Catching up

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