Future of openSUSE - Update on the Discussion

Beta 2 is out and meanwhile, the discussion on the future of openSUSE development continues. I've attempted to summarize the current status, both to help my own overview of the discussion and to try and help clarify it for others. It has become quite a mail-client-challenging monster thread and Robert S has already asked people to open separate threads for the specifics we're discussing...

Tumbleweed

A first point of consensus was that there should be more emphasis on Tumbleweed. Greg brought up a few pain points he would need to see fixed and asked for help in general. Some conclusions and plans:

• change processes to lower amount of rebuilding of packages in OBS (Greg, Coolo, OBS team)
• add hardware for faster building (OBS team)
• optimize OBS for faster building with things like better/smarter/faster bootstrapping (pre-setup VM's with GCC ?), new filesystem, smarter dependency checking and possibly integrate the rebuild_logic="coolo" thing in OBS itself (OBS team)
• Greg needs to tell us what else we can do to help him make Tumbleweed better

Release Cycle

Consensus seems to be that a longer release cycle is a good idea but nothing concrete has been proposed. Coolo will probably simply make a 12.3 proposal for say November 2013. Some numbers where brought up that show that we can indeed use a longer stabilization period for our releases. 'Release when ready' is also still on the table.

If a longer release cycle is introduced, Tumbleweed becomes more important, but so do the other OBS projects. Users will depend on OBS far more to get new packages. What effect this has and how to tackle that has not been discussed yet. On a personal note, I think the new software.opensuse.org will need some improvements in case we go this route. It would have to put more emphasize on the devel projects as 'official' sources of software. Right now, there are roadblocks put in place for users who want 'stuff from OBS' and it's made clear that things from there are untested and possibly unstable.

Changing the Development Process

Consensus seems to be that the current setup with devel projects feeding into Factory and having groups of maintainers (the aggregate of the individual package maintainers) doesn't work that great. In short, we need to stabilize Factory further. Things that might change:

• Build Failures could create BNC Entries... assigned to the bug owner of the package. (OBS team?)
• Be stricter about maintainership - have 2-3 maintainers who really are responsible. There is some unclarity between the roles of bugowner and maintainer. OBS currently adds the role of maintainer to everyone in a project, which is deemed a bit overzealous - a package can that way end up with 20 maintainers but only 1-2 of these might dare to touch it. Not clear where to go with this yet.
• Do more checks on packages like rebuilding dependencies to see if they fail. Heavily depends on available build capacity (currently very limited). While it requires more work to get something in Factory, as Karl Eichwalder said: "your fun must not prevent the others from having fun."
• process of getting packages in factory might need changes. For less core packages, we could possibly skip devel projects, provided there is review done on the packages. We might also expand devel projects for the remaining packages to do more testing.
• staging projects
  
  
  we could either have one or multiple staging projects.
  • With one, all eyes would be on the same, but it would have the same breakage issues as Factory. Advantage is that we can have an automatic revert policy where packages can't get in Factory until all breakage in Staging is fixed. It would require OBS to automatically detect build errors due to changes in a given package. We're unsure if that is possible.
  • Another way would be to try and get Staging stable, once everything is green - move to Factory. Get new packages, stabilize again, move to factory. Etcetera. Having multiple staging's in parallel might help to lower the 'latency' of getting packages in Factory but it would cost build resources.
  This discussion is also still ongoing.

It was brought up that it'd be possible to create a 'core' of base openSUSE packages (roughly up to X.org) which would be 'atomically updated' for the rest of the packages on top, decreasing breakage and allowing easier testing. This could even be part of a release scheme with a 'core openSUSE' and peripheral packages in Tumbleweed and OBS. It would require some work on the software.openSUSE.org search UI and software management in general, however.

Social issues and responsibilities

Several people brought up the social side of things. As Coolo already mentioned in his initial email, we'd need more people fixing problems 'all over'. These will need mentoring - something openSUSE currently doesn't do in a structured manner, except in the context of Google Summer of Code.

Aside from mentoring, there should be more clarity about responsibilities. If a new version of a library breaks things, who should fix this? The person who maintains the library or the applications which are broken by it? These questions are unanswered as well and possibly a one-size-fits-all answer doesn't exist.

Last but not least, development is helped by a positive, constructive atmosphere on the list. The openSUSE Board has been spending some efforts in improving the situation on our lists and with some success. But more would be needed and how to do this is still unclear.

Conclusion?

It is most certainly not clear where exactly we will end up. Of course, we're only 6 days since the announcement by Coolo that he thinks things have to change. Much of the discussions does point to interesting solutions, but we have to come to definite conclusions before anything can be done. And then, we need people to commit to executing some of the changes!

The openSUSE Conference (Prague, October)will be a good place where we can finalize these conclusions and start implementing things. If you're in the Americas, the openSUSE Summit in Orlando in September might be more convenient for you... In both cases, if you have an interest in the future of openSUSE you should make sure to be there!

Re:Publica

About two weeks ago I went to Re:Publica, a hipster event (can I say that?) in Berlin. It was an interesting event - related to the stuff I usually visit, yet different. I'll go over the differences, then present what I see as the challenge for Free Software events: get those creative, digital and always-online people closer to us!

Audience

The main audience of the event could probably be best described as people interested in the 'digital lifestyle'. People who use smartphones, are always on-line. They find their places-to-go on foursquare, talk to their friends on facebook, share their opinions on twitter, Whatsapp with their love - but they don't hang out on IRC or visit forums very often and they probably have a Macbook Air and a high-end android phone. Yes, not that different from us.

Subjects

The event featured talks on things like the web, new cloud services like on-line music and creativity like music and video tools, open video etcetera. But that was only about 10-20%. Another 20-30% was about the future - social media, social innovation and more. To my surprise, the remaining 50% of the talks was about Freedom - and I use the capital for a reason. The Occupy movement, Digital Restrictions Management, Net Neutrality, Open Data, Digital influence on revolutions, eco-journalism, (internet) governance. Very close to what we, the Free Software community, hold dear (and find interesting!) Yes, not so different from us.

Marketing and artwork

You can imagine - an event organized by hipsters creative people looks good. It does! Team t-shirts were sponsored by spreadshirt and had the title 'actionist'. There was a big wall with the program, using pictures of the speakers, QR codes and more weird stuff. A twitter stream on a screen is old, people. Here, if you tweet a hash-tag you get your face as part of a logo shape or you get a gift if you check in with foursquare. That's more like it. Oh, and they had a 'carry your own chair' program - not unlike we did at the last openSUSE conference at the end of each day, except that it was 'cool', not 'please help us out with moving chairs'!

There were other things, too. Interesting or just plain weird stickers - with just a QR code or a shortened link, or only a slogan. There was stuff like a live steaming camera so you could interact with people on-line (easy to do: a laptop with a webcam connected to a google hangout?!?) and plenty of other good ideas. Surely different from what we usually do!

Challenge for us?

I lately have been feeling that Free Software is loosing the battle for the hearts. Privacy and security are not important, internet is just a tool. We've been trying to educate people about Freedom but they don't care.

I was wrong. Collaboration and Freedom DO matter and people know it. We just don't reach the most of those who care about these things. This is where our challenge lies!

After talking with others and thinking about this, I conclude that there are two things we have to do better:

Positivism. We have a tendency to 'lecture' about the dangers of DRM, closed standards, government control and other things. Wake up! Look around you! Online Collaboration has given us Wikipedia. Online Communication has supported revolutions in the Middle East. Social Media gave us the Occupy Movement. And everyone's using Android phones. Yes, there are challenges, but let's celebrate our successes too! Relevance. We often are perfectionists. Build alternatives instead of interfacing with what's out there. But most people don't care that much for a slightly more secure system if it makes getting the latest stuff harder. People don't care about a perfectly free Cloud solution if it's more difficult or doesn't work with what they have. We must realize that a Can do attitude gets us far further than a Can't do way of thinking. And we have to make sure that what people care about is what we care about. Talking to others, sharing data, working with what's out there and checking if what we do has real-world value!

Concrete

At least at the conference's I'm involved in I'll be trying to broaden the audience a bit and attract people outside of our usual circle. By changes to the program (workshops on Krita, Gimp, Blender, Kdenlive and Inkscape? ownCloud? web stuff? Talks about Wikimedia, the EFF, net neutrality, copyright?) and by advertising/spreading the word in less usual places (maybe an Apple fan magazine or a design paper). Let's see if we can get more people to see what we do, get involved, care!

Awesome images by Renehamburg on flickr

What's going on in openSUSE marketing

Just wanted to update whoever's interested in some of the things going on in openSUSE marketing and how you can help!

Ambassador activity

The openSUSE ambassadors visit events around the world. We've got better support from the international team and are becoming more and more active:

• In the last 6 months, we've really gotten our DVD program up and running like clockwork (thanks, AJ and Iwona (Europe), Jeff (USA), Sankar (Bangalore), Andrea and Priscila (Brazil), Al (Taiwan) and all the other heroes involved!
• We've got the Ambassador Travel support program (thanks, Izabel and Kostas!)
• We're creating lots of conference and promo artwork (Thanks, Andi, Shayon, Victor, and others!). See our github repo for the cool stuff!
• And I'm struggling to get some of that artwork turned into actual paper ;-)
• Thanks to the efforts of the USA team, we'll be visiting more conferences in the USA this year than we did in the last 5 in total... Thanks esp to Bryen for coordinating this but also to Clint, Mike, Shayon, Matt, Don, Andi and the many others who are making this possible!)
• But not only the USA is going strong. In Taiwan we're setting up a really cool thing: COSCUP, Taiwan's biggest FOSS event, will have a track dedicated to KDE and openSUSE! Thanks go to Sakana, Al Cho, Max, Armijn and Aaron for making this possible!
• As you might have read on news.opensuse.org we'll be active in FLISOL in the South and Central Americas.
• And of course we're visiting loads of other events, see our ambassador event page. If you want to help out, sign up there!

ConferenceS

Yeah, this year we'll have two conferences. For the global openSUSE conference in Prague we're close to deciding on a location. It wasn't easy to find something as we need quite a bit of room and don't want a typical corporate setting. But we're down to two locations and the locals are checkin' them out so we can pick one. Thanks to Michael, Alan, Pavol, Michal and the rest of the team who signed up to help: Michal, Michal, Michal, Petr, Petr, Petr, Martin, Vitezslav, Ondrej and Tomas. Yes, we'll have a 4-michal-3-petr conference team there... If you want to help out as well, email opensuse-conference@opensuse.org. We're especially looking for Geeko's living in or close to Prague!!!

In the USA, things are going much faster. We're readying the website, finishing artwork, preparing a CfP, working on the sponsorship brochure etc - wow. Andi has been blogging about the artwork and Shayon has been working like crazy on the website. Besides them, we have Bryen, Alan, Drew, Carlos, Robert, Rouzi, Will, Jamileth and Michael. If you want to help out too, sign up by sending a mail to: opensuse-summit@opensuse.org.

Help out!

As I already wrote, you can spread the word on openSUSE, if you like, at conferences. There's info on the Ambassador events page and you can order promo DVD's here.

Sorry for all the names I missed, it's impossible to find all of you who are active in the areas I've mentioned. And worse, I haven't spoken about many things which are going on, I know.

GSOC 2012 for openSUSE

While writing this, the openSUSE Project meeting takes place on IRC and Manu Gupta is telling us about GSOC 2012. Yup, yup - openSUSE wants to join GSOC again! For that we need mentors and ideas - anyone who has not put any ideas up yet should do so asap at this page.

Other cool stuff going on is the organization of oSC 2012 - we hope to have a location soon and from then on we need help to make it happen. It will take place somewhere in October in Prague, that much is known. But finding a good place for 300-500 people, with proper BOF rooms, reasonably priced and preferably allowing us to do our own food (me loves cooking) is not easy at all.

The openSUSE Summit in the USA already has a location and place - check the awesome poster design on the right, done by andi. We're getting ready for a CfP and the other things needed to really make it happen. Anyone interested - let us know!

/me now goes for food with a bunch of crazies