something. As a matter of fact, I've discovered that I enjoy drilling holes in helpless pieces of wood almost as much as cutting innocent vegetables in small pieces. Somehow it is relaxing. Yes, I know, it is disturbing.

Anyway. My office is far from done - I have my keyboard on my lap and my mouse rests on a small chair, just to give an impression of what's still to be done. But the location of our home is absolutely awesome - everything is around. I thought I had lived in a city but this really is a new level... If you haven't seen Berlin and think you can stand me, consider visiting. We've got a very nice guest room and as long as you can somehow claim to have a passing relation to Free Software or either of us personally, Camila and myself would gladly welcome you. We're both used to sharing a place with others and honestly, I prefer to have some people around.

In the work area, I haven't done much in the past 5 weeks - I have lots to catch up to. I'm reading mail now, answering some, ignoring most. So if you have emailed me over the last month and not received a reply yet - I hope I can reply in this week.

Oh, and yes, I plan to be at FOSDEM. And so should you - all your friends will be there!

GNOME in Rio de Janeiro

2011-12-13T02:12:00.000+01:00

On the beach, no less! At Copacabana, the most prestigious beach in Rio, I discovered proof of gnomes. It seems they try to hide by stepping in other people's footsteps. That's not working very well, as you see - it's clear they're there. I leave it up to you to decide what this means (but I do agree that the GNOME team deserves a break and Copacabana is a great place for that).

The beach is pretty, we went for a swim at night. Careful with the waves, they're really huge... I lost my flipflops in the water but miraculously found them again :D

Oh, and yes, we've finally seen Jesus! See the picture below, he's the dude in the back playing 'airplane'. We also enjoyed great (and unfamiliar) fruit juices and some more beach. Have some red stripes again. Tomorrow we'll try and see some trees, then we fly back to the Gauchos.

Calligra...

2011-12-08T21:02:00.000+01:00

While Calligra 2.4 did not make it as part of openSUSE 12.1, its latest beta is available in the KDE:UpdatedApps repository and I hope Tumbleweed will pick it up too. I'm quite excited about this release and I'd like to share why!

Little intro

As you might or might not know, Calligra is the result of a split of the KWord maintainer with the rest of the KOffice team. The ODF based Suite has a wide range of applications. From Krita, the most versatile and usable sketching and painting application on Linux (click for an experts opinion), and Kexi, the most powerful and complete database tool available as Free Software - to Words, Karbon and Stage. These last, as well as all the other applications in Calligra, are far less mature than Krita and Kexi. The team has been limiting their scope, focusing on getting them stable and usable while skipping on features.

But despite lacking quite some features, these apps are OK for the basics. And they have excellent ODF support as well as the best DOCX support available outside of MS Office. Not that I like that format - but you unfortunately need to be able to open it if you want to work with non-linux users these days...

The most interesting part of Calligra is its architecture. Calligra developers call Calligra 'the webKit of office suites' because the applications are only a thin layer over the powerful core. This design has proven itself when the Calligra developers ported their applications to platforms like Nokia's N9 (where it ships as standard office suite) and KDE's Plasma Active. There are currently four distinct GUI's for Calligra Core!

What's exciting

For me, the exciting part about Calligra is that it's fast and easy to use. OpenOffice.org and later LibreOffice always suffered from performance and stability issues and the betas of Calligra have been extremely nice in those regards. The UI is also a delight compared to the competition. Words has a few nice improvements compared to the previous version and it's far more useable on a small, wide screen laptop. As I only write basic documents and don't use fancy features in my presentations, Words and Stage suit me quite nicely - while keeping my rather slow laptop from cranking up the cooling fan.

Potential

More importantly, for me at least, is that when working with Calligra, you feel potential. It takes innovative approaches to user interface elements and thanks to its design, anyone could whip up a new interface in a short time. This is what Free Software needs - a powerful base to innovate on! If you think you can do better with an Office UI, whip something up in QML (javascript)...

Stage

The app I use most is Stage, the presentation tool. It works quite comfortable compared to the competition, faster and more stable too. The coolest thing I was looking forward is the Infinite Canvas support in Stage, which will allow it to do Prezi-like presentations. Would be great to have such a cool feature in a proper presentation app instead of needing flash or having to build SVG files by hand... Unfortunately it's not there now but planned for the next release.

Getting it

You can get Calligra stuff for openSUSE by just clicking here (One Click Install)or by adding the KDE:UpdatedApps repository by hand. Currently it's all at Beta 3 but of course newer versions will be packaged in no-time!

Nightly builds

I've been trying to build packages pulling the code directly from git in OBS but I'm not smart enough to use this cool feature :(

Help or tips are appreciated. This stuff does not seem to be documented anywhere, at least not n00b-style. If I manage to get this working I promise to write a 'how-to' to turn an OBS project using a 'fixed' tarball into a 'nightly building' thing pulling directly from a SCM - there are quite a number of projects who would probably love this. I'll also try and provide nightly-build Calligra packages for other distro's.

Being in the know

2011-12-06T14:48:00.000+01:00

'being in the know' means something like being one of those people who knows what is going on. When it comes to Free Software events around the world where openSUSE is involved that means being on the opensuse-ambassador mailing list. That's where we discuss events and where you can send invites you receive for openSUSE attendance. Like, for example, this one:

Hello,

My name is Erin Tyler and I am with the Palmetto Open Source Software Conference (POSSCON), one of the largest open source software conferences on the east coast. We would like to invite OpenSuse to participate in POSSCON 2012, scheduled for March 28 and 29 in Columbia, SC, USA.

Thank you for any consideration,
Erin Tyler
Coordinator, POSSCON 2012

If you want to be there or at any other event to represent openSUSE, let us know - mail the ambassador list!

Beautiful weather

2011-12-04T14:20:00.001+01:00

OpenBeach

As you can see in the picture, I have parked my ass on the beach. Visiting OpenBeach in Brazil, yup yup. Time for some much-needed relaxation - I'm taking pretty much the rest of this month off.

I have already transformed from a White Wale to a nice Red Lobster. Of course I failed to put the sunscreen on myself evenly so it's more like a Red Panter. Greatly enjoyed the pirate party on the first evening (Friday night) although it lead to a little bit of a headache the next day. Something to do with the beer, I guess. Yesterday did fairly little - today, churrasco and chimarrão (and Matte).

Yay!

I still will do a little bit of work (nobody would expect otherwise, right?) but it'll be as minimal as I feel I can get away with. I do have some blogs scheduled, which will go out over the coming days. Which doesn't mean I actually am online, for some reason wherever I go the internet seems to stop working. Bad karma or something - I wouldn't be able to reply to any mail if it wasn't for offline IMAP. Aaah, just means I have no choice but to relax more :D

Love,

Jos

12.1 closing in!

2011-11-08T22:55:00.001+01:00

We're about to put the finishing touches on openSUSE 12.1 and the amount of activity in the openSUSE IRC channels is impressive. I see people working 12-14-16 hours a day, fixing the last issues, writing release notes, and in short getting this release ready for our users. Respect!

I myself have upgraded my laptop to openSUSE 12.1 RC2 now and I got to see the new Plasma Desktop. Overall, the difference between Tumbleweed and 12.1 are minimal. As expected, considering Tumbleweed (openSUSE's cool rolling release repository) was a hair away from 12.1, the biggest differences are probably artwork and of course Plasma 4.7 instead of 4.6...

KMail2 and Feeding Nepomuk

Ok, there is KMail2 which gave some work. It is really a mixed blessing. A bit slower in opening mails and folders, MUCH faster in checking and downloading new mail (awesome for bad network connections!), painfully big memory usage. There is a problem with the akonadi_nepomuk_email_feeder (yes, feeds mail from Akonadi in Nepomuk for indexing and search) where the queue fills up memory. My 6GB of mail surely doesn't fit in my 2GB ram so that's painful! But it fills up slowly while processing mail so restarting it every 30 min during the night (akonadictl restart) gave it a chance to index all my mails. And this problem is being worked on...

Less nice is the constant use of memory (MySQL alone is 120 MB), but I hope there is room to optimize things further. At least it's pretty much stable, which is a bigger deal than memory usage to me. Thanks to Sebastian being supported by donations we have a faster and more stable Nepomuk, making search finally usable for me. Also nice.

Talking about faster and more stable, KWin is noticeably faster again, and blur works great now :D

Other new things

I've also installed the 3rd beta of Calligra which is available from the KDE updated applications repo. It is not perfectly stable (reported my first Tables crash already) but Stage now works with all the standard openSUSE 12.1 presentations, unlike the older KPresenter version. That is good news as it's still quite a bit faster than LibreOffice. Not more stable, yet, both are unfortunately quite crash-happy.

I haven't had time to check out Snapper myself, mostly because but I've seen a demo at Brainshare and let's just say I greatly look forward to Desktop Integration! Being able to see previous versions of files and to roll back is really cool, especially once you don't have to go to a separate app anymore but can do it from the file manager.

Played with SAX3 a bit, broke my xorg.conf. Looks like the automatic configuration works better than my manual one...

And yes, systemd boots up marginally faster. And it doesn't seem to break things for me so I'm content with it.

Now, I have to finish some more writing!

Discuss here...

2011-10-27T13:14:00.000+02:00

On the openSUSE Factory mailing list a bikeshed was started talking about how 'SUSE controls openSUSE' (see my earlier blog about bikesheds).

Luckily, several people were kind enough to point out how off-topic this discussion was on a developers list. And how horrible the timing was with regards to the openSUSE 12.1 release, keeping everyone from work.

But the discussion was not entirely irrelevant, as Robert noted - if people still think that SUSE somehow, magically, makes things happen in openSUSE, it's worth talking about that. Just not on a developers' list where people try to get work done!

Wrong list

If you're new to how Free Software communities like openSUSE work, this discussion is relevant. I know that the way many communities work is not very transparent to outsiders. And openSUSE is probably not the best in this area. But where to discuss this?

For the contributors to openSUSE, who have been around a while, this is no issue. So this discussion does not belong on a developers' list. If it was a widespread problem it might belong on our project mailing list. But in this case, even that is a bit overkill in my opinion. Hence this blog.

As reminder: if you start such discussions again and again on the wrong lists you will ultimately be kicked from development lists for disturbing the Force. Please don't do it!

Let's talk HERE

So, let me try and provide a more 'proper' place for this discussion: here. I'll start off with explaining how 'we' make decisions and what SUSE's role is. Feel free to ask questions or discuss this further below. And yes, it might make sense to collect the results of this discussion into a wiki page describing our 'governance' to avoid such discussions in the future. Volunteers welcome, remember, talk is cheap!

Structure

Unlike most other large distribution communities like Debian, Fedora or Ubuntu, openSUSE does not have a clear structure. We have the openSUSE Board and a release management team but that's it. There are of course groups in openSUSE - the edu team, the marketing team, translators, the boosters. But they are just gatherings of people who do a certain thing, not people who (can) tell others what to do. We have no Engineering Steering Committee or Technical Board, nor (benevolent or not) dictators, project leaders or anything else telling anyone what to do. Yes, as I've said many times before, that includes me: 'community manager' is a SUSE title, not openSUSE, and I have no say over whatever anyone of you do. Nor do I want to!

Decision making

So how DO decisions get made? Recently an interview was done with Michael Miller, who himself clearly was a bit surprised about how things worked. But, as the interview shows, he gets it now: people do what they want in openSUSE. That includes SUSE engineers - SUSE rarely tells their engineers what to do in openSUSE. Most are active as volunteers and those who are paid to do things (like myself) have a huge amount of freedom to do what they think is best for openSUSE. Robert wrote the same in a response to the initial questions. Read his mail.

It is very simple. The decisions get made by those who do the work, by consensus and on technical grounds.

Example process

Let me give an example: replacing the sysvinit boot system in openSUSE with systemd.

Who's involved in the decision to do systemd or not? Four (groups of) people:

1. the maintainer(s) of the current init system

2. whoever proposes the new solution (can be same as 1

3. The release team

4. All developers who need to adjust to systemd
Step 1. Those involved discuss and decide.
Now the maintainers of sysv init (1) and those working on systemd (2) talk together. If 1 decides that 2 has a great idea, they will stop maintaining the 'old' system and move over to systemd, together with 2.

Step 2. Release team gets involved.
They will then tell the release team, which will look at it from a technical point: will it break things? They will demand from 1 and 2 that they ensure no or very little breakage.

Step 3. Public discussion.
It is now time for the wider project, especially those who are influenced by this decision, to hear about the plan from the maintainers (systemd mail to -factory on June 2011). At this point, the rest of the distro contributors and possibly, in case a developer blogs about this, the rest of the world can also respond. Everyone can either come with additional constraints/limitations or object to the change wholesale. In both cases, they can either hope to convince the maintainers to take on the constraint or objection, or offer to solve the problem (and/or maintain the old system) themselves. Obviously, if the vast majority of the fourth group, everyone who needs to work with systemd, objects - there's a big chance the maintainers will cave. But they don't have to and if nobody else steps up to maintain the old system, well, everyone will just have to suck it up!

Note that in no way can the rest of the community (or anyone else for that matter) demand that the maintainers will listen to them. If you can't convince them with arguments nor provide an alternative with your work, well, too bad for you. This is how Free Software works.

Step 4. The decision
So yes, in the end, the maintainers decide. The release team will have the choice of not accepting their work (and how to schedule), of course, but if nobody has an alternative, that's unlikely. And the same goes for everyone else: you can vote with your work or your feet. Making noise just means the developers put your mail address and IRC nick on their blacklist.

This does not mean developers don't listen to users - they do. But they do via the channels they like to do it (blogs, bugzilla, openFATE, reading the openSUSE Forums). And in no way do they have to. Some prominent FOSS projects are maintained by people well known to not listen to users, and power to them. You're free not to use their software, so they don't have to listen! You can of course pay them, like with the Nepomuk fundraiser set up by it's author and the Krita fundraiser before that. Then yes, they will listen...

But SUSE...

No, SUSE does not control openSUSE. They do NOT interfere in this process. Remember how openSUSE picked a new release schedule? A new default desktop (KDE)? I can tell you that in both cases, SUSE management was not really convinced it was great for SUSE or openSUSE. But they did not interfere.

Obviously, SUSE, as a community member, sometimes wants things. So SUSE does occasionally tell their engineers to work on a specific thing in their paid time. Then the community can accept, or not, what these engineers do. Following the exact same process.

So if things don't go how you like them to go, well, don't blame SUSE. Blame yourself as you are the only person to blame. Because you didn't do anything about it. do, as in work, by the way, talk doesn't count as I said before. It just keeps people from doing their work but doesn't produce anything.

Discussion, questions

I agree the above is a bit opaque sometimes. We don't have a very clear list of maintainers and the process as I describe is maybe still not very clear. Even if it's clear now, it's not written down anywhere other than here. Feel free to ask for further explanations or challenge my assumptions. And volunteer to move this to a wiki page on the openSUSE wiki so we can educate newcomers better.

Almost too much going on...

2011-10-18T21:51:00.000+02:00

Been a busy week, last week. There was Plasma Active One, OwnCloud 2.0, openQA 1.0 and KDE's 15th birthday. Each of them deserves a lot of attention, which they got. I'll just add my thoughts!

Plasma Active One

Let's start with Plasma Active One. Now that is one heck of an exciting technology. Where the Linux Desktop will probably follow the general 'desktop computing world' into a (far less relevant) niche, tablets are hot. There is quite a bit of competition: iPad of course, and Android. Soon Microsoft will come out with something that might be viable on tablets. But the competition also means the market is dynamic and people are used to choice.

Plasma Active is an unique product in many ways. The UI itself is quite different from competitors, yet easy to use and intuitive. There are innovations like the heavy use of Activities and Nepomuk, stuff like Share-Like-Connect. And the way it is developed by a dedicated team, using 'agile' techniques and working with a number of companies is really interesting. I have a tablet with it and despite the horrible hardware in there (essentially GPU acceleration doesn't work) it's easy to see the potential.

Obviously I'm excited to see the team using the openSUSE infrastructure and technology. And it's working for them. OBS allows the team to have the new code packaged and available for the interaction designers overnight, resulting in a fast design-implement-discuss cylce which is surely part of the success of Acive One.

I think the Plasma Active team is on to something and congratulate them with their first release!

OwnCloud 2.0

OwnCloud 2.0 made a stunning release as well. Their new platform is easier to use, introduces a huge number of new features and... we're working on integrating it in openSUSE. You can already download an SUSE Studio image (Virtual Machine, USB, CD or Hard drive images available) to get it up and running in minutes. If you enter your Amazon Cloud credentials you can deploy it to EC2 without even downloading anything! Other stuff I am not allowed to speak about or I'll be jumped by a couple of big, German openSUSE dudes who can crush my back by looking at me.

As Frank said, the biggest thing he's proud off with OwnCloud is the community, and right he is. I met some of them at the Desktop Summit in Berlin but there's a whole bunch more and they are like busy bees. Just following their mailing list a little, I can't wait for the next release! So, OwnCloud team - congrats on your release!

openQA 1.0

On the same day as OwnCloud 2.0 came available, openSUSE released openQA 1.0. openQA is basically a tool which boots up an ISO file into a VM, giving (where needed) input via virtual keyboard or mouse events and takings screen shots of the process. It then compares the screen shots to reference screenshots and BAM, you know if the ISO did what you expected! It is stunningly easy to use on your own computer: clone the git repo and start the tests by running os-autoinst/tools/isotovideo [isodisc]. You'll get a log file as well as screen shots and a video of the whole boot - installation - run process in a directory.

The tests are written in Perl, something not everyone loves, but the whole thing is quite flexible and can be used to test ANY operating system. There's some support for Fedora, Debian and openIndiana but if Microsoft is interested in getting some QA to their OS they can get support in quite easy ;-)

I think, while there's work to do, for an 1.0 openQA is pretty cool and there's plenty of application for it. Let's hope other distro's will look at it, see if they can use it to improve the state of Linux quality all over the place.

So, openQA team, congrats on the successful release!

KDE is 15 years old!

15 years ago KDE was started. In that time it has evolved into the largest and most vibrant Linux Desktop project. I'm proud of this 15th birthday milestone! The cool thing about such an anniversary is that you tend to look back at what has been. But KDE has always been a community which looks forward. New technologies and innovations continuously flow from the community and while I would love it if the Free Desktop world would be a bit less 'NIH', much of this is adopted in other places at some point. Everyone knows about WebKit for sure but it is also cool to see KWin lead in the efforts towards Wayland and openGL-es, Nepomuk innovate on the semantic desktop and Plasma Active shows the world what a 'device spectrum' UI should really look like!

So instead of dwelling on the past (and yes, I've done and seen plenty in my ten "KDE years") I'll look forward to the future too. And I bet the next 15 years will see KDE continue to grow like Paul Adams' graphs show us. I'm proud to be part of two communities which are so close - openSUSE and KDE. And I congratulate my KDE friend with their 15 year birthday and celebrations!

I hope this week will stay a bit more quiet as I have some time off ;-)

Fights? Do something!

2011-10-06T20:43:00.000+02:00

The worst thing that makes conflicts do damage is related to a (possibly mis-attributed) quote of Burke:

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.

If somebody is behaving badly, don't let them do their damage. Realize that by not stepping up you are partially responsible for the damage being done to the motivation of whoever is being abused. I'm assuming you care about your community? Then speak up! Often, people who are being rude don't even realize that. It is learning for them too. And if they DID realize it and keep doing it, moderation is a mail or ping away.

Yes, openSUSE has moderation. At the conference it was decided to have a reminder of that on our mailing lists. They now feature a footer which tells you how to contact our mods. We have the guiding principles and if people cross the line, you can refer to them. If whoever crosses the line is new to our community, mail or ping them privately. If they keep doing it, feel free to tell them in public they should stop. If they still don't, ask a moderator...

Yes, we have freedom of speech. But this is our corner of the web and if people want to be assholes, well, let them get their own blog to rant. This also applies to bikeshedding: it does damage, so do something if it happens!

MeeGo and openSUSE - an invitation

2011-09-29T21:30:00.000+02:00

Dear MeeGo friends!

Yesterday a big announcement was made by Intel and Samsung. It entails another big change of directions for Moblin/Maemo/MeeGo.

Where to go Next

Many people in your community wonder where to go now. Yesterday, at a MeeGo meet in Tampere, many wondered if Intel will let the community contribute to Tizen. Will Samsung work in the open? Intel and Linux Foundation didn't build a great track record with MeeGo and some said they simply didn't believe in it anymore. Many clearly care about the great community which was build over the last years and are afraid it will break up.

Aaron Seigo spoke some wise words. He said: "don't rely on what big companies might or might not do. Find out what YOU want and how to get there!" And indeed, community is about making your choices together. Not depending on corporate players acting as ADHD kids in a candy store, tasting every candy then dropping it.

We've got room

So, I invite you to a community which you already know. A community which, like MeeGo, is young and vital. You're familiar with the Open Build Service and with tools like zypper. You know these come from a community looking beyond their borders - projects like Smeegol and Ayatana are good examples. Of course I talk about openSUSE.

And while we do have a large, corporate sponsor, they depend on us. Yet we don't exclusively rely on them. Many independent developers and companies are active in the openSUSE Community. Moreover, SUSE has proved on several occasions to respect the wishes of its community, even if it's uncomfortable with the choices, and we've been working on setting up an openSUSE Foundation with SUSE buy-in as well.

We're open to innovations

openSUSE is very flexible and open as a community. No complicated governance, no top-down management, like our large competitors. Just FUN. As result, we do awesome stuff! From OBS and the upcoming new thing, to the übercool Tumbleweed.

And timing is excellent: Andrew "Smeegol" Wafaa has recently announced the start of an effort to bring openSUSE to ARM devices. Progress was already made during this week's SUSE Hackweek and the mailing list is buzzing with activity!

You're welcome at openSUSE

In short, I would like to welcome you in openSUSE's ARMs. We've got the attitude which will fit you and we've got the technology and infrastructure to support you!

There is a nice wiki page on participating in openSUSE if you want to learn more. But to get things going, I suggest to start a discussion about how we can help you guys and girls on the openSUSE Project mailing list. Of course, feel free to visit our IRC channels.

See you at openSUSE and have a lot of fun!

oSC 11: more quotes

2011-09-29T11:41:00.000+02:00

Last time I blogged about the Conference I had a nice conference quote in there. Well, I've got a few extra for you. And I'd love to hear more in the comments section!

Henne about kicking somebody from the mailing list:

... sometimes they try to work around it and come back with another mail address and we do this dance of me blocking that too, then having to block their IP range, them coming back via a proxy, me blocking the proxy etcetera for a month of so, until somebody gives up... And that somebody is always them 'cause I get paid!

Klaas shared about his relationship:

I still have frequent conflicts with my wife because I keep leaving my dirty socks on the couch...

Gregory while discussing moderation:

Some people just are annoying and bikeshed all day long. But our project is about collaboration and if you're just there to voice your opinion, get an island!

Henne admitted:

No, I've got no life, ask my girlfriend...

A must-see from the conf are the ~100 geeko-everywhere pictures that Pascal Bleser took. Enjoy a few highlights above and below and go to Pascal's Picasa page by clicking the pics!

Tumbleweed image dream

2011-09-28T12:51:00.000+02:00

At the (pretty cool) openMind conference in Tampere, Finland, it came up that a big advantage of Tumbleweed is that it always has the latest hardware support. Thanks to the rolling release, Tumbleweed comes with the latest Linux kernel which plays a big part of the hardware support of a Linux distro.

If your hardware does not work properly with the 'stable' release of openSUSE (or other distro's) trying the latest kernel can solve that. But that's hard to get on your system, even with stuff like the openSUSE Kernel repositories because it usually requires you to first install something.

Van openMind 2011

So here's something I think would be very cool to have: a weekly Tumbleweed image build in KIWI/OBS so people can test (LiveCD/USB image) and install Tumbleweed directly! Building this should not be crazy hard and we might be able to automatically test and thus verify basic stability with openQA... It would offer state of the art hardware support with openSUSE!

Deathstar User Group at CLS

2011-09-20T21:06:00.000+02:00

A pretty cool session at the Community Leadership Summit was the Death Star Usergroup session, led by Simon Phillips. My notes on this one are below...

The Deathstar User Group

Imagine you're part of an User Group. The UG of an Deathstar, no less. Despite the obviously evil intentions of your organization, you are not evil. Still, you and your fellow UG members stay there. Either because Darth Vader gets you if you refuse. Or because you want to 'change the system from the inside'. Or you simply like big explosions and blowing up planets. In any case, you have to deal with things. How do you explain to your family what you do every day? To your friends? "Yeah, I work on a Deathstar. We blow up rebel planets, killing anyone we see!" And how do you deal with the choices you have to make? Do you tell your friends that the planet you just destroyed was really only inhabited by evil wrong-doers who attack law and order? Or do you admit the planet was full of innocent woman and children and was only destroyed because Darth Vader had a bad day? When do you refuse an order? Can you face the consequences?

Hard choices. Simon Phillips, ex-community manager at Sun, organized a session about this subject. The question: how do you handle the suggestion (or reality!) that your employer is not 100% well intended?

Companies are reptiles

Simon shared an interesting story. He once visited an alligator farm. A trainer there fed the alligator, entertaining the public. At some point he was standing close to an alligator who was just lying in the sun. Somebody asked: "does the alligator know you so he doesn't attack?" The trainer explained that he wasn't afraid, but not because the animal knew him or respected him. He said: "A reptile acts on instinct, and instinct alone. They fights when they are afraid, attack when hungry. If they're neither, they will just lay in the sun. Right now, for example, he's been fed and is not afraid of me. So I am safe. But I should never expect him to delay even one second to attack me, just because I happen to be the guy who feeds him every day." According to Simon, companies are like reptiles. They don't have moral standards. They are not evil, nor good. They just need to make money. If something threatens that, they attack. If they are safe and not hungry, they just lie there - and let their employees do whatever doesn't threaten their income.

Of course, we should also realize that IN those companies, persons of flesh, blood and emotions run the show. They have obligations to their company but they also have their own goals. Even on a Deathstar, many people want to do the right thing... With a few other people from companies like Adobe, Microsoft and Oracle there, it was interesting to hear stories about what was going on at these companies.

Evil actions or just accidents

A funny observation is that often, people perceive evil intentions behind actions which are entirely or almost entirely random. Big companies do weird stuff. One part of the company wants to go left, the other part wants to go right. Sometimes timing is strange. This leads to all kinds of conspiracy theories. I always think: "Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity". It's as true about companies as it is about people, if not more. The big, evil plans people see are often just a random coincidence combined with (good or bad) luck and a healthy dose of incompetence.

Of course, these things can be just as damaging. Oracle has been miss-handling their Free Software projects to the point where they simply killed them off entirely. Is that evil? Does Oracle hate Free Software? It's far more likely that they just don't understand it. They lost incredible business value and probably still don't realize it... Obviously, we (as in Free Software contributors) should be careful in dealing with them. Giving them a hard time doesn't help them learn but might convince them how hard it is to work with Free Software. But we shouldn't trust them too much either until they've shown that they (finally) get it. Which will take a while...

Self-fulfilling prophecies

The bad thing about having people focus so much on "this and this company is evil" is that it results in less positive relationships with companies than we could have. Take Microsoft. Sure, their business relies on proprietary software. And parts of what they do is threatened by Free Software so not the whole company is a big fan of 'us'. But not so much that they try to kill any FLOSS they can. There are plenty of people in Microsoft who believe in the model of Free Software and in collaboration with the community. Microsoft is churning out Free Software, contributing to FOSS projects and doing all kinds of interoperability stuff. In part because their customers simply demand it from them. In part because some people in the company simply believe there are opportunities there and nobody stops them. But we shouldn't expect the company to trow away their current cash cows like Windows and Office - they're a company and make money on proprietary software. Realize that companies are even legally obliged to act like that: if CEO would do something 'because it is the right thing', and not pursue income, the shareholders can sue him!

A company can only ever do good as long as it makes business sense. That's why it is so awesome to work for a company which does indeed make money on doing the right thing. Developing and distributing Free Software, a FOSS consultancy company, a hardware company sharing it's source code with others... Even then, you might occasionally bump into 'Deathstar issues'. But usually you can convince management to do the right thing. And if not, contain the damage as much as you can.

Take a stand, or?

That's not to say there are no people who just close their eyes and keep happily hacking (operating the Deathstar) while their work actually is damaging. Just looking at the interesting technology and the work you do is no excuse if the end result means you're collaborating on something bad.

Yes, in some cases - you might have to take a stand. I know people who quit because they couldn't reconcile their role in what their company was doing. And I respect that greatly. But I don't look down on people who keep trying to change things for the good. It's a hard and often not exactly thankful job which deserves equally much respect! It is a though call and I think we all have to realize that we don't know the full picture. We can't see what happens internally in a company, we can't judge how much chance there is to turn things around.

It was an interesting session ;-)

oSC 11 take-away

2011-09-17T17:05:00.000+02:00

Writing a blog about oSC is quite difficult. I've been asked a few times what I thought about the conference. Well, let me be honest - I was stressed like a headless chicken. I didn't attend half the sessions I wanted to and didn't sleep very well during the nights.

On the other hand - the sessions I did attend were interesting, meeting all the openSUSE people was really awesome and the parties and barbequing evenings were really fun. I think that's the main thing I took away from oSC and I know this goes for many other people as well: awesome community! Quite a few people remarked on the open atmosphere and the friendly people and that's what really matters to me.

I guess I simply need to digest the conf a bit longer until I can say more. So let me just quote from Kostas:

Drinking beer with Greg KH: great. Having him carry your beer: priceless

Cheese at oSC

2011-09-10T12:32:00.002+02:00

When I traveled to Taipei I discovered something truly painful: there is no cheese in Taiwan.

Mc Donalds

Of course I had noticed none of the (great!) dishes featured cheese and of course I had grown a bit weary by the cheeslessness. But when I asked my new friends about the lack of cheese, and their response was "Cheese? Oh, yeah, that's the stuff Mc Donalds puts on a hamburger, isn't it?" I truly cringed.

Cheese!!!

I can live for a while without my favorite cheeses, even survive bad cheese. But NO cheese? Now I'm all aware of the fact that many Asian people can't digest milk products very well or at all, and I'm deeply sorry for them. But still, a country with no cheese? At least you could smell it, yes? Believe me, stinky Tofu is NOTHING compared to the smell of some of the fine French cheeses. I'm talking about the ones more hairy than your dad; the cheeses that could easily walk away from you if they weren't too proud to do it. REAL cheeses!

Anyway. I brought cheese to the openSUSE Conference from the Dutch cheese store below.

Van oSC 2011

Zentrifuge

Talking about the conference, over the last couple of days, a huge amount of work has been put in the "Zentrifuge", the location for the openSUSE Conference. And I really mean huge, the place was - well, what do you expect of an empty, old industrial complex... It was empty ;-)

So we now are doing the finishing touches, and I'd like to share some pics of the work! I've put them on my picasaweb, have fun!

oSC 2011

Edit: note that you're all welcome at the conference location from now on! If you arrive before 18:00 however, you'll be put to work. After that, we have a nice pre-registration party with beer and pizza!!!

So, how useful was it?

2011-09-08T20:36:00.000+02:00

A while ago I blogged, asking if the materials we provided on the openSUSE wiki for speakers at oSC was useful.

What stuff?

As a reminder, the materials I'm talking about included:

The Guidelinesfor speakers (and specifically the Tips and tricks, like the extensive how-to on preparing a talk)
The articles on news.opensuse.org:
- What is and how to do a BoF/Discussion/team meeting session
- How to prepare and give a workshop

And I also wanted to write an article on how to organize a Hack session/Developer Sprint but that's on ice for now.

I used a web poll for people to answer and you can see the results in the poll below.

Free Web Poll

Unfortunately, right now, only 9 people answered. Only 3 of them read it and considered it useful information but didn't use it for the openSUSE conference, 4 of them didn't notice it (while 2 would have liked to see it) and 2 people saw it but didn't need it.

So, does that mean I should stop to spend my time on such things, or does it mean people didn't see my blog or didn't bother to answer?

Bikeshedding and CLS

2011-09-07T15:00:00.000+02:00

I wrote a blog about bikeshedding some time ago. At the Community Leadership Summit this subject came up and as I promised to write some blogs about that and because the openSUSE conference is coming I decided that this should be the topic for my second CLS notes blog.

What color should it be?

Refresh

So what was bikeshedding again? It happens if on a mailing list or a IRC channel a subject comes up which is trivial enough for everyone to have an opinion on. The result is that everyone feels obliged to share that opinion and challenge whatever anyone else comes up with. Leading to a long and mostly useless discussion.

That is bad because, especially on lists with many subscribers, it clutters hundreds of mailboxes of busy people with pointless mails and it needlessly complicates decision making. Which in turn leads to people starting to ignore the mailing list or even unsubscribing. Usually the people who do a lot of work are the ones leaving, while those who prefer talk over work will stay... See bikeshed.com to learn where the term comes from.

Dealing with bikeshedding

So bikeshedding is bad and it's something to avoid. How? There are a few ways in which you can avoid it.

1 - Change the culture

First of all, bikeshedding is a 'cultural' thing. If it's seen as acceptable, if people say 'all opinions are valuable here', well, it won't stop. So people will have to speak up against it. Tell others "ok, it's been enough, let's move on" or "This is not on-topic, please don't do that". This is a responsibility of all people on the list in the spirit of Edmond Burke's "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing" ;-)

2 - Be a good admin

But preventing bikeshedding and off-topic comments it is especially a responsibility for list admins and moderators: stop bikeshedding threads. On forums this is usually quite well established, on mailing lists less so.

Intervening as list or IRC channel admin should be done in the proper way: "praise in public, punish in private" is the golden rule here. Tell people privately that it's been enough. When a big group in thread engages in bikeshedding, give a general warning like "Ok, enough bikeshedding, please end this thread". It is possible on most mailinglists to block threads, so that might be a good next step if things don't improve. If people keep engaging in bikeshedding or other abusive things and don't listen (or fight your decision) a 24 hour ban can be a good cooling down period for some.

Oh, that's censorship? So we should allow a few people to make a whole list useless to protect their freedom of speech, you say? Realize that anyone can exercise that right in many places! A community has every right to have rules protecting their communication channels. openSUSE has these described on the mailing lists wiki page and our Guiding Principles.

3 - Try to turn it around

One thing a moderator but also anyone else on the mailing list could do is recognize the value of people who bikeshed. I've been talking all negative about it, but the discussions and sometimes conflicts which take place on the list also show that people care. One interesting tip which was brought up at CLS was to give people who often are involved in bikeshedding and conflicts a 'job'. After all, they seem to care a lot - giving them some responsibilities diverts their (negative) energy to something positive! It takes skills to turn a negative into a positive but it can be a powerful thing.

4 - From the start

A way of preventing bikeshedding lies in how topics are brought to the mailing list. Not only the kind of topics (irrelevant topics are of course bad) but also how you start. Yes, we are an open community, but that doesn't mean that you can't prepare your mails. It can help a lot if you first talk to some key people involved in what you want to discuss and include in your first message a list of the 'obvious' arguments. This prevents the first 20 mails from being trivial and keeps the thread short. Which in turn prevents these basic arguments from being brought up again and again because they people didn't bother to read the huge thread!

We need plenty of bike sheds, let's build one in each color...

So...

If people take others up on their behavior and when list or channel admins moderate actively a lot of bikeshedding can be stopped. And prevented - yes, people learn, albeit slowly. You'll get a few fights and disagreements as those 'corrected' often don't like being corrected. But realize that the 'silent majority' will be grateful for it and the list will become more useful. And discussions can be shortened considerably if the topics are presented well prepared.

I do think that we, in openSUSE, allow too much bikeshedding at times, which hurts us. Feel free to argue with me at the openSUSE conference if you agree or disagree! But don't bikeshed about it ;-)

I think openSUSE can improve with the lessons learned in other, more established communities where the culture is so that bikeshedding rarely happens.

Bretzn at oSC

2011-09-06T20:29:00.000+02:00

So there is the cool Bretzn project which was about creating a plugin for IDE's to compile and publish code via the Open Build Service and the Open Collaboration Services and then letting the user install, rate and comment on apps via a desktop client.

Unfinished

This last step, the client, unfortunately isn't finished yet - you can find the current code on gitorious but it still needs work. The underlying stuff is done, however so it shouldn't be that much work to finish it. The team working on it had to move on to other things - jobs, clients, real life stuff.

Too bad, as that means the chances of this making it into openSUSE 12.1 aren't big. So Bretzn is looking for help! According to Frank Karlitschek, finishing the client shouldn't take much more than 6 weeks volunteer's work. It's currently done with QML but obviously a contributor could take it in another direction. Sure is, however, that whoever takes it on can count on some pretty good mentoring from Frank, Frederik and others.

You?

So - anyone around who's interested in a cool, cutting-edge GUI project for openSUSE & KDE? Note that in typical openSUSE fashion, this tool is not meant to be openSUSE specific - or even KDE specific. The Appstream project is working on a GNOME GUI based on the Ubuntu Software Center and sharing most of the infrastructure. It's a cross-distro effort, with people from Fedora, Debian and other distro's involved!

If you're interested, contact me (just post below) or talk to us at the openSUSE Conference!!!

strategy!

2011-08-31T14:35:00.002+02:00

A few weeks ago the results of the voting for the openSUSE Strategy came in. 90% agreement, nice!

And another number - I've talked about the openSUSE strategy in no less than 8 posts already. Sjeeminee. Re-reading, I noticed this one where I mentioned that Fedora was also 'doing strategy'. I see that the Fedora Board has created a Vision statement.

Obviously Fedora is quite different from openSUSE (see their Leadership system) and they worked quite differently compared to what we did. Other communities are also having 'strategic discussions'. Looks like we set a trend ;-)

It was quite a learning experience. Doing this in such a large community, with so many ways to let people provide input - wow. I think we did very well. Thanks in part to tools like co-ment and of course the input of many people. I think it's impressive that we did it so open and bottom-up!

In any case, I'm happy with the outcome and I'd like to echo the statement in the article: we're still looking for feedback and further refinement and the strategy mailinglist will stay open! And you're always welcome to provide input in-person at the openSUSE conference.

10 steps to building a local community

2011-08-30T21:41:00.016+02:00

I've had the question a few times: how do I build a community [here]? With here being in a variety of countries and places. As I speak to quite a few people who lead local communities, I decided to put together a presentation with 10 steps. Feedback on this is obviously welcome, such a thing is never complete! The presentation can be found here and the notes have far more that what I put below.

Step 1: just start!

Start organizing meetings around the subject of your passion! That's all it takes. Pick an interesting subject, find yourself a speaker and get going. Start small: invite friends and collegues. A first meeting with 5 people is fine!

find a free venue, small is OK. Meeting room at company is always nice, but universities and schools often have something too
pick a time after work. 7-9PM works usually fine.
Make sure you have coffee, tea, cake. Not full catering or dinner but basics
try to offer this for free (see Step 5: sponsorship)

Step 2: Get interesting stuff to attract visitors

People come out of interest. So, you have to have interesting meetings. For that, speaker quality is crucial.

Get a good speaker to talk about an interesting subject! Someone who KNOWS HIS STUFF, preferably not a marketing person... but an engineer or so.
meet them before the session to get to know them
make sure they have a good presentation (eg avoid death-by-powerpoint etc), help them to improve if needed
maintain a good relation with speakers - you might want to invite them again!

Step 3: Make sure they stay

Make people feel welcome! A few tips:

make sure you talk to new people and introduce them to others. And introduce them shortly to the group before the talks!
if your group grows bigger, pick someone to do the introduction for you: appoint a 'director of communication'!

Step 4: Advertise

Getting the word out is important.

set up a nice website with info on the upcoming meetings (something blog-like is fine!)
write short reports on the meetings
use social media: facebook, twitter/identi.ca etcetera. Be sure to automate as much as you can, often you can link those sites to your blog.
provide a place to talk online. Forum, mailinglist, comments on your blogs...

Step 5: Find sponsors

To pay for the coffee and tea it helps to have sponsors.

try to find local sponsors and don't stop at one so you don't overtax that one sponsor
ask in the meeting if people know potential sponsors
don't ask too little money.If you ask $250 you might get 3 sponsors and if you ask $1000 you might only get 1 but - well, do the math... You must realize that $250 or $1000 is almost the same for a company, considering how much trouble they have to go through!
Let sponsors pay for things directly to save yourself the tax trouble; or use American Express gift cheques
reward the sponsors: put their name on your web site, talk to them about what you do, invite them, let them know they matter!

Step 6: Bring friends

Encourage your visitors to talk to others and bring friends. Reward them with some goodie if they do!

Step 7: Reward creativity

Often, people come up with interesting, fun, weird, creative stuff. They create a nice logo for your local community, postcards with the logo, want to give a origami course to fold it, stuff like that.
SUPPORT IT. Creativity is good; it's fun and showing the love! Talk about it, give people a chance to show what they did. It's good teambuilding!

Step 8: Find minions

You need to off-load work at some point. Find people to help you!

give responsibility, don't micro-manage. Mistakes are OK, be patient!
value all contributions, no matter how small, it always helps
give credit where credit is due. If someone takes care of something for a while, give them a title. Nothing's wrong with being Coffee Master!

Step 9: Be ready for bad weather

Keep the community healthy and fun. That means also to take action when the harmony is threatened.

set up a simple code-of-conduct on your site. Nothing complex, just "behave or you're not welcome"
if someone mis-behaves, take them apart, talk to them. If they persist, tell them they can't come for a while. Don't argue: it's YOUR event, YOU make the rules
if a public apology is warranted, do it yourself. Be non-specific, just say "something not OK happened, I'm sorry. The person(s) involved are sorry and won't do it again."
if the people involved don't learn, they're not welcome anymore, period. If you let it drag too long to keep that single person in the group you can loose the whole community! Nobody is worth that, even if they do a lot of work and don't mean it that badly.

Step 10: Have fun!

With all the tips and ideas in here, you would almost miss the most crucial and important point. If YOU don't have fun, you'll be burned out quickly. So make sure it's fun for yourself.

And bonus openSUSE tips

For openSUSE and other communities which have a connection to a global community, I have an additional tip: stay connected!

Follow the international news site(s), blogs and mailinglists. Blog yourself about the events, let people know your community exists.
And the other way around: discuss the international news in your local community. A 30 min "what happened this week/month" can be fun and interesting.
Make sure you invite people from the international community to big events in your country; let the team know and let them meet with the international community members!
use the materials the international community creates:

translate articles or discuss the topics in there;
ask for goodies, DVD's to hand out, other materials!
use the travel sponsorship where needed to go with your team to events!
use the materials on the marketing wiki, talking points, release announce information and other stuff to make sure you say the right things!
and use the graphics, folders, flyers and other things created by the international team!

have a release party around releases!
come to the openSUSE conference to talk with other leaders of local communities and learn!

CLS, DS, COSCUP... Plasma Active, ARM, ...

2011-08-29T09:04:00.001+02:00

It's been quite a while since I wrote a decent blog and it might be a while longer until I really get to it. I do have a lot to write about, however. First about the Community Leadership Summit - the notes of which I'd like to turn into a few blogs. Second, the Desktop Summit, which was awesome. And third my trip to Taiwan. Finally the upcoming openSUSE conference which is going to be awesome. But let me get the most important stuff out of the way first.

Desktop Summit Awesomeness

At the Desktop Summit (which imho was a great success) I organized 3 food cooking parties where we made some Asian-inspired curries. I've put the recipes on-line for those who asked for it. Find them on the Desktop Summit Food page.

At those cooking evenings we had between 25 and 30 people join us each night. It was big fun, we had good food (and beer and more) and I really intend to do it again next time. As a matter of fact, I hope to do the cooking again at the openSUSE Conference. And remember - if you don't use openSUSE that doesn't mean you can't come and enjoy the company, food and discussions about all kinds of things. See for yourself in the detailed program. You can also learn how IO travels in the kernel, how to use the mtux console multiplexer, the sessions about GIT, cross-cultural communication, GCC and Kernel stuff and more. And that's just stuff from day one, we have about 100 sessions in 4 days.

Talking about cool stuff, on Tuesday we'll have an 8-bit music workshop... Seriously, I look forward to that. If you want to join, hurry up, the conf takes place September 11-14!

!Fail

Taipei and Plasma Active

Last week I made a trip to Taiwan to meet the openSUSE community there. There's quite a bunch and they did awesome at the booth at COSCUP. Really cool. We had lots of interesting stuff there, flyers, geeko's, stickers, USB sticks and Aaron left his Plasma Active tablet (runs openSUSE, of course) at the booth a few times. That thing drew quite a crowd - and rightly so. I hadn't seen that much of it but Plasma Active is really something very interesting. It's a unique touch tablet UI, yet easy to use and intuitive. Build in just a few months it's amazing to see how well it works already. The team aims to stabilize it in the next few months and I'm absolutely certain it will result in a pretty darn impressive product.

Aaron spoke quite a bit about how well the Open Build Service works for them during development. The team works closely with an interaction designer and obviously she's not such a hugely technical person. With a traditional development process someone would have to do packages for her - or she'd have to learn how to check out a repository and then compile and install stuff herself. Thanks to OBS, packages are build continuously and very easy - a dev checks some code in and the next day the designer can give feedback! Continuous build services are not unique of course but they usually don't come easily, don't produce packages, etc. build.opensuse.org has an easy web interface, can build for all major Linux distro's and architectures (yes, including ARM) and is of course entirely free.run it in-house,

I'm quite proud that openSUSE proves to be so successful for the Plasma Active team. They also build packages for MeeGo, as they want to support ARM systems. I know several openSUSE contributors want to have ARM in openSUSE, well, Plasma Active is at the openSUSE conference so we can meet and talk about it there...

Anyhow. So Taiwan was fun. You can find some pics of COSCUP on flickr and I have an image of two of my hosts as well as fellow visitor Aaron below :D

You'll probably find all three of them at the openSUSE conference too, btw.

DesktopSummit about to start!

2011-08-05T11:50:00.000+02:00

I'm already late to be at Humbolt and help the team to prepare for the arrival of many hundreds of Free Software desktop* contributors.

For those who missed the mail by Claudia with some last minute information, let me include the most important stuff:

Pre-regisration starts at 16:00 at C-base, coolest place in Berlin. Be there for a badge and beer! If you can't make it you can register on Saturday but you'll have to enter the building via the back ;-)
Lunch vouchers for food at the uni cost 17 euro
Yes, bad weather here, lots of rain. Get Umbrella's...

For more info, see the the desktop summit wiki and here. Contact info can be found here.

Have a good trip if you're not there, and if you've arrived already, enjoy your stay!!!

*I'm unsure what to say these days - "desktop" doesn't cut it, but "UI" or user interface is too vague, user experience too fancy, "desktop/mobile" too long etc etc etc...

Harmony horrors

2011-07-31T15:07:00.000+02:00

Besides the positive things, there's some less nice stuff to talk about.

On the other side of the web, I kept discussing Harmony with Allison (Canonical) until I asked something and got no response anymore.

Bringing up arguments like "it provides more clarity to contributors, a 'check point' to look at the legal situation and reassurance of legal status to users" or the already-debunked "but it is helps protect the copyrights and handling of disappearing contributors" doesn't convince me that contributors should sign away their code while running the risk TO GET SUED BY THE COMPANY THEY JUST GAVE THEIR CODE TO FOR WRITING IT IN THE FIRST PLACE. Seriously, that's a risk, read Michael's post.

The whole problem with CLA's and the like is and remains that you give but don't get even the least of protection or right. All risk remains with you - if you overlooked any patents on the code you just signed away to the company, they can sue you, or let others do so. And you can infringe on patents of the code you yourself just wrote. And in case you're defending yourself in court, they can sell your patents you need to defend yourself to the company attacking you (or they already might have, years ago). So they get to monetize your contribution any way they see fit, including selling it to the highest bidder, patenting it and suing anyone who writes something similar. You get - well, what do you mean, you want something?

You got to write code for them, didn't you? For free! You should be happy you got to contribute to such a great company! Now get out of the way or we sue you!

Honestly, I wasn't enthusiastic about Harmony but as I'm no lawyer and not really capable of reading the legal speak of the (hard to get to) licenses I didn't know it was that bad. Ok, it's a 1.0 release, signing it might burn your house or let anyone sue you. I'd say a warning on the site might be in place...

Read Michael Meeks' interesting insights. Little to say after that, imho. The pro arguments are not convincing at all, the con's are big. I'd recommend to never sign a CLA or work for any company requiring you to do so - unless they pay you of course. After all, that's the whole point:

If a company wants ownership to your code, they should pay you!

KDE release on Radio Antwerp

2011-07-30T15:04:00.000+02:00

As usual lots going on. I haven't mentioned it anywhere yet, so: congrats to all KDE peeps for the release of SC 4.7 ;-)

I presented the release on Radio Antwerp Centraal a few days ago. I had helped out a bit with the release announcement but hadn't had a recent look so I had to catch up to the major highlights quickly. Worked out great, though. Also discussed Tumbleweed and GNOME with the radio dude. Not sure what the initial plan was but I found myself talk for a full program in the end... Surprise, huh?

On the other side of the world I went to CLS last week. Still have to turn my notes into something readable - struggling with crappy sleep, family visits and other time-eating things. And the DS is upcoming... But I'll blog about this later, promise!

Harmony 1.0 is out

2011-07-17T18:38:00.002+02:00

Well, well. Almost nobody noticed as they didn't make much noise about it, but Harmony 1.0 is out. I made my opinions quite clear in my blog and column about Harmony and said we'd have to judge once something came out. Well, let me just quote Richard Fontana from Red Hat, who's saying what I think (but more politely):

(...) I say to Mr. Shuttleworth, with all respect, that I cannot join him in any support of the Harmony initiative.

I surely don't support it anymore than he does and agree that as far as I can tell, Harmony has much more potential to do damage than good in the world of Free Software. But let's see how the discussion goes at the Desktop Summit Panel on Copyright Assignment, who knows, Mark might convince us...

Edit: read this blog by Bradley Kuhn if you want to know why Harmony is harmful... Long but good.

oSC2011 CfP & reg

2011-07-14T17:00:00.011+02:00

Titles are supposed to be short, right?

The full text would of course be "openSUSE Conference 2011 Call for Papers and Registration" and yes, that's what it is about: on Monday we've extended the deadline for the CfP so you can still shoot in session proposals. And today the registration has opened so you can let us know you'll be there :D

We want to let you all use this conference to get something done which is why we focus so much on interactive sessions. BoFs, workshops, hack sessions... Think about yourself! What do YOU want to accomplish? What does YOUR team need to talk about? What features should be finished? What decisions should be made? Use the conference for that!

Shoot in a proposal here!!!

And as I said, registration is open, register now!

BTW I just updated the links to openSUSE conference posters, there are two of them now. One by Robert Lihm with a big Qr code, the other, designed by two Greek Georges, is a bit more Green :D

Open Build Service and Renault

2011-07-12T16:31:00.000+02:00

A while ago, Renault employee Xavier notified the OBS mailing list that Renault is using the Open Build Service internally for building packages.

Anyone up for asking Xavier a few questions and writing a nice article for news.o.o about this? It's easy as the mail already contains a lot of info, otherwise we can ask Xavier for some more input and I'll obviously help with the writing...

Getting the new MS fonts in LibreOffice - or rather, forget about it

2011-07-06T15:13:00.000+02:00

Personal learning point of the day: when on the website of a company with dubious business and legal practices READ the fineprint...

I already wrote most of the following blog (actually more, including making screenshots) before I discovered the fineprint leading me to write the above...

The Font Issue

If you get a document with fonts you don't have, the result can be bad. Layout will surely not be proper and for some reason LO and Caligra pick a horrible replacement on my computer - Alien Leage, see screenshot. Guaranteed to make any normal document unreadable. And the idiotic 'reading mode' of LO makes it impossible to change the font until you've saved the file somewhere. The benefit of that mode always escaped me in MS Office, at least I knew how to turn it off...

Solution

Anyway, enough ranting - a solution. If you don't have the new Microsoft fonts like the new Win7 fonts including the often-used Calibri, you can start to search the web for obscure download sites where, after you decided not to enjoy some online casino, enlarge a body part or clean your computer from viruses, you might find potential candidates in zip or rar form.

Luckily, there is a better way - get the stuff from the source. Install the free Microsoft powerpoint viewer with Wine. Serious! You can get it here. The second image in this blog shows the three major steps you have to go through to install this using PlayOnLinux (plain wine might not work but this does). In the end it shows a selection dialog which you have to point to the executable and the font files would obviously end up in C:\Windows\fonts of the PlayOnLinux map (~/.PlayOnLinux/).

The snag

I would recommend to do this, if I had not discovered the following section on the download page of the PowerPoint Viewer site:

You may use the fonts that accompany the PowerPoint Viewer only to display and print content from a device running a Microsoft Windows operating system.

What a ridiculous limitation... In other words, people send us documents but it's illegal to view them properly. I call it abuse of market power and it makes me feel how I imagine Thom felt when he wrote about Microsoft's extortion against Android makers. If you can't win by creating a better product...

And of course I only discovered this AFTER writing this blog etc etc.

Sigh.

I'm happy to be active in the world of Free Software, openSUSE and KDE. We invite our 'competitors' to our conference or simply share it with them! We're not afraid as we believe in ourselves. Looks like Redmond lost confidence in their own products long ago...

oS strategy

2011-07-04T15:55:00.000+02:00

The voting for the oS strategy ended on the 30th but the board decided to extend it a bit. Which makes sense, quite a few members were not aware of the voting. Seems like many of them don't read the planet very often ;-)

So, we will extend it with two weeks & send out a mail to all members notifying them of the voting...

Obviously, you don't have to wait for that mail - if you read this you can also
go here, log in and vote!

From the email:

What do I vote for?

We realize the vast majority of you simply prefer to focus on writing code and building packages. 'strategy' might not be the most interesting thing in the world. However, it does influence at the very least how we communicate about ourselves and how we are seen. Think about texts on our websites, what our ambassadors say about us at conferences. This is an important goal of the strategy - not only decide upon the direction we want (after all, the current document simply describes the status quo) but also define our communication!

Obviously there are many more reasons why we did the strategy discussion - after all, many people asked for it, not just marketing. But communication is an important part of it... And:

We need to know if the end result of the discussions about strategy reflect how you see openSUSE. Even if you disagree, it is important for us to know that - we accept any outcome!

In short, please vote, even if you want to neither answer yes or no - there is a third option ("Abstain, I can't decide").

Note that the document isn't meant to be final and should be revised in the future. That's also why we're still very much open to feedback!

Was it useful?

2011-07-02T19:51:00.001+02:00

For the openSUSE conference, a number of people has worked hard to provide tips and information on giving talks, organizing BoF's, setting up a Workshop or managing a Hacksession.

We developed a few resources:

The Guidelinesfor speakers (and specifically the Tips and tricks, like the extensive how-to on preparing a talk)
The articles on news.opensuse.org:

We spend quite some time on it, but now I wonder: who has seen this? Who has actually read it? Who has USED it for anything? Below a nice (javascript...) survey which might help me answer that question :D

Free Web Poll

Blog: Dutch KDE BBQ

2011-06-30T10:55:00.000+02:00

Sunday, Juli 10th I'll organize a KDE BBQ at my place, Cooklaan 7 in Utrecht. Anyone, including openSUSE or GNOME people more than welcome :D

You're welcome from about 14:00 and I'd appreciate it if you can give me a heads-up on Saturday so I can make sure I have enough food :D

The bbq will be done Dutch style - bring something yourself. But please, not too much, I don't want to have to eat meat for the next 2 weeks. I'll make sure there is some beer, veggies, bread etc of course. If the Weather gods don't like us we can eat inside and I might turn it into a curry cooking party or so but we'll decide that later on. In any case I'll take both herbivores and carnivores into account!

Getting there:
Public Transport: Go to Utrecht Central station, take the tram. Get out by Vasco Da Gamalaan. When you get out the tram, go right, then left to cross the street and go further in that direction. You'll pass a LIDL at which point you have to go left and you will find the Cooklaan as the first street on the left. Ring the bell at nr 7 and look sweet so I'll let you in.
Car: use open streetmap, Google Maps or TomTom... Don't forget to look sweet at the door ;-)

Desktop Summit: register your BoF!!!

2011-06-29T12:12:00.002+02:00

A few weeks ago the registration for BoF's and workshops opened. Now, it is almost July 3rd - the deadline!!! So if you have something to discuss at the Desktop Summit, be smart. Not registering doesn't mean you can't have your BoF but it DOES mean it might have to be 9 in the morning, the day after a party. And we all know how well attended such BoFs are ;-)

Go to this page and register your workshop or BoF!

While on the subject of reminders:
- register for the Desktop Summit if you haven't already!!!
- Send in your session proposals for the openSUSE conference!

Time to register!

2011-06-22T22:47:00.000+02:00

The Desktop Summit is getting closer. That means you really need to start planning travel and hotel and of course - register!

We need to plan our event properly, and for that we need the visitors to register in time. We might not be able to get you network access or have room for you in the social events like parties or trips if you don't register in time, so it's in everybody's interest if you do :D

If you're still wondering if you should go, remember this: if you are interested in the Linux Desktop, this is THE place to be. All key players are there! You can get to know them, learn, share thoughts and ideas.

And not to forget, we have a STUNNING line-up of talks, awesome keynote speakers and of course much much more.

So go, register today!

DS call for participation: BoF's and Workshops

2011-06-20T12:34:00.001+02:00

The Desktop Summit schedule for the talks and presentations has been published a couple of weeks ago. Now Jon announced that it's time to start sending in sessions for workshops, BOF's and hack/teaching sessions! The dot has a more extensive announcement.

The important points:

All forms of hands-on activities that aim to further the Free Desktop are welcomed. Examples of such sessions include BoF, project and cross-project meetings, workshops, hacking sessions and training/teaching sessions. Each session is self-organized and it is up to the hosts and participants to decide if the session is to be loosely oriented around a set of topics, or have a well-defined agenda.

Each session is meant to be open to anyone who is interested, if you want to organize a closed session on a subject, contact the organisation (details below). We encourage participants to make use of the fact that the Desktop Summit will bring together people from several different communities, and the unique opportunities this creates.

And:

The deadline for pre-registered sessions is July 3rd. Sessions registered before this time will be scheduled by the organization team between July 3rd and July 10th.

For sessions registered after this date, attendees themselves are responsible for finding a time and location for the session. Rooms will be available for this for the duration of the Workshop & BoF days, and the wiki can be used to coordinate.

This means that if you schedule in advance we can make sure there is no overlap between these sessions or talks and that the order makes sense. For example, first a talk introducing QML, then a workshop on QML & Plasma, then a hack session to write some applets. If you don't schedule now, you run the risk of having a BoF at 9 in the morning the day after a party, too :D

Note that obviously, you can't be sure yet about the topic of some sessions. Especially BoF's are supposed to be about relevant, recent things. So you're not expected to have a perfect topic yet, a rough outline is enough!

Now, go forth and shoot in a BoF, workshop or similar Read-Write session!

hettes and giving back Windows licenses

2011-06-17T10:00:00.001+02:00

The dutch hettes is an open source webshop. I've been talking to them as they want to ship openSUSE on their computers.

Now they bump into an issue: the well known Microsoft tax is unavoidable, even if you don't want or use it! They can't ship back the licenses as MS doesn't accept that. In effect, their customers have to pay Microsoft even though they don't use their software.

It is called Tying and illegal, but who has the financial power to do something about it? In the USA, this has been solved - MS has been ordered to accept customers who send back licenses and give them $30 for each. They don't make it easy but at least it is possible now. However, as far as I know, in NL there is no such a rule and I'm not sure about the rest of the EU either. Hettes is talking to the Department of Economics in the Netherlands but frankly, I'm not sure that'll help much.

The question I'd like to put for you all is: what can Hettes do? Is there a way to get their monies back? How can we help them with this silly situation?

openSUSE conference sponsorship

2011-06-16T12:28:00.001+02:00

On news.opensuse.org an article went out recently to ask for sponsors for the openSUSE conference. As the openSUSE conference this year is expected to attract some 500 attendees, we need a serious budget. Surely, the Platinum sponsor (SUSE) can take care of much, but we need to be able to support our many community members to come to the conference.

International

If you live in India, Brazil, Taiwan or Australia, it is not cheap to fly to Nuernberg. And we do want those people there! We are an diverse, international community, something to cherish. But we can't afford that without some serious sponsorship. So that's why I ask for help. We need YOUR help to find sponsors, contacts in companies, anything. Please, help us out, let us know! You can email me (jos at opensuse), or Izabel Valverde (izabelvalverde at opensuse).

On the value of contributing opinions

2011-06-08T17:00:00.003+02:00

I recently read a mail on the KDE core-devel mailinglist by Eike Hein. It was quite a good description of the value of opinions and ideas for a FOSS project - something I've been thinking about quite a bit lately.

What is the value of an idea, suggestion or opinion? That is a much harder question to answer than it might seem. Free Software projects solicit user feedback in a variety of ways. For example via a bug tracker or comments on announcements. Users are sometimes asked to participate in mailing lists or on forums. Interestingly, both users and developers often complain about the process and results. Users feel they are not heard, developers say the comments are unfriendly, de-motivating or useless.

In Eike's case, he commented that the user was

sort of implying that the current placement of things in workspace isn't already the result of a thought and decision process, while not actually having done your homework yet on what the purpose of the components in question is

So, he felt attacked a bit - the user makes it seem like the developers just did something at random. And the user didn’t bother to inform himself, so the comments aren’t useful either.

value of input

Taking this serious, it raises the bar for input from an user: first of all, he or she has to assume thought has been put in the decisions by the developers. It might not seem that way sometimes - and it is not always entirely the case. But often, it also happens that the developers simply had more or other use cases in mind. As developer, you have more than one user so you have to make your application fit with more than one way of working. In this case, Eike elaborated on the design decisions here.

Second, input is clearly only useful if it is well thought out. Hein comments further in the mail:

Sorry but that doesn't cut it - starting a discussion like this on that sort of rickety foundation is likely to end up as a http://bikeshed.org/ discussion because the quality bar for participation is already so low: It's easy to have an opinion, but hard to argue for it, so everybody will chime in with a few quick words, and it won't amount to anything substantial.

I personally would like to echo his statement. Yes, opinions are easy - everyone has them. That doesn’t mean they are useful. Unfortunately, without putting in a serious amount of thought, they end up being trivial.

I stumbled into this myself, about 7 years ago. I was active in KDE-promo at the time. Being a student, I had time on my hands to read up on what was going on in KDE development on the KDE-core-devel mailing list. And I voiced my opinion on things there as well. Which was considered - well, noise. I wasn't a developer and most of what I had to say was subjective or irrelevant. This was, at some point, simply told to me in a friendly, private mail. I realized that the person writing that was very much correct and refrained from cluttering the threads on the mailing list from that point on.

So what then?

So this knowledge puts a burden on whoever wants to really contribute thoughts and ideas. Quoting Eike again:

Wanting to shape the product is awesome (we need more people looking at the big picture), but the only way to have debate like this is to do the up-front work so a thread can hit the ground running.

So, yes, throwing some trivial comments at a project is not helpful. If you want your input to mean anything, to be helpful, you'll have to put in more thought. Find out what the background is, why those decisions were made. This is not a trivial amount of work, I recognize that. Most users won't have time to put in that much effort in something.

But it also means that yes, developers do welcome input. They need it to create better products. And you don’t have to be a coder to help. You don’t have to be a designer or a marketing professional. You DO have to commit a serious effort, however. "talk is cheap" is not always true, but very often.

All this doesn't mean that if you're new, un-experienced or not all-knowing, you can't contribute. Of course you can. "There are no stupid questions, only stupid answers" and all that. But you have to be serious. You have to realize that adding trivial comments in a thread on a mailing list has a serious cost: time of the people reading it. Time which could have been spend on reading more important things, or even better: writing code.

openSUSE

In openSUSE, the -project mailinglist is known for having a (too large) number of trivial comments. In his announcement of Tumbleweed Greg mentioned that there had been discussions for years about doing a "rolling update" version of openSUSE on mailinglists and at conferences, but nothing has happened yet. He indicated that this is something he sees a lot. A word has even been invented for it: bikeshedding. Which basically means that people have lots of opinions on simple subjects but this provides little actual value. And when asking for input on a more complicated matter, where it is really needed, often responses are few and far between. This is exactly the problem Eike talked about. Many, if not most developers have unsubscribed from the list, or don't read it anymore. That is a serious issue. Think about it - does your opinion actually add anything to a discussion? Or is it just noise which keeps others away?

bikeshed.org is recommended reading on this subject!

Strategy voting has started!

2011-06-07T17:00:00.021+02:00

Awesomeness!!!

Yup - we've got a strategy proposal under vote. Sorry it took so long. Everyone, both from the board and the strategy team, has been busy with the openSUSE 11.4 release and the upcoming openSUSE conference. But the board has asked Thomas Thym to get it out 2 weeks ago and he asked me to create a openSUSE Members poll (he's not a member yet). And I did. So if you're an openSUSE member, go to connect.opensuse.org and cast your vote!

Meaning

I've blogged before about what this strategy is and isn't about but I'd like to re-iterate it one more time.

No, it's not about finding a perfect description of all of us. We're way too diverse for that to ever work. It also isn't about carefully describing a grand, detailed plan for what we will do. We don't tell our contributors what they can and can't work on. And it's not about writing a sexy and engaging text. The marketing team will do the marketing texts, this is too much based on compromise for that to be possible.

It is about having a reasonably accurate description of who we are, what we want and where we stand.

Yes, it does say some things about where we might not want to go or where we focus. That is because the majority of us focuses on certain things and doesn't care about other things. IF someone wants to take those things on, change that focus, fine. But they have to be prepared to do a LOT of work and get little support. In a sense, this 'strategy' can tell people they should join openSUSE because we are the perfect community to do what they want. Or not...

Now surely we can and will revise it in the future, but in small steps. We'll update it if people start doing cool new stuff, for example. We already had to add Tumbleweed and Evergreen! And if enough people want to work on mobile devices, ARM or other stuff - well, we just do it and then change our 'strategy'.

So, now go to connect.opensuse.org and cast your vote!

green picture in the article

On the green "I want you" picture on news.opensuse.org: I got it off the web and used Krita to make it green. I know, Krita is meant as an artist tool, a painting app. Wrong tool for the job. I just didn't think about using the Gimp... Actually, on my laptop I usually use Showfoto for these things which is far superior to both for basic photo manipulation. Forgot to use that too. Yes, right tool for the job isn't always high on my agenda, hehe.

The image in the previous Milestone 1 article WAS made with the right tool: Krita again. Just 5 minutes with the right brushes and layers and it's awesome... Obviously, this is NOT a serious proposal for openSUSE 12.1 artwork.

GSOC mentoring

2011-06-06T11:44:00.000+02:00

Hi all,

Dave Neary has written an interesting blogpost on 'effective mentoring'.

If you don't feel like reading the whole thing (it's big, yes) I can give you some highlights on common issues that make mentoring less effective:

communication. Apprentices often expect their mentor to check in, the mentor expects apprentices to ask questions if they have any. This means it is a wise thing to contact your apprentice and:

ask how it is going, if they need any help
tell them they have to be pro-active: ask questions and give you reports. Just to correct their perception if they expected YOU to ask them! Make clear it has to be pull from their side, it won't be push from yours. Their GSOC project is their responsibility.

Mentoring doesn't stop in August: realize YOU are the friendly face to the project for the student/apprentice. Please be prepared to keep talking to the students and help them, even (especially!) if GSOC is over! And tell them so.
Regular meeting are really important. Have a weekly IRC chat and just talk. Both about personal things (get to know each other!) and about the project.
And please tell the students to help each other and others. That is both a learning experience for them, AND they understand others who are new better than anyone!

If you have questions, please ask on the mentor mailinglist, not only on IRC. Others can learn from the answers. Others here includes me, btw, I love to know what issues you bump into!

Good luck mentoring and remember, we want the students to STAY, not just fire some code at us and go again ;-)

Harmony

2011-06-02T23:31:00.000+02:00

I was feeling opinionated on legal stuff recently. Don't worry, it doesn't happen often and I wrote it off in a column on Harmony. Read it here on linuxuser.co.uk and feel free to comment below. After all, I love flame wars. But I have something else I'd like to get of my chest, about pragmatism vs idealism.

Pragmatism and idealism

Now before I start, I'm not very much interested in legal stuff. On the other hand, I use the term 'Free Software' as opposed to 'Open Source' for a reason. I do care about the Freedom part in what we do. While it's not a huge issue for relatively rich people who live in relatively free countries (like the vast majority of European citizens for example), it bites when you live in Egypt or Iran. Take the GPLv2 vs the GPLv3. The GPLv2 ensures 'code' stays free. If you have a device with modified GPLv2 code on it, you have to share the code. But you don't have to allow your customers to replace the code on your device. That is unfortunate for iPhone users in the USA because it means they pay more for some things than they would have had otherwise. But for BlackBerry users in Iran, who can't set up their own Blackberry server to keep the prying eyes of their government out of their phone communication, it is a life-or-death situation!

Hence I completely, fully understand those who are pragmatic: if you look at yourself and most of your friends, there is no huge issue. And you don't have to be an activist. I'm not an activist, at least, most of the time. But when I see what happened in Egypt and then hear Mark Pesce talk about how he's working on a way to eliminate any central control over our communication (make the internet truly free and independent) I'm happy and proud to be part of the Free Software movement.

Sometimes the lines between pragmatism, extremism and full-fledged nutty-ism are vague - sure. The company which hired me has had its share of criticism - some fair, lots of it in the 'nutty' category. Such things often hurt more than they help. This complicates things - we want companies to work with us, but only following our rules. Mark recently was interviewed about those things, and he criticized this attitude strongly. And to some degree, I agree with him. But I also see the point of extremism here: you don't advance your cause if you water it down to nothing.

So it has to be about balance. And this, I guess, is a personal thing. Some people pride themselves on not working on Free Software for any company. Well, I did that for about 10 years and I feel I can make a lot more difference with the time and resources I now have. But at the same time, yes, my paycheck also means I have other obligations now. For me and what I do it is a net gain, for others maybe not.

Well, I don't have any answers here, just more questions. Sorry about that. I guess it's the nature of the thing!

Black and white

Feel free to discuss or attack and defend, my blog is open. I do ask people to be polite and show at least SOME cerebral activity, the brain-stem like responses I sometimes get really don't add to the discussion. Oh, and realize please that the world is not black and white. Unfortunate, I know, but it's reality and ignoring it doesn't make it go away.

Promoting openSUSE at a conference

2011-05-19T17:31:00.005+02:00

openSUSE has many ambassadors who go out to conferences to talk about openSUSE like last week at LinuxTag. The marketing team provides them with a number of resources:

The openSUSE talking points
The openSUSE artwork repository
The openSUSE ambassador wiki

Each of those is frequently undergoing changes and improvements. The latest change to the talking points, for example, introduces three elevator pitches to help you quickly explain openSUSE to people. Input (preferably in the form of fixes to the linked wiki page!) is of course welcome.

The artwork repository offers lots of poster- and flyer artwork as well as a number of ready-made presentations. Unfortunately git, which is where this is all hosted, is not super-nice as a way to distribute content. The presentations are up to 25 mb, which you can't download from gitorious directly... Luckily, Bruno "Tigerfoot" Friedman has set up a nice mirror where you can download the presentations.

However, for input, git merge requests are certainly preferred :D

The Ambassador portal on the wiki leads you to lots of good resources, like how to organize an event.

So, ambassadors, use what we have - and let us know if it works for you or even better - just improve it!

LinuxTag 2011

2011-05-17T11:29:00.001+02:00

Last week openSUSE had 30 Geekos at LinuxTag in Berlin. Awesome times, with the exception of the last day when we figured out the power supplies of our nice big touchscreens were stolen... And to think the thieves left the beamer?!?

Talks

But aside that little snag, we rocked. At the booth we had mini-presentations, which weren't as successful as last year, but the 15 presentations we gave in the big rooms worked out just fine. Of course, Vincent Untz had to give his cross-distribution ollaboration talk as first presentation on the day after the party and my own openSUSE 11.4 intro was scheduled at the same time as fellow Geeko Eckhart's talk about Wayland.

Still, I'm quite sure we got the word out on openSUSE. Especially when it comes to 'openSUSE is more than a distro'. Personally, I feel more and more strongly on that subject. Presenting openSUSE 11.4 is nice - we've got some interesting things there, but honestly - what is really so special about the specific kernel or LibreOffice version we ship? I feel a lot happier telling people about Tumbleweed or OBS!

Distro Contest

The relatively minor differences between the distro's became especially visible on the last day, when we had a 'distro shootout' or something like that. A row of distributions, from well-known Ubuntu and Fedora to smaller distro's like Kanotix, was put on stage, represented by someone from the project. A task was given and each had to execute it, showing what their distro had going for it.

Now the task was to show the installation of some software... And honestly, it only showed no distro has got it really perfect or even stands out. And this is my personal experience as well. I've been using Arch Linux for a long time and the Arch package manager, Pacman, is pretty simple. But good enough. So why fight between far more advanced package managers as apt-get, zypper, Urpmi or Yum? Each has their cool stuff but frankly the differences are minor. Ok, zypper has this nice solver which gives you possible solutions when conflicts arise - Debian has it in a separate tool, Aptitude. Yum can install a filename directly (give it "/usr/bin/firefox" and guess what you'll get). For me, I still like urpmi just because you can say "urpmi firefox" and don't have to give any arguments...

In short, most 'unique' features aren't that unique or only really interesting for a few power users. And then the GUI tools. Ubuntu showed their easy to use Software Center. Debian showed synaptic so the third Debian derivative Kanotix settled demoing some scripts they used for auto-installing things. Mandriva has their own graphical UI and points for Fedora - they demoed PackageKit which is cross-distro. I decided to show how you can always reach YaST - from the commandline (ncurses), GUI (GTK & Qt) and web (webYaST). Oh, and our awesome games store nobody knows about... But to me, it all feels a bit marginal.

Basically, it was one big show of how AppStream is the right thing to do! Take Ubuntu's easy GUI, Fedora's Packagekit & the Debian screenshots, combine it with OCS' awesome social features and have ONE really good tool to rule them all. Or rather, benefit all.

take-away

What I took away from this exercise were two things:

For the average end users, most differences between the technical products on Linux are not relevant anymore. Even 'minor' distributions have progressed to the point where they are good enough!
So what matters is the PROJECT, the team behind it! And this is where openSUSE makes me proud...
It is all about collaboration - that is how we can get further, together! After all, our real competition aren't other distributions but Microsoft and Apple.

On that last note, I'd like to publicly ask Canonical and especially Mark to deeply consider getting rid of the Copyright Assignment for the Software Center. It is a blocking issue for real collaboration and as you consider it Bug #1 to get rid of MS' majority market share, why not put your money where your mouth is and work with the other distributions to do something about that?

Code of Conduct or anti-harassment policy

2011-05-09T17:44:00.000+02:00

I went to LCA 2011 in Januari. There, a 'mild controvercy' (or rather 'nuclear war') developed around a keynote by Mark Pesce and how it was handled by the conference team. Now personally, I had little issue with Mark's keynote. Ok, there was some harsh language and some explicit imagery, but nothing that offended me. So when an apology was made during the closing ceremony, I was suprised and later on spoke out with some others against the 'censorship'.

Changing mind

But after a while I realized that the point of all this isn't about censorship or Freedom of Speech (vs freedom of 'not being insulted'). Those issues surely play in the wider, public area. I don't want to have laws which allow our government to prosecute anyone who talks about something they don't like! But that is not relevant here. LCA is NOT a public place. It is a conference organized by a team which has EVERY right to tell us under what condictions we can join! It is their conference, after all. And yes, one of those conditions is that we are supposed to watch what we say so we ensure a welcoming place for everyone.

As I've already been convinced that we do need to think about diversity, openness and anti-harassment after reading this LWN article about the darker side of open source conferences by Valerie Aurora, I've decided to draft up a Code of Conduct for the openSUSE Conference today.

You can find the Code of Conduct draft on the wiki and would love input!

Events - LinuxTag and HCC linux themadag

2011-05-09T01:30:00.000+02:00

I'll be going to two VERY different events this month: Linux Tag with thousands of visitors and a big openSUSE team and the Dutch HCC Linux Themadag which I expect to be slightly smaller - by a factor of 10 or so.

I'm not really sure what kind of event I like most. At LinuxTag I'll probably be more busy to talk to people who know a fair bit about Free Software, get interviewed, discuss things with other FOSS people in many one-on-one or small meetings etcetera. At HCC, well, there will be few people I know and most visitors are probably quite new to Linux. I really look forward to meeting the dutch openSUSE people (most of whom I don't know yet) and yes, I always enjoy talking to newbies. But LinuxTag has lots of friends, both from within openSUSE and from other projects - that's also awesome.

I think I'm gonna decide that they're both equally cool.

And if you live close to either, be sure to be there & say hi to me!

If you want to pick me out of the crowd, a helpful tip: my hair (both on head & chin) got a bit longer since the pic above was taken!

GSoC - DOs and DON'Ts

2011-04-25T14:24:00.001+02:00

Soon we'll all hear the news on the students accepted to Google Summer of Code. I'm excited and I'm sure so are a lot of students!

Once the news is in, it is time to start getting to know your mentor, getting your development environment up and starting to code. To help students, mentors and admins, let me echo a post by Lydia Pintscher to Planet openSUSE pointing to three blogs about DOs and DON'Ts she wrote with two other experienced GSoC mentors:

Donnie Berkholz from X.org and Gentoo, Kevin Smith from XMPP and I have written a series of blog posts for Google’s Open Source blog about the dos and don’ts of Google Summer of Code. Check them out. They have useful tips no matter your role in GSoC. There is a post for students, admins and mentors.

I think I can summarize many of the tips for students as: take a GSoC project serious, it is a real job! There is a serious commitment on the side of the organization (mentoring!) as well as the side of Google (payment!). And there is a lot in it for you, not just the money but also the learning opportunity. Last but not least, a successful GSoC looks good on your resume!

Resume?

Don't underestimate the value of GSoC and work in a FOSS community for an employer. As you know, all employers want 18 year old employees with 20 years experience. So having done some work in a FOSS community counts!

And as Boudewijn said in the first comment on the tips for students, taking your summer job for Google & your project serious also means you don't disappear at the end of the summer. It looks BAD to an employer as it signals little commitment to what you do. Especially if you have delivered "almost-ready code" which you never finish. You're basically saying that you are not very reliable!

Don't think potential employers won't see your GSoC work. Most, and especially the better employers, will do a search on your name and have a good look at the results. It is very likely that, once you've finished your GSoC, googling your name finds your project in the top-3 results. Moreover, if you hang around and keep doing some work, you'll learn more, build up an even more valuable resume and you'll more likely to be able to give your mentor up as a reference to a future employer.

fun

There's no guarantee, but maybe your GSoC one day leads to a job at a Free Software company. And a job in a Free Software company is more fun, really. You often get not only more pay (frankly not that important once you make enough to live OK) but also more responsibility and respect. Even if you get a job which isn't Free Software related, if you have the experience of working in a community, you will have a better position in your first job. You'll know better how to interact with people. How to write readable, maintainable code. When to ask questions. Who to ask. Such skills are useful so you're a more valuable employee - one who gets more choice, freedom and responsibility!

Taking your GSoC serious also means more fun on a personal level. At least I'd argue that having your code finished, shipped to a few million users and having your name on it as developer or maintainer is not just cool on your resume but pretty awesome in general!

Even without Google

Last but not least, as Boudewijn blogged, GSoC is not the only way to get most of the benefits of becoming part of a Free Software community! Even if your GSoC project was not accepted, you can ask if you can do it anyway. Mentors often have no problem mentoring you without a GSoC and while you don't get the money, meaning you'll probably have to find another summer job, you'll still get to code, learn & become part of the team.

so...

So. Take your GSoC project serious. It means more fun and better results. Both for yourself now as well as for your future!

Have fun!

Upcoming...

2011-04-13T23:45:00.001+02:00

I've been quite busy over the last few months - after Michael Loeffler left and AJ went on parental leave for 2 months life got crazy. Luckily openSUSE doesn't exactly depend on me and while some things slipped, I don't think big things broke down. Ok, my boss wasn't happy with me as especially internal budget things suffered. I've given those sending me interviews and other writing stuff (like my column for LinuxUser) a very hard time too. And personally, I'm unhappy with it because I tried to do to many things which resulted in many of them unfinished.

back on track

But AJ is back, we're getting some processes on track and the 11.4 release worked out great. So it is time to focus again and get things finished. First is the strategy stuff. The openSUSE Board had a few comments we'll look through, then it should go up for voting. Really. I know, it already needs some updating - we'll try to do that first. Once that is done, it's time to vote on it and get it out however.We need to get the DVD's out which we created for GNOME 3 and KDE. For both I spend a lot of time collecting materials to include on the disk and imho the end result is pretty ok. But there's also room for improvement, something for the future...And we have marketing materials to create for the US. There have been only a few suggestions on the marketing ML so it looks like I'm gonna have to lock myself in my room for a day or two to write some stuff...Finally, I have to catch up with mail. With over 2300 unread mails that'll be quite a job but in some folders I'll probably just mark all read... And then it's on to new stuff!

Like...

Last Saturday I gave a talk at a FLISOL meeting - and in the preparations for that I updated a number of presentations I have. Will share them with the marketing team and hopefully put them in Git & the wiki with the marketing materials.

wiki stuff

The openSUSE ambassador talking points have been improving and I'm working on an upcoming features. I've also went through the wiki pages for new contributors, making small changes and adding links there, improving the Junior Jobs pages. Now the openSUSE Boosters are planning to work on that as well, smoothing out the process of getting involved in openSUSE.

openhatch

Once we have that up, I'd like to investigate openSUSE joining openHatch. For that we'd need junior jobs in a variety of areas as well as mentors - but I think I can just start small. We have a convention in Bugzilla which is followed by practically nobody: mark simple bugs with "JJ" so they can be easily found. I'll try and get a few of those on openhatch, see if we can get a contributor or two to chip in. If that works we have a good reason to expand upon that!

and a promise

Finally I promise to work harder on being available & in meetings - I know I missed a few ;-)

LibreOffice

2011-04-02T20:26:00.000+02:00

I just stumbled upon mmeeks blog where he mentions some of his favorite projects from the LibreOffice GSoC ideas. And it made me happy.

OpenOffice = blegh

Now I've never been a big fan of OpenOffice. I saw it as a huge pile of legacy code with little future. Part of that was due to the "WE OWN OPENOFFICE" Governance from Sun/Oracle, part due the the slowness and UI horror. And part due to developers saying things like

"developing OpenOffice is like brushing your teeth with a chainsaw"

Such quotes don't inspire a lot of confidence

LibreOffice an improvement

The LibreOffice fork solves the governance issue and focusses strongly on cleaning up the code. Still I felt they still had the Millstone of the old codebase around the neck. I've always seen a lot more future for Calligra suite which has a modern code base and innovative features, especially since the inception of KO GmbH. For me, LibreOffice did not seem relevant for anything other than bridging the gap until Calligra was end user ready..

Which in itself is bad - competition is good, OO has a huge user base (slowly moving to LibreOffice now) and the LibreOffice project is a big showcase of Free Software in many ways.

Light at the end of the tunnel

So the post by Meeks lighted up a little spark in me when he mentioned moving over the Canvas to Cairo. Yes, I'm no developer, but I do know that Cairo is a modern technology, good enough to be adopted as the new canvas by the upcoming Qt4 port of Scribus (part of openSUSE 11.4). And it is what GNOME Shell is build upon, not exactly irrelevant either. Meeks also mentions an Android port which would force work on improving performance like it did for Calligra office.

So why is this so special? It's not like OO.o didn't have any plans... Well, frankly, the only improvements I've seen from OO.o over the last years was an addition like Java. Sorry but why oh why add Java to an office suite which is already slow as crap and big as a mountain? Oh, and the discussions about the "awesome UI redesign" ("let's copy the ribbon, badly"). I didn't hear about taking advantage of modern technologies like Cairo. Frankly, the improvements were mostly putting lipstick on a pig, if you ask me.

LibreOffice REALLY brings change!

So now I have the impression that LibreOffice really represents a change. Sure, it's all perception, I know. I'm sure the OO team did some replacing-of-legacy-stuff. And LibreOffice still has a HUGE amount of work to do. They still have the old code base. But the project is revitalized! With all the new developers and LibreOffice in GSoC, there is change in the air. With Calligra going incredibly strong as well (just see the number of ppl here) the Free Software office space looks to be gearing up to good stuff.I for one welcome our new Office overlords, evil or not ;-)

The Collaboration Imperative

2011-03-23T03:59:00.001+01:00

As you might have noticed, there is a little bit of a brush-up between GNOME and Canonical with KDE involved from the sidelines (just read Planet GNOME). Dave wrote a reasonable summary of this and so did Jeff Waugh in his series on the relationship between Canonical and GNOME. In three sentences:

Let's have a fight

Canonical gets a lot of criticism for creating a fork of the GNOME experience with Unity, instead of contributing upstream to GNOME Shell. Canonical responds that Unity was meant to be a GNOME project and their contributions are being blocked (giving libindicators as example). Suddenly Aaron Seigo from KDE weighted in, saying GNOME is indeed hard to work with.

I've been reading up on it and to some extend participating in the discussion on identi.ca. As you know, I'm interested in the subject of collaboration and this is a case where it clearly didn't work out for a variety of reasons. In this blog I won't try to weight in on the topic itself but rather argue that the psychological construct of "the fundamental attribution error" can explain much of the conflict and how to avoid it.

But let's start with a sample of the discussion.

forming an opinion

I'm not exactly the type of person who makes up his mind easily. And the stories that came out of this debate were highly conflicting and confusing. According to this, Canonical discourages its employees from contributing upstream. However, Aaron claims GNOME does not WANT to collaborate. And Mark blogs:

Jeff also goes on to talk about Ted and Aurelien, who were proposing the app indicators work in GNOME and KDE respectively. KDE apps worked smoothly, Gnome rejected Ted’s proposal.

I say opinions are cool!

So GNOME is uncooperative? Or does Canonical not get it, as Dave claimed? Is KDE just pushing things without listening? Depends on your point of view - the facts are vague. Read for example this thread on freedesktop.org about the StatusNotifier (systray) spec - there is about a 50% chance you'll decide KDE is the uncooperative one... This thread was referenced several times as proof Party X was inflexible and rude - where X was sometimes GNOME and sometimes KDE!

Makes you wonder what is going on...

So what is real?

A few days ago I had a call with Jeff Waugh. He offered to talk in a dent and I'm glad he did. Of course, as usual the whole situation is more complicated than what you can discuss in 140 characters on twitter. The talk was very enlightening and made me think of a psychological concept.

Call it a family trait...

The fundamental attribution error

People tend to attribute what happens around us in the world to intentions. We believe things happen for a reason. This is quite a strong human tendency already present in very young children. Put a 3 year old in front of a room where stones are moved around by some invisible means like magnets. Ask the kid what is going on and he or she will describe the events in the room in terms of "the blue stone wants to talk to the red one". We know stones usually don't really want a lot - so why does the child perceive such intentions? This phenomenon not only forms the base of early religions (attributing 'intentions' to weather, trees or growth of crops) but also results in making conflicts worse. Psychologists call it "the fundamental attribution error" and it is fundamental (hence the name) to our perception of the world.

So the reality is, besides that stones and trees don't have 'goals' and 'intentions', that often things happen for other reasons than someone having the intent to do that specific thing. Or in English, if a specification gets critical comments - maybe the respondent might have had other reasons than just wanting to be a jerk. Like being busy, tired or having misunderstood/missed a part of the discussion.

Reality?

Reality applied

The talk with Jeff made clear that the major reason for GNOME not supporting the systemtray spec was timing, not lack of interest The focus of the GNOME project right now is understandably narrow: get GNOME 3 out the door. Something like interoperability, no matter how important, is not on top of the agenda. Jeff said he expects the FD.o systray spec to be supported hopefully in GNOME 3.2! The lesson: sometimes things interfere with cooperation. And the 'other camp', blissfully unaware of the real reasons behind lack of response or rude behavior, attributes it to a lack of willingness and support.

As another example, take the adoption of the Galago (notification) specification and what went wrong according to this message by John Palmieri. And about GNOME and Canonical having misunderstandings: Stuart Jarvis blogged how hard understanding a Free Software community can be.

Now I'm not going to attempt to unravel all the events that led to this blog as that would simply be impossible. Nor will I attempt to figure out 'who is to blame' as that's pointless (and wrong anyway, as I argued above). What I can do is ask those involved to think about the fundamental attribution error: if someone looks funny at you, it doesn't mean they hate you. They might have something stuck in their eye!

*snap*

Actions

Ok, so maybe the others don't hate you. That doesn't solve the problem - yet. We all need to step up and do something. What?

Make collaboration an explicit focus

I wrote about collaboration before and at FOSDEM there was a cross-distro-collaboration discussion. As I said there, a big blocker for more openness is that we simply don't think about collaboration. We need to be aware of the opportunities for and benefits of collaboration. The whole discussion that I started this blog with might be negative and things are all a bit tense right now, but it shines the spotlight on something that needs attention! And positive initiatives like Appstream are happening. As Seif Lotfy wrote on his blog:

And if you haven’t noticed we are working with GNOME Shell, Unity and KDE. So a sense of collaboration is possible ;)

It just needs us to take notice! So, Mark, maybe blog about Appstream? It's using Ubuntu Software Center for the GNOME side, after all... Let's also focus on the positive projects!

Talk together face to face!

It is important to talk about concerns and frustrations. Considering the distance Brazil-Australia the best Jeff and I could do was a phone call but it was certainly enlightening. And I bet that you'll notice the same when you finally get to talk to those you've been fighting with on IRC and mailing lists for so long... Even then, realize that one single person does not define his or her whole project. Not everyone in KDE is as jumpy as Aaron; not everyone in GNOME is as French as Vincent Untz. It is important to share the results of a chat as well - blog about it (if your blog is aggregated on your projects' planet), or add results to a wiki or commit logs etcetera. Make sure the positive results persist!

Allison wrote he also wants to start a bit of a discussion in the cross-desktop area which I welcome and support. Sounds like something which could make an impact and Allison, if you want my help, let me know what I can do.

Time for a group hug?

Take advantage of events to meet

Don't overlook the opportunity to meet at events. For example, there is the Linux Foundation's Collaboration Summit in San Fransisco in a few weeks. It is co-located with Camp KDE which seems to me an excellent opportunity for stakeholders to get together. Go a few days before the Collaboration Summit starts so you can get some face to face time with desktop folks.

Then of course in August, there is the Desktop Summit. I'm one of the organizers and while collaboration isn't always perfect, the team has a common goal: organize a great event! Like the previous Desktop Summit in Gran Canaria I hope we can make some steps forward. This Desktop Summit will have collaboration even higher on its agenda than the last one and I hope this will have positive effects.

Doing more, moving forward

There certainly is more we can do to solve the conflicts. With apologies for the irony here, more blogs trying to analyze the whole thing may simply be fueling the flames more than extinguish them. Talking to people works better. I don't claim there was no talk, there was. However, much communication we do happens over the web. And as we are all aware, that can easily lead to misunderstandings. So the face to face meetings I suggest, as well as an awareness of biases like the fundamental attribution error, can contribute to solving these conflicts in a more effective manner. As long as the results get documented in a few (public!) places and as such don't get forgotten the results of such meetings can be good and long lasting!

Gran Canaria Desktop Summit

Personally, I'll stay away from the subject now - I've dented, tweeted and now blogged enough about it. I'll focus on the positive - including the Desktop Summit. And making sure the next openSUSE conference will have as much of a collaborative atmosphere as the last one!

HCC linux Day and the NL release party

2011-03-15T18:59:00.001+01:00

HCC Linux Day in May

Yes, as I blogged before, Saturday May 21 there will be a HCC Linux day (news updates here). And openSUSE will be there. Soon you'll find the HCC Linux day page on the openSUSE Ambassador events page! If you're interested in helping out, just let me know. No, you don't need any special skills or a lot of knowledge - you'd be surprised how little the average visitor knows of linux and openSUSE. And if they have harder questions, you can ask one of the other team members - so you'll learn something too ;-)

openSUSE release party in NL

18 March 2011, from 17:00 onwards in the Novell office in Utrecht an openSUSE release party will be held! Of course, everyone is welcome. What do you need: be there. What do you get: fun, pizza, some beers, an openSUSE presentation/demo, some big surprise and of course party.

So if you are in NL at either of these dates, you know what to do!

makeovers

2011-03-15T15:24:00.001+01:00

Today I did a makeover of my blog. Thought - hey, I can fix the bad looks in 10 minutes, right? Guess again ;-)

But it is done. I am an absolutely horrible artist but I could draw on the awesome work of Marcos "SUSEspain" B.R. (isn't CC licensing wonderful?) and of course the blogger team. Next up: a proper domain name...

Oh, I butchered Marcos' wallpaper as the original didn't fit my blog & was too sharp. So - what you see is a horrible version of his original work which you can find (together with his other stuff) if you click on it below!

Marcos, if you read this, awesome wallpapers dude!

edit: and I forgot to add these but didn't want to let you all miss out on it: on the right pics of an LA airport makeover. They have a sense of humor over there...

Be proud of yourself, Geekos!

2011-03-15T04:13:00.000+01:00

Right now I'm enjoying the post-release stress. Going back and catching up with what was delayed due to the release being priority and all... And enjoying huge discussions on Identi.ca like this one ;-)

Me proud of the Geeko!

The article which went out on Friday made me very proud - openSUSE 11.4 made a splash. The title is really correct - we're gathering info on reviews etc on this page but it is extremely incomplete - there are so many reviews, articles, tweets, dents, facebook comments, video's on youtube - it is really great! And well over 100.000 downloads in 24 hours, almost twice what we did for 11.3 - awesome. openSUSE has its momentum back, that's clear. We already wrote that in this "end of 2010" article, and the subsequent Bretzn and Appstore sprints, the marketing sprint and all the cool stuff that is going on makes me quite certain about this: the openSUSE conference 2010 was a real turning point for openSUSE. The Geeko's back in the game!

Did we leave?

The question that might come up is - did the Geeko ever leave? I had a look at some statistics on our user base. openSUSE has 7-8 million users, that's significant! And, interestingly enough, between 30-50% more than Fedora. Ubuntu has no statistics online but once made some noise about numbers - talking somewhere between 6 and 8.

So be a proud Geeko!

Now all these numbers have some uncertainty associated with them, nothing is sure. Yet the numbers of Fedora and openSUSE at least are measured in the same way, so likely you can at least compare them roughly. And I bet Ubuntu has similar statisics on which they based their number - with the usual exaggeration. So even though the numbers aren't entirely clear, it is interesting to see openSUSE ain't exactly insignificant as many seem to believe... Not only do we have amazing technology like OBS and Studio but we also have a HUGE user base whom we serve with a pretty awesome distro! So, Geeko's, in the communication and marketing department - maybe openSUSE is not well known for that. But we're a leading distro when it comes to what matters - users and technology. Be proud!

YESSS, it is out!!!

2011-03-10T17:40:00.000+01:00

Friends! It is out!. That means that after 8 months of hard work, you can finally...

Or, if you're tired of all the work on openSUSE 11.4 - sit back, relax and watch the news flow on twitter, identi.ca, Facebook and all those other social media outlets. And be sure to join in the chatter! Our hashtag is #opensuse as usual and help in getting the word out is appreciated!

Play with Plasma Desktop and Netbook 4.6.1, GNOME 3 SHell preview, XFCDE 4.8 (which is a very good release, btw, working on an article about it) and for those with older hardware the cool LXDE.

I was enjoying some of the goodies already - running the KDE apps 4.6 on my laptop (Kate is awesome and I love the better performance+stability of Plasma&Kwin) and GNOME Shell at home. But now the whole thing, awesomeness :D

Congratulations and mucho huggggz to everyone involved in 11.4!!! I know it is awesome and as soon as I really feel awake and can get my eyes of IRC and twitter for a minute I'll upgrade ;-)

11.4 - almost there

2011-03-10T05:36:00.000+01:00

Warning: huge blog ahead. To butcher Mark Twain:

I didn't have time to write a short blog, so I wrote a long one instead.

Excitement. Lack of sleep. More excitement. Many things not finished. Yep, a major release. Despite a crashing laptop (every 30 min it hangs, I'm afraid it is the heath) I'm having fun preparing for the biggest event since I joined the openSUSE community: the release of openSUSE 11.4!

The marketing team had a meeting 2 weeks ago to prepare for 11.4. But we weren't the only ones working hard. And this week, our release dude, Coolo, got sick and AJ had to replace him. Well, the GoldMaster was in time, so AJ, great work. And Coolo: if a doctor tells you to stop working it probably makes sense to listen.

New features

11.4 will be exciting. I mean really, really exciting! There is a huge number of new features and improvements. I just finished an 11.4 feature overview presentation. It's not perfectly complete (how could it be with so much new stuff?) but a good start if you want to have a launch party. Speaking of, if you're Dutch, there will be a Launch Party in NL!

Anyone who wants to visit or organize a launch party, there is still time. Go to the Launch Party Wiki Page and see if there is something close by. If not, organize it! Seriously, it's not hard: just put a page up there, point to a cafe where you can get beer & coke and you're already pretty far. Sure, you can do fancy presentations in a conference room, but isn't beer what brings people together? And isn't a party nothing without a well-equipped bar?

Posters - but where is the source?

By the way, there is a bunch of awesome-looking Launch Party Posters on the Launch Party Wiki Page, where are the sources? I bet you can ask in the #opensuse-marketing channel on Freenode for them but having them up there is easier, ladies and gents!

I want the sources because I'd love to have a release party here, in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Anyone else close by? Any suggestions for a decent pub? Please mail me at my first name on opensuse.org! KDE and GNOME, XFCE & LXDE fans - you're all welcome, we're YOUR best distribution after all!

Shout out

As I said, I'm pretty tired, so I surely will skip people in this list but I just HAVE to thank some people for what they did:
First of all the whole marketing team for their work on the amazing Product Highlights (I keep calling it feature guide, hehe). I shout out to Bruno, Tony and James for their technical knowledge, Izabel for her TIRELESS work in adding all the relevant information and Helen for helping to clean things up and write proper text. Sascha, Holger, Christian, Carlos, Frank, Greg, Chuck, Andres, Andreas, Bryen, Kostas, Dominique, Guido and all others - thank you too, every line of text helped tremendously!!! If you helped out and weren't credited, add your name to the list at the bottom of the Product Highlights. You deserve it, don't be shy! Those not on the marketing team, you'll see the end results when the announcement is live ;-)
Chuck, I have to mention you especially. Your mail on social media made my day. I was worried nothing was being organized - and I didn't have time. You took it on yourself and made a difference. Love you.
rtyler, you're another hero. Your writing for OMGSUSE.com in the last 10 days has been awesome. I know it was exhausting - yet you still helped out reviewing and writing. AWESOME! Oh, and add your name to the list on the Product Highlights!
Manu, manu, manu. You've been all over again. Despite busy with school and other obligations, you worked until deep in the night. Feature guide, website, social media, everywhere. You deserve a thousand hugs!
The work our Tiger Bruno has been doing, working with Chuck, Carlos and Javier - invaluable. Thanks to you guys we'll have an amazing openSUSE 11.4 poster shipped with the next Linux Magazine!!! And Bruno, give a hug to your girlfriend for organizing our Virtual Launch Party on Second Life!!!
And just now Rajko and Sebiastian: when I asked an hour ago (almost desperate) for people to help fill the screenshot section on the wiki, you jumped up and started to work. IRC lit up like a lightbulb: "I'm editing, wait a sec..." "where are those GNOME shots?" and in mere minutes - AWESOMENESS! Thanks a lot, you made my night :D

A full round of hugs and Doritos (sorry sshaw)!

flash 10.2

2011-03-05T22:08:00.000+01:00

Anyone who has updated to the latest Adobe Flash, you can fix video's (which are now pink on sites like Youtube) like this:

Step 1. Right click on a flash content (I went to this flash site http://moodstream.gettyimages.... and simply right clicked on the page)
Step 2. Choose the entry "Settings..."
Step 3. Unclick entry "Enable hardware acceleration"
Step 4. Click "Close"

And done :D

Enjoy non-pink video's again!

why oh why

The issue is probably caused by the crappy video driver situation on Linux... Or just crappy engineering on Adobe's side, something we've gotten used to by now, haven't we?

Let's hope HTML5 will help us get rid of Flash once and for all. And let's hope we've learned our lesson and don't jump from one hole into another by adopting a non-open codec like x264 instead of WebM or Ogg or something else really open. Yes, of course open includes being royalty-free - how can you call anything 'open' or 'a standard' if there are limits on who can implement it?

Aaah well, live ain't perfect. So relax, enjoy your weekend and if you live in Brazil - Carnaval on Monday and Tuesday!

criticism towards GNOME Shell

2011-03-04T15:28:00.000+01:00

Reading all the controversy around the decision by the GNOME Shell designers to remove the minimize and maximize buttons from GNOME shell reminds me quite a bit of the discussions around Plasma. Especially for stuff like the brilliant yet controversial Folderview widget.

criticism

It also makes me wonder if those complaining have ever tried GNOME Shell... As is adequately explained in this rationale, minimizing simply has no place in the concepts behind GNOME Shell. Period. And if you've tried GNOME Shell you would realize that.

GNOME Shell in openSUSE 11.4

Yes, Shell takes getting used to, it does enforce certain habits. If you want to customize your environment for maximum 'getting-work-done' then maybe GNOME Shell is (currently) not for you. But that's the crowd KDE has always appeased to anyway. There is after all a trade-off between efficiency and ease of use (or rather, discoverability) - it is why most seasoned sysadmins use a command line.

Newbies!

But the power of GNOME Shell lies somewhere else. Put a newbie in front of it. Observe - in 5 minutes they've figured out how to use it, really. It is very simple and intuitive. I find that very impressive. Especially on a touch screen, it all makes a lot of sense. And it also works on very small screens. And yes, you'll see, the minimize button DOES NOT make sense in GNOME Shell. Really.

If you want to criticize GNOME Shell, talk about technology. I would've advocated to not build a new tech platform but build Shell on something like Plasma which is designed to make interfaces like GNOME Shell, or do like Ubuntu did with Unity 2D). But I kind'a get why they didn't, it's software 'from the other camp'. A more harmful thing is that they didn't get involved with the fd.o systray/notification rework done by KDE and Ubuntu, I see it as a big miss for GNOME Shell, and I'll consider it narrow-minded until I see or hear a good rationale somewhere ;-)

Plasma 4.6 and KDE Apps in openSUSE 11.4

But don't balk at the design until you've tried it with your grandmother... And in the end, Shell is innovative and new and will need maturing. I always have a soft spot for innovative and new things, it's why I like Plasma despite the issues it still has. So I do look forward to the final release of GNOME 3 and I'm happy that we (openSUSE/Novell) decided to press GNOME 3/Shell LiveDVDs as soon as the release of GNOME 3 is out. Yes, we'll also make KDE ones, 4.6 on openSUSE 11.4 really rocks and deserves it ;-)

openSUSE Marketing Meeting in Los Angeles

2011-03-03T23:49:00.000+01:00

Finally, after well over a week of telling myself I should blog I have found some time. Sleep is overrated and I can't actually get any while flying anyway so let me tell you why I had to blog.

Marketing Meeting and SCALE

Last week the openSUSE Marketing team had their first dedicated marketing meeting in Los Angeles. This was followed by the whole bunch attending SCALE. SCALE is probably the most prominent Free Software conference in the USA and we made a big splash there so that was really cool!

At the meeting we had lots of fun of course. We had an incredible team from all over the world - Australia (Helen), Greece (Kostas), Swiss (Bruno), Brazil (Izabel and Carlos), USA (Chuck, Tony and Bryen) and myself (a Dutchie). Stephen and Tyler (from OMGSUSE fame) joined us for SCALE. And I should mention that Alan Clark was there as well for the full week. Unfortunately, some we hoped would be there could not make it - including James, who was ill, and Manu Gupta from India who had Exams interfere with his trip. Luckily both of them as well as others joined us via IRC.

Hard at work at oS Marketing Meeting LA

Results

So what has the team been up to? First of all, getting to know each other. Most of us never ever met in real life. And we've got a great team, really cool! During the week we worked, initially quite organized (we set up an agenda, split in teams and worked on the tasks) later on in a more 'organic' fashion with constantly changing teams and tasks. We did a variety of things - work on marketing materials, preparation of the 11.4 release, GSOC (thanks, Izabel & Kostas), a bit for the openSUSE Conference and some writing. And as usual we didn't get 10% done of what we wanted to do - yet I'm very happy with the results. For our 11.4 release we'll have a lovely Feature Guide, showing our users what's new in this release. Based on the Feature guide you can expect some articles to be released before and after the release, as well as other marketing materials. We've prepared a bunch of presentations on a variety of subjects (Tony, thanks for your work on Tumbleweed!) and improved some wiki pages with information for our ambassadors (Kostas!!!!). And a series of posters was made - a really *awesome* series of posters! Clearly, putting Carlos & Helen in one room leads to some cool stuff!

Having fun at oS Marketing Meeting LA

And we learned a lot from each other - especially Bruno and Tony who were the more technical among us were answering questions a lot of the time. During the evenings - well, we usually kept working, but we also had a few beers and cigarettes outside the conference room. Usually people stayed around until 2-3, I usually went to bed early 'cuz I had to open it up which I did around 8. Food we got from a supermarket (Novell paid) so we always had fresh sandwiches with lots of stuff to put on them. That was really good - the first day we had lunch at Denny's but nobody really liked that much so the other three days we just made our own food...

Having food at oS Marketing Meeting LA

Friday we enjoyed a day off - at least, most of the day. A bunch of us went 'tourist' and saw the Hollywood sign, the famous stars and of course LA traffic, traffic and traffic...

Being tourists at oS Marketing Meeting LA

And now...

Now I have some more pics to upload and some people to kick about the reports they have to write. And I have to thank Bryen again and again for the organization of this meeting, as well as Novell for paying for it! SCALE deserves a blog of its own, which I'll do tomorrow or Saturday.

LibreOffice and openSUSE 11.4

2011-03-02T01:21:00.001+01:00

Happy to see LibreOffice going strong... This article analyzes the contributions to LibreOffice. Some impressive numbers - 133 new contributors already!!! Even Canonical has send in a patch to fix something... Meanwhile Michael Meeks' team (Novell) is leading the 'corporate contributors' pack. And yes, openSUSE will be the first major linux distribution to ship LibreOffice - and it'll be good, thanks to that involvement in LibreOffice development.

Sean Michael Kerner mentions this fact and our upcoming release in his blog on internetnews.com where he also quotes our AJ on several infrastructural improvements. We do need to educate him and explain openSUSE isn't exclusively a Novell product - with so many volunteers involved and the work going on to set up a Foundation you simply can't claim that anymore... We're leading the pack in that area as well and we need to be vocal about that!

PS will blog on the Marketing Meeting we had last week soonish, need to catch up to some urgent things first... Especially sleep!

Priorities: communicate and be a mentor!

2011-02-22T17:46:00.001+01:00

I just reviewed and published the news.o.o article on openSUSE's GSOC participation. We're seeing quite a few ideas being added to our Ideas page on the wiki and some mentors have stepped up as well - but we need more. Seriously, if students are to pick openSUSE as an interesting organization to do a GSOC project, they need to have some exciting ideas! And mentors who can help them get the most out of their 8 weeks of hacking.

for openSUSE

For openSUSE, GSOC is a great opportunity. I've already heard marketing people talk about how cool it would be to have an Android app for people to read the Weekly News or follow planet openSUSE easily. Or how cool it would be if SaX, the well-known and missed-by-many X configuration tool for openSUSE could be resurrected (there is an idea and a mentor has stepped up already!). The build service team has added some ideas too but I bet other areas of openSUSE could also use some help. Having a student work 8 weeks full time on something which needs to be done is nothing to be sneezed at - even though it takes some time for a mentor to help them out.

But frankly, in my opinion the value of the code itself is nothing compared to the opportunity to gain a new contributor for openSUSE. Many students stay around in the projects they wrote code for - Cheese wouldn't exist (and be maintained!) if it wasn't for GSOC. And we all know how popular that app is at demo booths around the world ;-)

Priorities

But we have the openSUSE 11.4 release come up! And once that is over, there is bugfixing to be done, work on the next release... We're all busy and not all of us might feel capable of helping a student out, or want to spend time on doing that. Isn't it more important to make sure 11.4 is a rock solid release?

I say no. Seriously. As any Free Software project, openSUSE gains and looses contributors all the time - people join but also leave because they get jobs, become to busy, loose interest or otherwise aren't able to contribute anymore. It is vital for us to keep working on getting new people involved. So if you have a choice between fixing that bug in Plasma NetworkManager for the upcoming release, upgrading that GNOME package in time, fixing OBS - OR spending time on mentoring.

What do you do? Think about the long term. Surely, having bugs in our release is bad. Most of us surely qualify as perfectionists and see the quality of their work reflect upon them. And having show stoppers chases users away. But. I am sure you have to agree with me that openSUSE will never be perfect. There is always another bug to fix. Meanwhile, in another 8 months we'll again be close to a release - and you'll have to do your work alone if you don't get help! It is surely more fun (and more effective) to be squashing bugs together than alone and to make that happen, you have to do something.

Blood, sweet and tears

You all put in your hard work in openSUSE and you all want it to succeed. So, you do that by working harder? Maybe. I don't deny that hard work is where it starts. But it is NOT enough, believe me. The difference between successful projects and unsuccessful projects lies rarely if ever in technological superiority or even in the hard work of the developer who started it. You can't do it all alone, and not until eternity either. For the continuity of your work as well as the quality it is crucial to have others who care about it.

So you have to spend time on helping others and getting them involved. You have to spend time communicating about your project. If others don't know about it, they won't use it nor help out. That is why writing a blog regularly matters - surely, I know many of you don't even have time to read blogs, let alone write them. But like other Free Software projects, we have many people who are interested in what is going on in openSUSE. Blogs, articles on news.o.o and even just mails to -project help them stay up to date and might convince them some day to help out. And once they make that step of coming forward to help, they need to be mentored. Be it for a GSOC project or in their own free time, it will be a challenge for them to really get into it.

We don't realize how difficult it can be to get involved. How big the step can be to set up a development environment, let alone send in a patch. Or even just ask for help. So you have to make that easier. You have to offer help. Write documentation, make people enthusiastic about what you do by communicating about it. And by making time for them when they need it. Even if there are urgent bugs - people matter more than code.

Impact

You might think you can't do it. Or that it won't help much. Maybe you've been disappointed in the past by someone who you've tried to help and it didn't work out. Well, get over it. Life sucks and things don't always work out. But if you give up, you don't just give up on some potential help. You give up on your project.

Sometimes you can blog many times asking for help and nothing happens. But I have also seen a simple call for help ("we need a developer to help out on our website, just mail me") result in 5-10 people step up. I am not kidding, almost 10 contributors in a week time after a single blog. And mind you, that blog was not special. It didn't have pretty pictures or a well written text. It was just a cry for help and it worked. And once those people stepped up, answering their questions and working with them resulted in a great product. Most of them are still active!

Step up

So we need you to step up. Decide for yourself: do you care about what you do? Do you want it to survive you and the company you work for? Then drop that bug you are working on and put your name on the Ideas page (HUGE credit to Manu Gupta for all the work he did for planning GSOC for openSUSE!!!). Blog more often, send a status report to -project (and CC the openSUSE news team in case they want to give it even more exposure). Communicate. And make time for anyone who even remotely starts to think about possibly helping you out. Document your code, keep it clean. And make sure it is crystal clear how someone can get involved.

Don't bother with pretty pictures if that is not your thing. Your blog doesn't have to read like an essay. Simple is enough. Perfect is the enemy of good, remember? But step it up. Without communication and mentoring, openSUSE has little future!

On getting and giving attention

2011-02-18T13:40:00.002+01:00

Dear openSUSE community,

There is a lot going on in openSUSE. Some of those things are reasonably well known by now - Tumbleweed for example. Other things like the cross-desktop MIME handling Stanislav Brabec has been working on are not that public. But should be! Now that is where everyone can make a difference. If you're a developer but also if you're just interested in what is going on! Development of important things happens because people know about it and care about it. They know and care about it because there is communication done. The openSUSE marketing team and in particular those writing for news.opensuse.org see it as their task to help spread the word about things in openSUSE which are important and can use help. But our marketeers can't be everywhere - they don't always know what is going on. So they need help with that.

How?

Simple. If you are a developer working on something cool and new, let the openSUSE marketing team know. That doesn't mean you have to write a story - just ping one or more members of the team or mail the mailinglist or news@opensuse.org. They'll get back to you, ask you questions, write about your initiative. And if you're aware of something cool a developer has done or is doing in and for openSUSE but you haven't seen any writing about it, think about letting the marketing and news team know! Send links to mails or blogs where they can find some information or help them contact the developer(s). Obviously, if you can write a quick summary of what is going on and why it is cool - that is awesome. You don't have to write the article, the marketeers can do that for you, but any material you can give or point them to will help them do it!

This way we can more easily give some of the cool new initiatives in openSUSE more attention. openSUSE is a bottom-up community, the initiatives by individual contributors make the difference - that also means we need to work a bit harder to get the word out on what is going on. Help us with that, please!

Linux Starter

On an slightly related note (getting the word out), the Dutch "Linux Starter" Magazine still is and will continue to be available from this site. Yes, you can finally order them now! Go ahead if you want to start with Linux and/or openSUSE, for about 10 bucks you have an excellent source of information and a nice custom dutch openSUSE DVD! Spread the word on that too :D

Banshee, referral money and how to earn a honest living

2011-02-17T20:30:00.000+01:00

I'm catching up to some reading and bumped into Joe's interesting article on Open Source Report about the Banshee Amazon store in Ubuntu 11.04.

How not to make money?

If you haven't read the article, you should. Its about a question which has been on my mind too. How can a Linux Distribution make money in a sustainable way? This move from Ubuntu takes away resources from downstream - the party actually writing the code they ship. This community, partially funded by Novell, donates the money to the GNOME Foundation. I can't politely express how low it is to take that away so I won't try. However, it does beg the question how one should do better.

Needed for...

openSUSE is in the process of setting up a Foundation (or e.V. or...). Once there is a Foundation, it will be on the lookout for funding. Obviously my employer will support it, we are a stakeholder in the future of openSUSE. And provided we support the Foundation's goals. But the Foundation will also want to explore other ways of generating income.

What doesn't work?

Donations and merchandising don't seem hugely profitable in other communities. Sure, openSUSE did well at FOSDEM, selling 16 crates of openSUSE beer and donating the money to FOSDEM. But we're still talking about a few hundred euro's and that's including the t-shirts we also sold for FOSDEM. That wouldn't keep the openSUSE Foundation running. So I understand that the $10.000 that Banshee brings the GNOME Foundation each year is interesting from a distro point of view. But ethics and common sense should play a role here too. I guess it might make sense to take a 20 or 30% cut in discussion with the projects - not 75 or 100%. So it might bring some revenue. Not enough still.

I've been thinking about the individual sponsorship program - communities like openSUSE, KDE and GNOME have lots of people who used to be active members but since then moved on. The skills they learned while active surely still help them every day. Maybe they even got a job because of their activities! So why not set up an alumni program, target them to give a small share of their income to the community? Organize something for them - a yearly reunion, a special alumni meeting at a yearly conference, some way to share what they have learned since leaving openSUSE...

So what DOES work?

Good question. Maybe the answer is all of the above. Use referrals as much as is reasonably possible. Take a 20% cut of the Firefox/Google referral, 20% of Banshee/Amazon etc. Sell some merchandising. Set up a Individual Sponsor program, an alumni program, try and offer companies incentives to sponsor as well. And do specific, targeted fundraisers for specific causes sometimes. But stay reasonable. An e.V. or Foundation should protect, support, mediate, communicate. It doesn't need to employ 100s of developers or marketing people or consultants. That is for the other parties in the ecosystem.

Ideas are more than welcome

This is something all Free Software projects struggle with. Surely there are plenty of articles about how companies can develop a sustainable business around Free Software _ found less on how communities should generate income. So ideas and links are welcome!

*photos by kaero on flickr*

FOSDEM 2011: building distro bridges

2011-02-16T03:04:00.004+01:00

FOSDEM. I finally got to the "blog about it" todo I took from there. I have to talk about the distribution collaboration panel discussion Jared Smith (Fedora Project Lead), Stefano Zacchirol (Debian Project Lead) and myself led on Sunday (video here). We discussed what barriers there are to cross-distro collaboration and what to do against them. I can summarize the whole thing by saying pretty much everyone in the room agreed more collaboration would be good and won't be that hard. More specifically, the main arguments and their rebuttals that I heard:

We will lose our identity and become one big grey blob!
Now first of all, grey blobs can be cool. Second, our identity does not lie in any single tool or application - our identity lies in the people, philosophy, culture AND technology combined. Collaboration on a software installer or init system won't change that!
We will never all agree on anything!
And why is that a problem? Maybe openSUSE and Fedora work together on the init system without input from Ubuntu while Mandriva and Arch push forward a new Software Installer without Debian's collaboration. Boehoe. I'd say such a situation would already be a big improvement over each doing its own thing!
We all hate each other!
No, we don't. As was said in the discussion panel, usually our users get a whole lot more passionate than our contributors. openSUSE and Fedora, Debian and Mandriva - we all DO work together already. Fedora and openSUSE collaborate on bringing LXDE patches upstream, KDE and GNOME packagers have worked together since ages. There is plenty good going on already.

It is not that hard

I think the last point makes clear what Vincents presentation on Appstream and the success of the cross-distro collaboration meeting on application installation also pointed out: we're doing it, NOW. The reason the Fedora and Debian PL's as well as myself wanted this meeting and are talking and writing about this has little to do with resistance to cross-distribution work in our communities. There's little of that. As I expressed at the panel, the issue is that when we encounter an issue and start thinking of possible solutions, working with other distributions isn't a high priority. Rather, we just don't think about it. That means we start to build a solution, only to discover later that there already are others under development. And I bet the result is often that all solutions have their pros and cons and none is as great as a unified solution might have been. Too bad! Because if you DO try to collaborate, you might find yourself in the same situation Vincent found himself in: he cautiously proposed "maybe we should try and work something out together?" and it turned out everyone loved the idea!

So our issue is awareness. I think we already did a lot to advance that at our last openSUSE conference: Collaboration Across Borders. It really made a difference and it is where Appstream was born.

A good example

To show how easy it is to communicate, let me point you to this recent email on the distributions mailing list on Freedesktop.org. In that email, Czech SUSE hacker Stanislav Brabec just tells people about a solution for a problem he's been working on: the maintenance of MIME defaults in glib and desktop-file-utils and making it all desktop-specific. This work can help applications integrate better within different desktops. For example, Nautilus in GNOME will start file-roller if the user opens a ZIP archive but if Nautilus runs in a Plasma desktop it will start Ark. If the other distribution people like this work and want to help out, that would be awesome. We would get better integration between Plasma, GNOME, XFCE, LXDE and the other desktop technologies on Linux. And the distributions would share the workload!

by FSCONS on flickr

Help out

So, things are happening. But you can count on me to keep talking about this and trying to help make it happen wherever I can. Jared and Stefano promised to do the same and I hope other distribution leaders will follow suit. And I count on all of you to keep collaboration in mind! More importantly, do it, help push it, help make a difference. As I wrote before in my way or the highway, collaboration strengthens us all and is what makes open source work so well...

Nokia does the right thing!

2011-02-15T03:34:00.001+01:00

For those who've had it with the Nokia discussions - further down I have some positive news too...

So the rumors turned out to be true. Stephan Elop, the new Nokia CEO (and ex Microsoft employee), has decided the future of Nokia is to work with Microsoft. It will be possible to decrease investments in R&D and Nokia won't have to build it's own platform nor focus on services anymore. Instead it can focus on becoming a phone hardware manufacturer, a strategy which will ensure high margins!

Sarcasm aside, it seems to me that Nokia (or at least its CEO) has realized it has had its best time in the nineties and it is over. Better to show good profitability for the next 4-6 years than invest in the future. Within 2-3 years Stephan will leave a company which is "going great" (short-term financially speaking) and receive a big bonus. Usual business of the type which brought us the credit crisis.

How about us?

So what does this mean for Free Software? Hard to say yet but I think it's a fair bet that development on MeeGo won't increase due to these choices. Bad for the linux kernel, infrastructure like Telepathy, Gstreamer and top-level stuff like Qt. Qt will probably not be hurt that much, it is the platform of choice for Symbian for at least the next few years. And if they change their mind Nokia (or otherwise some volunteers, can't stop them can you?) will port Qt to WP7 - write one app, run on MeeGo, Symbian AND WP7. With the open governance model of Qt & the LGPL license, the decreased investments could be compensated by community efforts. Still, I feel sorry for those who might get fired over this. And personally, I was looking for a really open mobile platform - my N900 is pretty awesome and though I'll buy the N9 it's sad it won't have a decent successor.

Meanwhile, stock has gone down some 15% on Nokia, MS' stock went down, Apple and Google went up. Hmmmm, what does the stock market think... Anyhow. I guess more than enough has been written and said about it, let's just wait and see what happens next...

Good News - twice!

In far more positive news, my own employer (that would be Novell) has helped the stability of the UK financial system by migrating the London Stock Exchange from a Microsoft .NET based solution to a SUSE Linux Enterprise stack. The new trading system went live last week. The earlier Windows and .NET based software actually managed to get the CEO of the LSE fired after an 8 hour outage (any idea how much money that costs?). Their new CEO, slightly smarter than Elop if I might say so, decided to go for Linux. This has led to better performance and stability - no surprise. SUSE proves to be about 15 times faster than the MS/.Net system which couldn't get network round trips below 2 milliseconds despite big investments in code and hardware improvements. Meanwhile SUSE comes in at about 126 microseconds! I don't expect any 8-hour outages or fired CEO's, so congrats to everyone involved!

And while at it, let me also mention an interview with my colleague Kerry Kim. Subject was IBM's supercomputer 'Watson' which took on a human in the TV show 'Jeopardy'. Watson runs SUSE Linux - as do, Kerry mentioned, 6 out of the top-10 supercomputers in the world. Check a video of Watson out here (or embedded above).

LCA 2011 event report

2011-02-03T19:52:00.000+01:00

Hi all!

I've recovered from LCA 2011 and took the time to write an event report for the marketing team. You can find it here. A quick summary:

Event Details
It is a well organized and quite professional conference. Biggest sponsors HP, IBM, Intel and Google. Budget about $700.000, entry fee from $60 to $600 (depending if you're student, hobbyist or professional and if you get early bird registration (50% off). There are about 1000 people there, mostly semi-regulars, few students. Most of them quite technical and experienced.
Arrived Tuesday night, Wednesday first day of the conference for me but the conf starts on Monday with small sessions.
results
Attended talks, among others by Red Hat/Fedora ppl Learned about Koji and how it is quite a bit behind on OBS (which is probably also due to a different focus. Either way, forget about cross compiling, it runs locally, has to be controlled from the command line etc)
Got in contact with a few local (open)SUSE people, will try to help them to set up more of a community in AU.
Realized many people want to spread openSUSE but don't know how. They used to have local Novell contacts but those disappeared (layoffs, personnel changes) and now they're lost. I will try and get them motivated to become openSUSE ambassador. Need to expand our ambassador program, communicate it better and work with the local Novell/SUSE offices, integrate their work with local (open)SUSE people and the ambassador work!
Had a meeting with Fedora Project Lead. We discussed cross-distro collaboration. There will be a discussion panel on that on FOSDEM lead by him and the Debian project lead, I will join them.
Communication
Gave a 90 second lightning talk (24 slides about SUSE Studio) during the closing ceremony which earned me a t-shirt (winner best lightning talk). Resulted in ppl coming up to the booth all Saturday to say they would check out openSUSE and SUSE Studio (again)
Held a booth on Saturday together with Tim, local Novell/SUSE employee and openSUSE volunteer. Answered many questions.
Created 1 A4 poster with the marketing team to get geeks' interest, gave away about 40 and used it in booth area
Gave away 150 DVD's, rest is with 2 local openSUSE ppl now.
Conclusion
This conference is certainly worth going to but needs more marketing materials and more people, a team!

Egypt and the rest of the world outside of AU

2011-01-31T10:37:00.003+01:00

Warning: personal & political opinion below. Don't read if you don't like politics ;-)

While writing this, I'm in a plane somewhere above Iran, catching up to what happened in the rest of the world while I was at LCA 2011. And I am reading some weird stuff about Egypt. Their government took the Internet completely off line there. Funny, some USA senators wanted a kill-switch for the web. They've been taking cues from Iran and China lately when it comes to Freedom of Speech and how to deal with it, looks like they got another shining example of how to limit communication. Meanwhile, they are cracking down on Internet action group Anonymous. Interestingly enough, it's perfectly fine to demonstrate in front of the white house or block access to nuclear plants when they try to remove waste. If you do the same on the web, trying to defend freedom of speech (Wikileaks) they break in your house and take you, your family and any silicon-based device they can find. And they get away with it - as someone on osnews said: "[US citizens] wouldn't know it if aliens invaded and then simply took over. That would involve lifting their nose out of their kindle or iPad."

Unfortunately, it ain't just the usual suspects China, USA, Korea & most of the middle east countries. I understand Australia (where I just came from) has also seen several arrests of Anonymous members. And to think that we just listened to a keynote by Mark Pesce talking about how we're way to much under control of governments and large companies like Facebook and we need to start working on Mesh Networking and things like that so nobody can take away our communication... I hope the keynote video goes live asap on blip.tv. Warning, some profanity in there! Further at the conference, some experiments were done with a mobile phone (yes, just a normal android phone) attached to a balloon, providing mesh networking over several kilometers (!!!). Seems like we have the tech - now the incentive has arrived too!

I do see some bad sides of the little-too-extreme kind of transparency wikileaks promotes. And when I hear some people speak, I sometimes wonder if freedom of speech should be limited. But on the other hand - most of the things wikileaks has brought to light SHOULD have been brought to light. Their cables have already resulted in political fall-out in pretty much every country in the world (including my own Netherlands). And in a revolution which seems to be leading to more democracy in Tunesia, maybe in other countries too.

I know, I know. Politics doesn't belong on planet KDE, planet Suuuus or any other planet where I'm aggregated. But seriously. I'm pretty sure none of the regular readers hates to read this. Freedom of speech is something we all work on and care about, isn't it a central value behind Free Software? You, know, the "in a world where speech depends on software, Free Speech depends on Free Software". Looks like we need Free Networks too, now...

And those who didn't know about these events are most likely either interested or will continue sticking their nose in their shiny new iPad. I'm not fond of self-censorship so I speak up.

LCA on Friday

2011-01-28T06:26:00.007+01:00

Still at Linux Conf Australia. Have new pictures, see below.

A few notes:

I spoke with some local Novell/SUSE people - and we made a deal that we'll work more together to promote openSUSE in Down Under. Sorely needed, our technology can contribute a lot to the work people here are doing. And I bet we can learn a thing or two too...

Yesterday I attended talks about Koji (Red Hat build system) and Fedora. Koji - let's just say we need to communicate OBS a lot better. Will make the lives of many sysadmins quite a bit easier. Seriously, Koji is nice but: command line only (web interface just monitors and can restart tasks); runs on local hardware and thus only builds for your own architecture; doesn't really support building for other distro's - surely not Ubuntu and Debian like OBS can do; you can't just point it to a SVN or Git repository - no, first have to create source RPM's by hand. And there's more - just showing how awesome OBS really is. I do think OBS needs a name change - to something like Open Build Service. To make clear it ain't just openSUSE specific!

The Fedora talk was also interested and the Fedora Project Lead is a cool dude. I spend some time with him during the Penguin Dinner and he invited me to a cross-distro discussion panel at FOSDEM together with the Debian project lead. We seem to be very much on the same page and I look greatly forward to that!

The Friday keynote by Mark Pesce was awesome, be sure to to check the video's on blip! There is an upload/network issue, so they won't be there anytime soon, unfortunately. He spoke about freedom, mesh networking, facebook and more. Oh and it's 18+ rated - including juicy quotes on Steve Jobs you don't want to miss!

All in all - great day which isn't over yet. I'll be giving a 90 sec lightning talk at the closing ceremony, showing off the awesomeness of SUSE Studio. Mostly due to that being the only thing I could whip together into a PDF quick enough - ImageMagick's "convert" tool to the rescue! But it will give a taste to people, show them (open)SUSE is more than relevant: you really need to some SUSE knowledge on your CV if you want to be a good sysadmin ;-)

Of course the result will end up on the openSUSE marketing resources page here - I just need darix to upload it as the PDF is more than the 2 MB limit.

Now on to the images:

Van LCA 2011 Brisbane

HCC linux day and Linux Conf Australia

2011-01-27T01:01:00.000+01:00

Linux Conf Australia

I promised to write more about Linux Conf Australia. The good: great weather, great people, nice talks. The bad: little if any openSUSE presence; some people don't even know it and pretty much nobody has any idea bout awesome stuff like the Build Service, Studio, Tumbleweed etc etc. The ugly: no idea how to turn that around for now. So I need some help!

On Saturday the 29th I will have a booth at the 'open day' to help spread the word about open source, linux & of course openSUSE. Now I'll have a hard time doing that alone. Initially I'd have Graham help me out but I guess he couldn't make it, I can't reach him on mail or anywhere else. So if you're interested in helping out - I'll trow in one of the new openSUSE t-shirts (as long as my limited stash lasts)! Look me up, I've added a picture of myself in the Picasa album below, will do that again tomorrow ;-)

To save you the searching, see the picture below. And yes, I am wearing the openSUSE t-shirt today - and there's more where that came from!

Van LCA 2011 Brisbane

HCC linux dag in NL

A couple of days ago I wrote a blog about a dutch IT event where I would like to have some openSUSE presence. Now more information has become available on their website. The event will be on Saturday may 21 in the Postillion hotel in Bunnik, NL from 10:00 to 16:00. Afterward I might take the openSUSE team out for food ;-)

2 people already signed up and we're looking for more! We'll have fun, I promise :D

collaboration at openSUSE

2011-01-26T03:17:00.006+01:00

A few days ago I posted about Canonical's decision to start shipping Qt with Ubuntu but do it in a not-exactly-cooperative way. Aaron replied to my post that he had contacted Mark who simply forwarded him to the Kubuntu developers. Mark either didn't get the point Aaron tried to make or didn't like it - either way, too bad.

Collaboration news!

Luckily, at the cross-distro app installer meeting openSUSE organized, Ubuntu had two people over and it was even decided to use the Ubuntu Software center as reference for other distributions. Good to see Canonical seems open for collaboration - at least to some extend. After that meeting the Bretzn team worked for three days on an openSUSE appstore - count on an article about that soon! Hint: pretty awesome results in the pipeline and patches are already flowing in, implementing the ideas, plans and mockups from the meeting. I must say I'm really happy with those meetings and look forward to see what openSUSE will be doing over the next months on the app store front!

Linux Conf Australia

Meanwhile I write this at LCA 2011 in Brisbane, Australia. For anyone who is curious: no, no swimming skills needed to get around. Some roads are still blocked here and there but I haven't seen any big problems. I know, pictures or it didn't happen - see below. I promise to blog more about LCA later!

LCA 2011 Brisbane

openSUSE in the Netherlands

2011-01-25T13:53:00.000+01:00

In May, the dutch "HCC" computerclub will organize a Linux day. They have asked me if I'd be willing to give a talk there - cool, I can do that. And if I could also set up and staff a booth. Slightly harder to do that on my own - so I hereby would like to ask any dutch openSUSE users who are willing to help out to contact me!

Maybe we can do more than only that booth, there are plenty of events in the Netherlands and of course we should organize a openSUSE 11.4 release event to get to know each other!

Talking about local openSUSE, look at this site and find the openSUSE article by HeliosRed :D

My way or the highway?

2011-01-22T18:09:00.002+01:00

2 days ago I wrote an enthusiastic blog about a cross-distribution collaboration meeting on App Stores we've organized in Nuremberg. Then, a day later, Canonical decided to ship Qt with Ubuntu. While not anything special from an openSUSE pov (we give both GTK and Qt equal treatment and offer the best platform to develop for both), it's a nice move. In the announcement Mark Shuttleworth emphasized Qt integration with Ubuntu. I specifically write Ubuntu, not GNOME/GTK - Aaron Seigo responded to that with a blog post showing a bit of frustration with Canonical's policy, the push for dconf & Ubuntu-specific Qt integration in apps.

Yay, more flamewars!

Now I'm as big a fan of a good KDE vs GNOME flamewar as anyone and maybe we make them more fun by introducing a GNOME/Ubuntu and Qt/Ubuntu set of apps (what seems to be going on since Mark announced Unity as default in Ubuntu). More splitting up = more fun, and openSUSE's tagline is 'have fun' so maybe we've been going at this all wrong.

openSUSE has a focus on collaboration and integration. I happily wrote about the achievements at the openSUSE conference in that area in October. we worked with Red Hat, Mandriva, Debian. Over the last 3 days we had people from these and more distributions in Nuremberg to work on an app store spec for Linux. Then, right now a second sprint has started, to integrate appstore technology in openSUSE itself. Yes, 2 birds, one stone: first we discuss cooperation, then implement results.

Learning...

We do things that way because at Novell, we've made our share of mistakes. And we learned - we don't tell our community what openSUSE is going to do, we let them choose. Yes, Novell ships GNOME on their Enterprise Desktop. The community has KDE as default. Up to them. We work with others because be learned that the Free Software ecosystem matters. I wonder if Canonical is going to repeat those mistakes...

Now maybe Mark is right, creating a special Ubuntu world for application developers will create more fun. Or maybe we're right - letting the community do it's thing is more fun. I don't know. But if anyone is unhappy about Mark telling you what to do in Ubuntu, you're welcome here to help shape openSUSE how you want it! Which includes bringing Ayatana to openSUSE. Or MeeGo. And Mark, if you happen to hear Aaron and decide Canonical should cooperate a bit more with others, we're always open for that!

Have fun!

LCA - here I come!

2011-01-20T13:41:00.001+01:00

On a more personal note, next week I'll attend Linux Conf Australia! Luckily the bad weather around Brisbane has not made it impossible for the conference to go ahead as scheduled. I am finalizing my registration right now and travel has been arranged. I'll be there with Graham Lauder, openoffice.org's contact in New Zealand and openSUSE fan. We'll man a booth at the Open Day on Saturday where anyone can look us up and learn more about openSUSE.

So any openSUSE users and contributors in the area: come look us up!

Oh and for everyone with a blog or other site: here you can find openSUSE 11.4 counters!

Meetings & stuff

2011-01-19T12:30:00.004+01:00

I just heard from Vincent that the Cross-distro app installer meeting organized by openSUSE is in full swing.

Cross distribution Appstore Sprint

As Vincent wrote in his blog, the idea came up at the openSUSE conference. We should work on getting distributions on the same page when it comes to a Linux Appstore technology. Appstore API's have been in development for ages on linux so we have a strong base. The as the Open Collaboration Services we currently have on freedesktop.org are inspired by the GetHotNewStuff technology which was developed by Josef Spillner many years ago - KDE and GNOME have used this to deliver wallpapers and scripts to their users. After GHNS, two possible successors were developed - OCS, started by Frank Karlitschek, seems the de-facto standard now. It was adopted by Maemo and now by MeeGo for their appstore, openoffice.org supports it and of course the family of opendesktop.org series of sites including the popular gtk-apps.org, qt-apps.org, GNOME- and KDE-look.org are all accessible from this API.

At the cross-distro appinstaller meeting which started this morning people from several distributions including Red Hat, Mandriva and Debian are discussing together how Linux should tackle this. Can we agree on a common technology shared between distributions and Desktops? Hopefully we can bring together the work on app install by Richard, the Software Center tech from Ubuntu and FD.o's Open Collaboration Services in a way that benefits all.

I had a quick phone call with Frank who told me the meeting is very constructive and he hopes that the major distributions can agree on some kind of standard by the end of this week. That would be pretty awesome! The appstore sprint aims to bring people on the same page and will be followed by a Bretzn sprint for openSUSE.

Bretzn Sprint

At the Bretzn sprint (also sponsored by openSUSE) the goal is to get something done: work on appstore integration in openSUSE, as well as smoothen the process of building and distributing an application for developers. Bretzn, first announced at the openSUSE conference in October, is almost ready for its first release. At the sprint, Pavol Rusnak, who developed a web based openSUSE Games store, will also be present - I hope he can make sure we also have a web-accessible store for openSUSE!

While it is unsure if the work on Bretzn and the openSUSE appstore will make it into openSUSE 11.4, it is clear that openSUSE is pushing innovation and standardization in the Linux market. Not going all alone, but thinking and caring about the larger ecosystem - I think that is what separates a real community effort from a company pushing a corporate agenda. Bringing the right people with the right skills and the right ideas together is what these sprints are all about - I'm happy to have helped make it possible. And less happy that I couldn't be there myself, there is little in the world of Free Software that gives me more energy than being at a developer sprint!

I'd like to thank Frank and Vincent for organizing, as well as all the attendees for attending and I look forward to their blogs and news.o.o article ;-)

Good luck and Rock the Boat!

Meetings and Elections today!

2011-01-12T14:56:00.003+01:00

Today is a busy day for openSUSE. The election committee is busy finishing the last bits and pieces needed for the election of two new openSUSE Board members to start. DigitITom just notified the openSUSE-project mailing list that voting is open and the voting site can be found on openSUSE connect!

Over the last days, candidates have been finishing their election platform pages which you can find on the election 2010 page. Vincent Untz has asked the candidates some hard questions and I must say I'm reading their responses with close attention ;-)

But there is more going on. We just added a GNOME team meeting to the agenda for Januari 20th?. The KDE team has moved back their meetings scheduled for tomorrow to today, 17:00 UTC - unfortunately the exact same time as the openSUSE Project-wide meeting in the #opensuse-project channel on Freenode. Once the project meeting is over and everyone has had a few hours to recover, the Board will have a public meeting 19:00 UTC in the same project channel. The agenda for today:

openSUSE Foundation

Membership approval team - replace people who don't vote with somebody else

Where do we need to improve ?

Questions & Answers

So plenty of activity, stay tuned and have fun!

Marketing Collaboration Day

2010-12-22T01:01:00.002+01:00

So the 3rd Marketing Collaboration Day is over. I need sleep, urgently. However, I'm also happy and excited so I won't be able to sleep anyway ;-)

Yes, it was awesome. The marketing team did a great job, many tasks were worked on - a bunch completed. Ubercool. So I would like to join Bryen in thanking everyone involved: awesome, I love you all!

And happy holidays for everyone who won't be around until they start.

openSUSE and Attachmate Q&A

2010-12-19T15:56:00.008+01:00

I recently had the opportunity to conduct a Q&A with Attachmate CEO Jeff Hawn. We covered openSUSE, SUSE and open source in general. Please see the full text of my interview at news.opensuse.org.

good news!

2010-12-13T11:50:00.005+01:00

Hello world,

Some good news.

First of all, the dutch Linux Starter I blogged about a few days ago is now available online. So if you're dutch and want to try out openSUSE - go and get it!

And second of all, the board has just announced that Alan Clark has been appointed by Novell as new chair of the board. Most of you probably don't know him, I do as I have been working with him for the last few months on the openSUSE Foundation and some other things. He's in my humble opinion one of those people who gets Free Software and a pleasure to work with. Only after this announcement I discovered he was pretty "high in the tree" as we in NL say - being on the Senior Leadership team of Markus, his experience in the Linux Foundation and other organizations... But while working with me he had a simple "let's get this done and do it well" attitude. Still an engineer on the inside - something you actually see a lot in Novell and something I appreciate greatly.

Greetings,
Jos

Magazines...

2010-12-08T22:48:00.005+01:00

After some travel, coming home means, besides washing clothes and catching up to email, a mountain of old-fashioned snail-mail. Unfortunately, most of that these days is bills - the one thing they still like to make as hard as possible (for reasons I'll never understand).

Thankfully, there was something good in there this time: the awesome openSUSE Calendar/Poster which comes with a free Linux Magazin (good for my German language skills)!

And also very interesting, this year's "Linux Starter" magazine, made by the dutch Linux Magazine, is fully openSUSE - featuring a custom openSUSE 11.3 live+install DVD and articles on almost every aspect of openSUSE a beginner needs. So if you haven't got it yet and want to start with openSUSE: find it in your bookstore!

openSUSE Board elections

2010-12-02T15:46:00.003+01:00

Awesomeness. I just heard that already 3 people stepped up for the 2010 openSUSE Board elections. And Sascha posted the announcement only yesterday!

Really, this is something that shows how openSUSE is a healthy community. We have plenty of people who are able and willing to do this - which is really great. Thanks to those who stepped up - there are only 2 positions, but even the act of stepping forward and saying you're willing to do this is very important!

The openSUSE Board work is very important and becoming more so. Currently work is being done on setting up an openSUSE Foundation - and the board plays a crucial role there. We need people with some experience and willingness to work hard on this, there is a lot of work. If you fit that bill - apply!

Love, Jos

catching up

2010-11-30T10:38:00.002+01:00

Hi!

It feels like ages since I blogged, so here goes. A lot has happened since my last blog - Latinoware is over (and was frickin' awesome), I had a week off which I enjoyed in Brazil and now I'm at the Nuremberg offices due to Michl who just left. We had some catching up to do before he went - same with AJ who has decided to enjoy some parental leave. And Jaqueline who will have to fill the shoes of these two fine gentlemen. Meanwhile I am trying to catch up to mail and news - there is a lot of both.

Mail catching up has been limited quite a bit by the KDE Factory OBS repository for 11.3 upgrading to KDE's 4.6 release of platform (Akonadi!), apps (KMail2) and desktop workspace. The two I mentioned (Akonadi & kmail2) have been a royal pain in the ass, to be honest. The migration of my old accounts took a night (>100.000 mails) but didn't actually import those mails. Hence they had to be downloaded from gmail. With the VERY frequent disconnections and regular hanging of the Akonadi resource this has taken a while to say the least - lots of babysitting (restarting Akonadi etc) required. I hope the KDE Pim* dudes and dudettes can get this stable (and faster!) before the release... Oh, and Virtuoso-t keeps hogging 100% CPU untill I decide to just kill it - after which I don't notice any bad or strange behavior. Maybe I should auto-kill it on login ;-) but in the end, it's all working reasonably well now, albeit a bit slower than KMail1.x. Yay yay.

Meanwhile, on the catching-up-to-news front, I am eternally grateful for the work done by Sascha, Carl, Saturo, Sebastian and Thomas on the openSUSE Weekly News. Instead of having to read >140 blogposts (and then still missing out on what is going on in openSUSE's feature tracker openFate and the openSUSE forums) I just had to read 3 or 4 Weekly News reports. Truly awesome. They aren't only providing a complete but also quite enjoyable read of what is going on in the openSUSE community. Tracking such a large bunch of people doing so much with such a small team - respect!

One thing I bumped into during the trip through the openSUSE news were a bunch of openFATE feature requests I really liked. One would be to have Unity on openSUSE, another was getting project Bretzn in openSUSE. Awesome ideas and there is plenty more ;-)

Now back to reading mail. I will certainly blog more when I bump into interesting stuff...

*Yes, I did file a few bugs for the crashes. Too bad GDB often crashes too due to the abysmal memory usage of the whole KDE stack right now - only 2 GB ram, not enough apparently. Akonadi sometimes experiences memory usage spikes increasing to over 600 MB in less than a second. If I have other memory-hungry apps like Firefox running, this often triggers the OOM killer... I really wonder how it is possible that Akonadi runs on my mobile phone - but it does. ?

First day of Latinoware

2010-11-11T13:38:00.007+01:00

So this is the morning of the second Latioware day. Last night, just before the party/rock concert Maddog told me he just finished a blog - which made me realize that I didn't... So my notes on Brazil, Latinoware and openSUSE here.

Brazil

Brazil is a curious country. That's not only due to everyone speaking Portuguese (and barely any English) which makes me think I need to learn either Portuguese or Spanish. Some things are just off. For example, it seems the government has looked at other countries and decided that yes, they had to do something about the speeding. So they put huge, clearly visible bumps on the road every few kilometer.

The bumps are so strong you have to slow down to a crawl - what everyone does. For the bump. Then - speeding again. On the road to my hotel is an electronic speeding thing showing how fast you go. It seems that, despite the maximum speed of about 60, everyone tries to drive 35 at most - past it, speeding again.

The traffic lights, on the other hand, are a marvelous piece of work. It seems they are build with impatient drivers in mind: they actually count down! It's quite some machinery (will try to take a pic later and show it) but it works great. I like :D

I've been told by the others here that Porto Alegre (which I will visit next week) is much more like a 'typical Brazil city' than Foz so I'll refrain from further commenting other than saying I really, really, absolutely *love* the Brazilian people. They are so energetic, nice and huggy, hard working and very, very creative.

Latinoware

So on that last note, you can imagine how Latinoware is: imagine a huge number of energetic, nice, huggy and enthousiastic people at the booth, giving talks, walking around - it is just awesome. And impressive. The Latinoware conference takes place at Itaipu, an interesting and big hydro plant. Big as in absolutely mindbogglingly huge. The Hydroplant runs linux and for a good reason: durability. During the building of the thing (which took 30 years and turned the world second-largest water fall into the worlds largest water fall) they realized it would take them at least 100 year to recoup the costs of building it. The livespan of the longest-living IT companies at that point in time was about 20 years - something they didn't want to bet their future on. Free Software, on the other hand, is obviously a much more long-term choice - you have complete control.

Now the Itaipu story is NOT a one-time thing in Brazil. Brazil runs Linux (and often openSUSE!) all over the place, to such an extend that Microsoft has realized they have no chance of selling much of their products other than by cooperating and going with the flow: there is a large 'interoperability' lab and several Microsoft developers were at the conference. Banco de Brazil has over a 100.000 SUSE installations and they are not alone. Universities and high schools are working with linux, teaching their students. I spoke with Sandro, who teaches at a Brazilian university and they use SUSE Studio to create special live CD's for their students to use. They love the fact that you can quickly point and click a custom linux distribution together and Sandro complained (!) that we do not promote SUSE Studio enough.

About the pictures in my blog: First one is Carlos, one of the most energetic and creative people I have ever met. An amazing person, really full of Free Software and openSUSE. I said creative, well, that is an understatement. He made openSUSE soap, a table soccer game (see one of the other photo's), a set of surprise-thingies for the ambassadors at the conf (can't talk about it yet hehe) and a billion other things. Wow.

Second pic is Izabel in front of the openSUSE booth before we started filling it up with stuff and people. Izabel is a Brazilian Angel who organized the openSUSE attendance at the conference. She has been around in Free Software in Brazil since 1998, organizing GNOME meetings and other events since 2003. A very special girl, I can tell you that!

Next pic is the GNOME team & me (LTR: Izabel Valverde, Vinicius Depizzol, yours truly and Luciana Menezes). Have I told you Izabel is cool? Well so are Vinicius and Luciana ;-)

Last night there was a rock band at the conference hence the image of a stage with a dancing tux and firefox in front of it. Nice party, but entirely void of alcohol. That was OK with me, I promised myself no alcohol at least until next Friday - so there was no temptation...

Next up again Izabel (have I said she is awesome yet?) showing two GNOME dolls for her talk about women in openSUSE and GNOME. The dolls are actually meant as a joke against the typical 'female' stereotypes. Which are probably different in Brazil compared to anywhere in the world anyway - in Brazil there are many women in management because that's something they are considered to be good at... Something this country is much more modern at than NL.

Next the results of Carlos' creativity: an openSUSE table soccer game. Really something, I tell you, that guy is special... The image following this one is Carlos giving an openSUSE training during the conference; then me and Thomas; finally Camila looking pretty in my camera ;-)

Now it is 2 hours before my talk in the Brazil room so time to start mentally preparing. Take care all!

beep-beep from Brazil!

2010-11-09T17:21:00.011+01:00

A few days ago I blogged about a dutch conference I was at and the talk I gave there. I realize it is not very smart to announce your talk at a conf after it is over. However, mistakes help with the learning. I learn a lot and to prove it, hereby tell you all that I will be at Latinoware. I realize Latinoware will start tomorrow, hence I did not improve my communication enough yet - but I will keep working on it.

Brazil

So, Brazil. I arrived last night, after a trip lasting a little over 24 hours. Which was fine thanks to some pharmaceuticals (my highest medicine intake in 24 hours ever, usually try to avoid it) and eating 20% of what I usually do. Yeah, I had some complications after the injections a week ago as I mentioned in my previous blog. I can tell you, either I was very un-lucky or I am in strong disagreement with the 'stabbers' on the definition of "mild" in the term "mild fever-like symptoms" which they promised me.

Enough complaining, Brazil is awesome. I haven't seen much but the people are very friendly, the hotel is an absolutely HUGE complex in James Bond 80's style (surely not intentional but it has charm), the taxi drivers want you dead and the hotel restaurant just managed to give me bread with what initially looked like red and green pesto & garlic butter but I haven't been able to accurately identify it yet. Tastes good though, so I take it like I'm taking all of this right now: let it flow over me and enjoy the trip. Wait, no, I resist when they try to take away my plate with bread - something they try every 5-10 minutes. Just bring the soup I ordered.

See image: the bed has a panel with futuristic (for 1980) switches and buttons to control all room functionality: light and airco. And volume, no idea for what. Maybe TV.

So while I try to (identify/protect what I) eat I will write a bit about Latinoware. Please correct my mistakes and add - the site isn't exactly helpful for non-portugese/non-spanish.

Latinoware

Latinoware is the smallest of the three major (as in freakishly huge) conferences in Brazil. It takes place in Foz De Icazu (ignore the spelling it's different everywhere I look) and attracts about 3000 visitors. Obviously this results in a huge number of topics and tracks being covered in three days of conference. With no schedule in English still, too bad. Yours truly will be giving a 'keynote'. Again I have definition issues - the Latinoware organization has organized 6 'keynotes' per day with 6 other simultaneous (but smaller) tracks, diluting the 'keynote' concept to 'main tracks'. ... Oh, Soup has arrived, please hang on.

... Good soup, very good. So my talk will happen on Thursday November 9th in room XXX. The talk is titled "why are you here?" (I decided not to chase anyone away, honest) and I'll talk about the motivation behind FOSS, then move on to the awesomeness that is openSUSE (duh). I'll re-use my kitty theme from my last talk as I honestly didn't have the time and inspiration to come up with something else. Blame the 'mild flu-like symptoms' I got from the Yellow Fever injections, the rather high fever* gave me weird thoughts but sadly no creativity. Of course the talk is different so there will be different kittens. Oh and any dirty talk afterwards will be nicked in the bud.

Meanwhile I have ensured myself that the red substance is sweet pepper. The green stuff has at least onion in there. Still no clue what herb makes the butter so lovely and none of the friendly waiters understands the question. They just smile and say yes. By their account the butter at least contains garlic (surely not), concrete (?) and grass (you wish). I gave up.

more openSUSE at Latinoware

Besides the talk I'll be giving - no big plans for Latinoware other than hanging out with the openSUSE ambassadors. But they'll get tired hanging quick enough and move over to walking so if any of YOU (as in, my gentle readers) is going to be at latinoware - look me up and give me a hug. I won't bother describing myself, just look for openSUSE people and ask them. And I just figured out that the bread sticks have anise in them. Darn tasty. Blame my more-quirky-than-usual writing style today on the medications.

Now I won't be the only one talking at Latinoware, here's a list of coolness:

A11y: Its about you! by Bryen "suseROCKs" Yunashko. Also a 'keynote' ;-)

openSUSE Edu Li-f-e by openSUSE ambassador Carlos Alberto dos Santos Ribeiro. Just read Carlos' mail from last Sunday that he is sick too - hope he'll be OK cuz I know litle about edu Li-f-e and I want to follow the talk if I can and it is English :D

two talks by ambassador Rogerio Ferreira: Xen for Dummies and Automatizando Tarefas ao Extremo com Shell e Expect. I'm taking a guess here and say the first is English, the second isn't :D

Conference organisator and all-round cool girl Izabel Cerqueira Valverde will talk about GNOME Women & openSUSE Women - Mulheres e seus espaços.

Her brother Ricardo Cerqueira Valverde will talk about: openSUSE apresenta Realidade Aumentada em Linux. I doubt he'll speak English :D

Silvio Palmieri talks about Laboratório de A a Z. I have no idea what it is but there is "laboratory" and A-Z in there - making sure I still have no idea.

And the openSUSE buildservice is covered by Alexandre Duarte Rogoski in openSUSE BuildService - Construindo Softwares para Diversas Plataformas e Distribuições If it ain't mumbo-jumbo it is probably portugese too.

Besides the openSUSE people I know there will be a bunch of KDE hugbears that I know - look forward to meeting you again, cuties (Yes, T.C., that means you especially)!

So. Enough geek- and food and people talk for today. Enjoy the relative quiet the next few days as I doubt I'll have time for blogs during Latinoware. And if I do I am hopefully more consistent.

mumblemumble... that is a HUGE soup with all that egg and potato and rice in it... it's a starter and I can barely handle it... happy I didn't order meat... mumblemumble...

What? Oh, sorry, tuning out!

grtz
Jos

* 40C/104F was highest I measured. It surely went higher but at that point I couldn't be bothered to put some beeping device in my ass telling me I should be feeling crappy - I knew that. You know what the worst part was? Not being able to keep in aspirine because I was so nauseous :(

beep

talk about openSUSE

2010-11-05T12:13:00.014+01:00

Yes, this will be all about me. Sometimes I need to whine a bit.

First of all, last Tuesday I endured the ritual stabbing that seems to be required for travel to Brazil (I'm going to Lationware). I'm rather proud of the fact that I didn't feint or anything (I did last time I had an injection) - less happy with the fact that I still have two sour arms and am expected to get flu-like symptoms over the weekend. Which have already started - I feel worse and worse by the hour. Yay. Expect delays in communication with me this weekend, sorry...

But such is life. On a more interesting note, I gave a talk about openSUSE yesterday - my first openSUSE talk, in fact. It was fun. Always good to have a room of people pretending to be interested in what you have to say, even if there are only like 15 people there...

For those who want to see my slides, I uploaded them here (click image with kitten for direct download). Translators welcome :D Paul Adams summarized the presentation by saying it was all about pussy. If you know Paul you will now realize that the rest of the day, subsequent dinner and the drinking afterward was all about kittens and anything related. He can be a little... Focused. Of course you could blame the others at the dinner & beer for not distracting him enough but they were just to busy supporting him in a train of thought that we should have never followed through.

How to present openSUSE

Anyway, enough about that - the presentation. It was surprisingly easy. Initially I wanted to talk about marketing, but decided that the topic of openSUSE would be better justified if I included a significant proportion of OBS and other technology. It basically means you won't have to convince anyone about anything. You just repeat words like "awesome" "cool" "incredible" and don't forget about "easy" while showing a series of screen shots (here) of the OBS build process. By the time you're at the end, most people will be stunned enough to believe anything you say.

Open Build Service

During the slide show (again link in image on right), be sure to mention things like "yeah I upload a tar-ball here but you can simply point to a source repository as well" and "so you could package software for all major linux distributions from a Windows workstation!". While of course repeating the magic words "awesome" and "easy" and so on. Oh and at some point there is a screen shot showing KIWI - if you feel people are resisting your 'leet marketing skills, talk about it. KIWI can create an always-up-to-date LIVECD, auto-regenerated from the OBS packages if something changes. As OBS can pull directly from Git or other SCM's and you can set up a cron script to kick OBS into rebuilding the package, you have a LiveCD which automatically daily rebuilds. With error messages send your way by OBS (and OBS ensures it rebuilds whatever needs rebuilding - if something doesn't work, the CD will stay the old one and thus hopefully working). Everyone will be impressed. Easy as kicking a puppy that's already down!

SUSE Studio

At the end, the more cynical in our audience will still be standing - so move on to the this SUSE Studio screen shot tour. The big finale there is the testdrive - please mention that any changes there (like creating files or changing settings) will actually be saved in the appliance. Oh and you can SSH into the running OS as well. Name a few of the Virtual Machine formats supported - EC2 (Amazon's cloud!), VMware, Xen, KVM...) and you're done.

Project Bretzn

Of course, there are always hardliners who won't be impressed still. Give em a good pounding with Project Bretzn. Tell them that the whole process of building can and will be automated from within the IDE (Eclipse, Visual Studio, Qt Creator, whatever gets 'em off) with a few mouse clicks; then the resulting binaries can be submitted to a number of App Stores like MeeGo's Garage, gtk-apps/kde-apps.org and (in time) the Ovi Store. The Bretzn plugin will spread the word for the developer on facebook, twitter and other social media (iow it will do the boring stuff). Then the users can comment on the app and rate it and such - the developer can ignore this feedback if he likes but unlike the usual feeback it won't consist of 90% "how do I build this", "it doesn't build", "do you have packages for XYZ" and other annoying stuff - so it might actually be worth reading it.

Finishing it up

Keep on repeating "awesome" in real Steve Jobs style! By the time you're at the end of your presentation, everyone will be completely brainwashed and cheering you on. Bow, thank them for their attention and get out before they recover and start asking questions.

Actually the questions probably will go fine too - just make sure you've spend a few hours clicking around in OBS and SUSE Studio, read a bit of the tutorials and it's very unlikely anyone will ask something you don't know. Easy as pie!

I know I promised that this post would be all about me, hence not worth reading - sorry. I hope at least it'll be useful for anyone who wants to talk about openSUSE and OBS ;-)

* note that anyone who dares to take this blogpost too serious will be chased down by BloodHounds. Wait, no, BloodKittens.

oSC successful? Absolutely!

2010-10-29T01:25:00.003+02:00

Hi all!

Just a quick note: I'm very proud of the very successful openSUSE conference and wanted to spread that word ;-)

Seriously, the "collaboration across borders" theme has worked out incredibly well. We even have a Red Hat developer with his own Build Service Project now. And I heard whispers about Mageia pondering the use of OBS as well. Awesome!

I know, I know, we didn't fork any big projects - well, actually, we had the first LibreOffice conference tracks there - it's becoming a real open source project, finally. Getting rid of pesky code attribution stuff has taken down a huge barrier. (meanwhile OpenOffice keeps crashing on my laptop. Which is OK, I used KPresenter for my presentation - too bad Beta 2 introduced the audience to ODF tags in the slides hehe)

Love, Jos

Catching up

2010-10-26T09:50:00.014+02:00

Currently catching up to things after the openSUSE conference. It was awesome but I had over 1000 unread mails, hundreds of planet posts to look at - luckily I have managed to catch up to sleep ;-)

I just released the Conference impression article on news.openSUSE.org - read it if you want a little taste of the conference. Personally, I can say it has added a second highlight to the conference year for me. I go to lots of things like LinuxTag, FOSDEM and many developer sprints. However, the yearly Akademy meeting has always been a lone wolf for me - in that it is so much better than anything else there is nothing comparable. Now there is. The atmosphere and energy of the openSUSE conference, while different, is certainly on the same level and I've heard the same from several other (KDE and GNOME and even other distribution) people. I already look forward to the next openSUSE conference - like I look forward to the next Desktop Summit...

In case you were wondering, yes, more articles are coming, and tomorrow I hope a nice overview of what was accomplished will go live. If you want to ensure we don't miss anything, send me or the marketing team your input please! Good bofs, people meeting people, new plans and ideas - it's all very welcome!

Three more things. First of all, Helen South has recently written an interesting and insightful article about cross-distribution and cross-community collaboration, find it here on linux.com. In my opinion Helen is an excellent writer and the thorough research she does is really amazing. Keep it up, Helen!

Meanwhile you all know the gnarly stuff going on in the area of Canonical (I wouldn't say Ubuntu is much involved, as that's the community and this decision was quite top-down, wasn't it?). I obviously share the feelings of many of you. Seeing the great collaboration at the openSUSE conference, reading about the announcement at UDS was like a cold shower. As Colin Guthrie wrote, "The first thing that struck me about this event is that it was quite inclusive". Yes, it was. openSUSE (and Novell) believe the Free Software community is an asset, not a liability.

Anyway. I support Dave Neary's proposal and hope Canonical comes to their senses and cooperates with the rest of the community, it's the right (and smart) thing to do.

Finally, something went wrong with the Wednesday-night-beer-discussion video I posted Monday. This link should work: click_me!

And I have another one here for you from the Green Party at Thursday night - including a dancing Bryen at the party :D

Now I need sleep. I feel like I'm having to catch up to all the work I couldn't do last week AND much conference stuff :D
Jos

Little conf video...

2010-10-23T09:41:00.003+02:00

Wednesday night at the conf center we had some beers and discussed them - I recorded a quick video of Leinir, Frank, Chani and myself there which is surely silly enough to be worth sharing with the world :D

Meanwhile I am trying to get more video's and articles out but NOW I need to get to the train to go home to NL...

Will blog and write more later ;-)

If you want some oSC video's NOW, check what Will has been recording, or the openSUSE channel.

Bye!

oSC party fun

2010-10-22T11:56:00.004+02:00

Wow, third day of the openSUSE conference already. Feels like the conference started an hour ago, every second has been busy. Well, almost. I'm currently enjoying my morning-thee, feeling a bit bad about the fact that 5 minutes ago the Friday keynote started... Will get a cab soon to not miss all of it ;-)

Last night we had the party - which was very, very cool. Green lighting, red and green drinks and I've met many nice 'old toads' (the openSUSE branded beer). Which contributes to me really loving my thee right now.

According to some anonymous sources the conference is bigger, better organized and has better content than last year. I can't compare to last year but it's nice to hear. That same source loved the party - another anon told me he actually hasn't had such a cool conference party in a long while. As I recently have been to both GUADEC and AKADEMY I wouldn't say the same (although I must admit I was only at GUADEC during the famous "shit we've ran out of beer" party).

So at the party I met probably more people I wanted to meet than in the two days leading up to it - and I'm not alone in that regard. I saw some linux edu people get in contact with each other (too bad Knut* didn't make it), Andrew getting even more pats on the back and we were served food by Klaas, Will, Pavol and the other Boosters. They did look good in their outfit, I tell yah.

* the word Knut might refer to:
A. An Electric Boogie dancer
B. Someone from a phone company
C. A legendary creature
D. Linux Educational Distribution teamleader
E. All of the above

Notes on OBS

2010-10-21T09:20:00.002+02:00

Hi all!

Having an awesome time here at the conference - esp last night with the Movie Night, the Movies were cool. As was the beer during and afterwards...

During the day I followed talk by Lubos Lunak about the Build Service as I wanted to learn more about it. As I made notes I decided to share them :D

In the introduction Lubos shared that apparently you have to package each application by hand - however, automatic downloading of random tarballs from the internet and turning them into packages for all linux distributions on distrowatch.org is planned for OBS 3.0!

For developers, OBS offers a platform to test software for a variety of library and distribution vresions and on 32 and 64 bit platforms. Of course it's possible to run your own OBS and have even more platforms there like ARM, MIPS and POWER. Furthermore, OBS can help you easily create packages for your testers - it supports building a package directly from GIT, SVN and CVS, creating an updated packages with one click in the webinterface or one command from the Build Service commandline client (OSC).

OBS is build with cooperation in mind. Packagers can send merge requests when they did a bugfix for a package maintained by somone else, it's possible to assing commit rights etc etc.

But you need to do a lot of manual work for packaging; writing a 'spec' file with a huge number of boring details like build deps, a file list, etc etc etc. Lubos thought it should be possible to automate this process - so he wrote a proof-of-concept tool for this, initially called "KDE OBS Generator". This tool has now moved from a proof-of-concept changed into a reall app, capable of handling a pretty wide variety of packages. He demo-ed how it works - which is pretty easy. Put a tar-ball in a folder and run the tool. The tool then automatically detects most properties of the package and generates the needed build files for openSUSE, Fedora, Mandriva, Ubuntu and Debian. It will also tell you what information it could not create by itself, like a name of the maintainer and more.

There is work needed on the mapping of dependencies on libraries on different distributions - like KDElibs4 is called libkde4-devel on one distribution, kde4lib-devel on another etcetera. During the talk a discussion started on ways of either auto-generating these mappings or even solving the problem on another level - something which will be further discussed during the conference. At some point, it is planned to integrate the auto-generation tool into the Build Service which will make it possible to just point the buildservice to a tarball on the web and let it generate the files right there lowering the barrier to packaging software even more.

During the questions someone asked if OBS provides repositories; sure it does. So, does it build all of GNOME for all distributions? Well, that would be a bit ambitious - the differences for something as core as all the GNOME libs between distributions is a bit too big to allow building all of KDE for all linux distributions - for now. But there is nothing wrong with ambition...

Which is a good note to end this blog with ;-)

Love, Jos

Almost time!

2010-10-19T18:53:00.005+02:00

Hi all!

After a slightly-too-big dinner last night your strategy team spend all day working on the strategy docs. We've spend most of that time trying to shorten it without loosing the essential information in there - trying to make it more readable. I think we did reasonable well - the results are on co-ment again.

Meanwhile it's almost time for the conference to start - yay :D

Love, Jos

Ambassador video's

2010-10-16T22:05:00.004+02:00

Hi all!

A couple of days ago Chuck came up with a (brilliant) idea to bring our ambassadors a bit closer to the openSUSE conference, even if they can't physically be there: let's all record a greeting message!

So that idea is awesome, and Bruno just announced some space to put the video's.

So, if you're an openSUSE ambassador and you won't make it to the conference, record a video and put it live :D

The video(s) should be about 10 secs, any decent format will most likely work, and shooting with your mobile phone is just fine. Say your name and add something of your own (I'm a Geeko was a nice suggestion but if you prefer to paint yourself green or sing a song that's lovely too). An English and one in your native language would be nice but remember - better something than nothing - perfection is the enemy of good ;-)

And for everyone who won't be there: we will do what we can to make sure you'll see as much of the conference as you can! It won't be possible to record all talks unfortunately but for sure there will be blogs, tweets & dents, flickr foto's and hopefully a bunch of video's, interviews and articles for you!

Love, Jos

Last piece of strategy before the conference

2010-10-15T00:54:00.005+02:00

Hi all!

The strategy discussion in openSUSE is a difficult one. I wrote in the latest announcement this:

So if you've held back, have not had a look at this yet - now or never! Provide your input on the draft on co-ment and help shape our description of what being a Geeko means to us all. Yes, this will hopefully describe ourselves - where we stand, but also add a bit of pepper and salt and show our ambitions. Our strategy document has to be inclusive - but not too long. It has to show some ambition - but must also be realistic.

This is not easy. We're a hugely diversified community with all sorts of users and contributors. We do NOT aim to change that - we're openSUSE after all. But we also have to make choices and have a profile potential users and contributors can recognize themselves in. Take 'beginners'. What does that mean? Are we talking about people who haven't used computers before? openSUSE should be fine for them - if they are looking to learn, play with it a bit. Someone who only needs a computer to check mail will probably need help, however, to get it up and running. They are not interested in reading on a forum about how to install multimedia codecs. So we target the person who will help him or her installing it and setting it up! Which again doesn't exclude a community team working on a super-simple openSUSE with everything a beginner needs - our infrastructure supports them. But we have to pick our battles, and openSUSE is traditionally a distribution which is powerful and flexible - we don't want to sacrifice functionality in our default offering. We want a graphics professional to be able to have all the powertools at his or her fingertips; we want a sysadmin to have an easy-to-administer system; we want a teacher to have a wide choice of interesting learning tools; we want a pro-audio user to easily install a low-latency kernel. openSUSE should not be harder than it has to be - but you may notice the power under your fingertips.

Anyway. Lots of talk, the resulting new paragraph in the description of our target users is dramatically shorter than the old one:

openSUSE users are looking for an easy and comfortable computing experience which does not limit their freedom of choice, offering sane defaults and easy configuration.

I think I like it, but the 'old' one (with updates) is also up on co-ment - let me know which one you like more. I even have a bunch of iterations in a piratepad here, feel free to look at the evolution. Altough this is only from today, yesterday I worked until 1 with Thomas Thym (thanks!). Today I had help from Klaas Freitag, Will stephenson and Henne Vogelsang for helping with this single sentence... I could not have done it alone! To paraphrase Thomas from last night: a team is more than the sum of the individuals.

Love, Jos

marketing and talking points

2010-10-13T17:24:00.005+02:00

Hi all!

Next week - conference :D
Looking forward to meeting many of you...

But I blog about something else - I've spend a significant proportion of Monday on making screenshots... I saw an email on the GNOME marketing list mentioning how impressed they were by a slideshow used by the KDE team at the Utah Open Source Conference. This turned my mind back to an earlier discussion about screenshots. KDE.org has nice screenshots on pages like this one, GNOME does not. So while creating screenshots for an openSUSE slideshow I made a few with the stock GNOME artwork and send them their way...

Questions and answers

Another thing I have worked on is our page with "Talking Points" for our ambassadors. The goal of these pages is to provide our ambassadors, who go to tradeshows and fairs to talk about openSUSE, with arguments and answers to questions. Of course I don't have the knowledge to answer all these questions, nor do I know what questions our ambassadors get asked.

Yesterday I have re-arranged all the questions that have been added over the last weeks into a few neath pages where they can be answered. I also worked on some answers - but I need your help! Go through it, see if you can (help) answer them, or of course if you know more good questions. The wiki page is here. Yes, some of these questions can be hard to answer but there are surely answers that are much simpler - so even if you think you don't know that much, go in, see if you can help our ambassadors out a bit!

hugs,
Jos

strategy, helping SUSE...

2010-10-08T01:32:00.002+02:00

Hi all!

I just published/send/submitted the last part of the openSUSE strategy stuff. Coming from KDE, this was a very interesting endeavor. It's not done yet, of course - I expect a huge amount of comments on this one (find it here) as it includes some notes on our 'competition' (coopetition?), what the results will be and how we'd like to be in a few years.

I know the KDE community is also looking at future directions - KDE 4 series is stabilizing, so where to go next? GNOME meanwhile is getting GNOME 3 out - but at the same time also had strategic discussions at the last GUADEMY. And of course Fedora has followed openSUSE in discussing directions. Guess it's contagious...

Not surprisingly, not everyone is happy with 'strategic discussions' within Free Software communities. In an earlier blog I spoke about the why of a strategy, so I won't go there again. I do feel, however, that tides seem to have turned. Either those sick of strategy have gone away, or those who think it's good to think about the future have convinced them. Or changed their ways of course, hehe...

Anyway. For a sec, let me move to the topic of helping... Not just openSUSE, but Free Software in general. I'm not sure how effective this is going to be, but I like the idea even though it's remarkably similar to linux counter :D

Ok, one more thing, because I can't help myself: the openSUSE marketing team is working on some flyers - KDE promo peeps might recognize something there, hehe. Find them here (for potential users) and here (for potential developers). Feel free to edit and improve ;-)

Oh and of course, because we're less than 2 weeks away now - go register!

Love, Jos

Smeegol, Conferences and cash

2010-10-06T14:00:00.007+02:00

Hi all!

Lots of good news today!.

First of all, the openSUSE community's Smeegol team has managed to get SmeeGol 1.0 out!.
And I'm proud of them, because:

We are beating both Fedora and MeeGo itself in delivering the latest MeeGo software

AND we do it while shipping newer software (Banshee etc)

AND we have one-click-install for openSUSE users & SUSE Studio images ready to be cloned so anyone can make their own version!!!! I already made a clone with some multimedia additions for myself... Too bad testdrive doesn't work with Smeegol :(

AND it's a true community effort, where volunteers from all sides of openSUSE have worked on!

So check it out, it's worth it :D

openSUSE users can install it quickly with this link:

The second piece of good news is that there is an official openSUSE Conference poster on the Conference Artwork page. So use it, print a few and hang em up at your local university IT department (University of Nuernberg!!) or in your local hacker space (I noticed C-BASE doesn't have anything yet so if you live in Berlin - go there and put up an openSUSE poster pls!).

And the third is that thankfully there is a little budget left for travel sponsorship for the openSUSE conference. I really appreciate that those who could afford the travel themselves have indeed done so, leaving those for whom it is a financial problem with some reimbursement. Now we can hopefully help a few more people. If you have decided not to go to the conference due to financial problems, contact me and I can see what I can do!

Talking about travel to the openSUSE Conference, be sure to look at the Travel coordination page!

And talking about conferences in general, the Desktop Summit dates are announced! As part of the organization I'm of course proud of that but there's a lot of work ahead. If you want to help, let the team know! mail to ds-team@desktopsummit.org or contact me.

Love,

Jos

EDIT: and thanks all for the re-tweeting/denting/blogging of the Smeegol, desktop summit and other announcements!

Call to Arms

2010-10-02T17:12:00.011+02:00

Ladies and gentlemen,

Recently Amaru Zelaya Orellana and myself cooperated on an article about the great work our ambassadors are doing around the world. They deserve great respect for what they do. A great marketing effort.

Meanwhile, the openSUSE marketing team is doing more work - getting articles out on the technologies we have, developing materials for our ambassadors and of course promoting the conference. However, no matter how much they do - they need help.

The work the marketeers do needs to be spread. openSUSE has technology and people which make our competition look pale. But they often manage to get the word out much more. Is that because they have better marketing people? Maybe. But what they DO have is a huge community of users who do their small share. Yes, it matters if you digg, tweet and dent. If you blog and talk about openSUSE. It matters if you become a fan on Facebook or on other social sites.

openSUSE has hundreds of thousands of users. Tens of thousands are active in the openSUSE community - reading our newssite, talking on the forums and contributing in other ways. Still, most of our news items get just a few diggs, just a few tweets, mentions in blogs or on Facebook. That means our impact is limited. You all should take that as a personal insult. If openSUSE is to make an impact, we have to do more than create a great linux distribution or good infrastructure. We have to make it known. Not only in English - blog, tweet or talk about our community in German, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, Dutch, Chinese - or any other language! Our lack of communication is hurting our visibility and therefor our impact.

A bad example is our conference. While most of our community members know about the openSUSE conference, a lot of people outside of our community don't. Yet, the title of our conference is 'collaboration across borders'. So they SHOULD know about that. And we are less than three weeks away! Why have they not heard about our conference? Because WE have not told them. People! We have a stunning program! We have excellent speakers, and many active community members will attend. But if we want to collaborate, increase our impact and really make a difference - we need more people there from projects like GNOME, Apache and yes, Mandriva, Fedora and others.

So I ask all of you - please step up. Go here and blog, tweet, dent, dig, become a fan. If you don't have any social media account, think about writing something for omgSUSE. OMGUbuntu is playing a major role in spreading the word on Ubuntu. We have rtyler and some others rocking and getting the word out for openSUSE users on OMGsuse.com but they need help! If you have a favorite application, write about it! It doesn't have to be a book, just a bunch of notes and a cool screenshot helps a lot. It IS a significant contribution to to that, and really, it doesn't take much time!

5 minutes at most - that's all it takes to help openSUSE. Think about it!

Welcome Mageia!

2010-09-21T12:37:00.005+02:00

Over the last couple of days there has been a lot of talk about the creation of Mageia, a community fork of Mandriva. Now before I go on a disclaimer:

I'm a Mandrivaclub.nl crew member and have been for a very long time. I might not be the most active member of the crew there but I DO care about Mandriva and its community.

painful but unavoidable
So with that out of the way, let me start by saying the whole Mandriva thing is very painful and I feel sorry for the employees and the community. I know that over the last months many employees have switched to other companies (including Novell). So a restart will be difficult for the company. They intend to focus on the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) as those are a Mandriva stronghold, and I think that is a sound business decision. Not sure if it'll be enough.

Unfortunately the community has finally lost confidence in Mandriva and decided to fork - I get that. Mandriva has some awesome technology, it would be good to keep that alive. And the company has failed a few times too many now. But they face a big challenge - building a new 'home' for themselves ain't easy.

looking for help?
So I have a suggestion for them. In the spirit of our upcoming openSUSE conference with the 'collaboration across borders' theme, I invite you to collaborate with us.

What Mageia might need soonish is a place to meet. The upcoming openSUSE conference will have visitors from Debian and Fedora already, why not have a Mageia delegation there? You guys and girls can meet, talk with people from other distributions, get some ideas on what to do next and talk among yourselves in real life. The conference already starts in about 4 weeks so there is enough time to plan yet it is close enough to be useful for decision making.

Moreover, openSUSE has the Build Service which we use to build our distribution. But the build service is also used by many other communities including the Linux Foundation's Meego project. It is fully Free Software so anyone can set up their own Build Service if they want. Currently the Build Service already allows building Mandriva packages and we could support Mageia too. As a stop-gap measure, the Mageia community could build (part of) their distro on our infrastructure - and in time set up their own Build Service instance.

Maybe there is more room for collaboration. Building a distribution is NOT easy and a lot of work - it'd be cool if openSUSE and Mageia could share some resources on some of the infrastructural bits like the kernel, Xorg and other base libraries. But even without that - the Build Service is there for you.

Of course, if Mandriva manages to re-build confidence they're also more than welcome to work with us. In my opinion the recent message from the board sets the right direction from a community point of view. Just contact me or anyone else either on IRC or by mail if you want to talk!

Concluding: I'm not saying here - give up on Mandriva and join openSUSE. What I do want to offer is some help - we're all Free Software communities, we care. Let's work together a bit more!

Target Aquired... Aim... xxxxx!

2010-09-16T17:58:00.005+02:00

Hi all!

Today the first part of a new description of openSUSE was released. Go, read through it, comment on it if you like!

We are using something relatively new for the commenting called co-ment. I encountered a similar tech when reading up on what was going on with the GPLv3 while it was being written - and thought it was brilliant... So we're using it now to get comments on the text we write in a more structured manner. Feel free to join the discussion!

Cheers,
Jos

On Russia...

2010-09-16T00:36:00.003+02:00

Hi all!

Novell just posted a guest blog of mine on their corporate blog. Topic is one I have harped on before - basically, like I hope WNF feeds their employees fair trade bananas in the cafeteria and let them drive hybrids instead of hummers, I hope they don't run 'Mac Donalds' on their computers. IOW use Free Software - cuz it helps.

The blog was prompted by a pretty good article from the NYT (yeah, behind a pay wall now, unfortunately) on new tactics for quelling dissents by the Russian government by confiscating computers under the pretext of searching for pirated Microsoft software. No, FOSS won't solve the 'evil government' issue. It might help however - and not only by giving them no legal reason to go after 'pirated software' but also by providing protection through TOR, GPG and other technologies...

Anyway. Read it if you like :D

Love, Jos

directions - openSUSE and Fedora

2010-09-05T19:44:00.006+02:00

Interestingly enough, in parallel to our discussion about where we're going, Fedora is also discussing strategy. One particularly good blog post by Máirín Duffy about target users of Fedora offers some interesting insights.

Situation

On Fedora, there are basically four repositories:

Stable - end user product

Testing - stabilisation tree

Rawhide - development tree (our factory)

Kopers - personal repositories (bit like our Build Service home projects)

As you might know, Fedora Stable does currently receive quite some package updates over it's lifecycle - catering to users who want the latest software. The downside of this is that it sacrifices stability - you can't have your cake and eat it too. And for some users - even that isn't enough. They want the latest Banshee when it is released right away - not wait for it to mature in Testing. So they have to enable Rawhide repositories - often bringing in far more unstable software than just Banshee or whatever they're after. And that software is build against a whole different stack - Rawhide has moved beyond stable of course, adding things like a newer glib or other base libraries and building against a newer GCC. All this creates a significant risk for instability.

Solution?

Máirín describes 4 target users of Fedora:

Caroline Casual-User

Pamela Packager

Connie Community

Nancy Ninja

She proposes to give each of these users what they want by essentially splitting the update policy for packages based on what 'level' the are. She recognizes Core Platform, Core Desktop and Applications. Core Platform should only receive crucial fixes and security updates, Core Desktop should get a bit more liberal updates and Applications should always be up to date. This way, users won't get bitten by instability, yet those who want more up-to-date software don't have to resort to Rawhide either.

Does this solve the problem? It does if you assume these more up-to-date packages for the Applications don't ever break things for Caroline. And if you assume that there is no reason why Nancy Ninja newer version of something in the Core Platform or the Core Desktop for the app she's writing.

openSUSE

openSUSE is far more conservative when it comes to upgrading packages in the stable release. Making it a much more stable platform. So, that means you're always a bit behind and you can't have the latest and greatest? No! openSUSE users CAN have their cake and eat it too. Thanks to the Build Service, newer versions of enduser applications and libraries can be entirely build against the stable distribution, lowering the number of packages you need to pull in and thus increasing stability.

Máirín and the other Fedora peeps don't use OBS - luckily, it's a Free service. Sponsored by Novell, AMD, IP Exchange and B1 Systems. Many packages on the openSUSE buildservice are build for various stable Fedora releases as well as for Red Hat releases, Ubuntu, Mandriva and of course SUSE Linux Enterprise. And the Build Service is also used by third parties like MeeGo to build their packages in house.

So I would invite Fedora users like Caroline to grab just the one package she needs from OBS!

For developers - and users

So the buildservice is awesome for developers who want to make their software available to users - no matter what distribution they use. The Build Service builds each package on a clean virtual machine install of the target distribution, guaranteeing compatibility. Check the documentation here. And a nice tutorial here. Note that it currently mostly focusses on the commandline solution OSC - but you can actually build and packages entirely from your webbrowser and get them to your users with almost no hassle using the gtk-apps.org and kde-apps.org OBS integration. Be like Lucky Backup and offer packages for ALL mayor distro's instead of only Ubuntu OR Fedora Or ...!

And for openSUSE and it's users, OBS enables us to cater a much wider audience than we ever could without. We can make newer software easily available for users who want it thanks to the one-click-install; yet users who want stability can have it. Surely there is still work to do - a proper app-store would be nice, although the search on software.opensuse.org IS pretty good...

Of course there is more awesomeness to openSUSE - like SUSE Studio (cool video here) and more. I just wanted to highlight one thing ;-)