Monday

Travel day. On Sunday I went home early from the conference. I tell you, 4 days of constant talking and sharing ideas with other humans is tiresome! Good that we choose a place to go to that is so remote that you have to hike there. I welcome another couple of hours doing non-geek activities. But first I have go to the main train station to buy some tickets for the team, then back to the office to unravel the rest of the conference party fallout and pick up everybody else at 9am. We are 15 people to go on the trip. So after everyone is in, and we pass on the luggage to Roland, we head off to the central station. Then go to Gößweinstein by Train/Bus and from there hike to our destination: Gut Schönhof, an old farm (still operating) that has some hotel rooms attached. It’s the most beautiful weather and everything goes smoothly. We arrive in Gößweinstein and have a quick look at the famous basilica and then go on along  the river Wiesent.

After a quick lunch stop at one of the local breweries (did you know that the Franconian Switzerland is the region with the highest density of private breweries in the world?) we arrive. The Schönhof people have prepared a couple of rooms and the barn for us. I decide to stay in the barn together with Tom and Robert.

By now it’s dinner time and it’s still very warm so we eat outside in the sun. The farm has also cows so we get the most amazing, fresh, organic steaks and fries you can imagine. Well-fed and satisfied we have our first session of talking. Mostly about what tasks everybody brings as baggage into the Team. After that the mood is slightly down because we discovered that some of us bring quite a lot. Anyway, this needed to be in the open so everybody knows what we can and can’t pick up. Then most of us quickly go to bed. After playing some cards for an hour or so with Klaas, Tom and Robert I go too.

Tuesday

The breakfast is as good as the dinner yesterday. This is not the usual supermarket stuff you get in the city. Superb self-made sausages, cheese and jam. Milk and Eggs that not long ago were in the cow/chicken and freshly baked bread/buns. Off to talking again, AJ and Michl join us today. This time we start to come up with things that we want to do in the future. The list is growing very fast. It contains very dull hands-on stuff like centralizing the widespread, messy developer documentation in the wiki but also cool new stuff like integrating the build service with the SUSE Studio Marketplace. This is awesome! We then start to pick out things to discuss in detail. Coolo is doing this as -1,0,+1 voting and it turns out that this works for our group very well. We pick 6 topics we want to discuss in detail.

In the coffee break some of us decide to explore one of the near by old castles.

We conclude the day by discussing some of the things in great detail. Everybody is eager to hand out Action Items and we wouldn’t be geeks if we didn’t drift off into implementation details all the time. But in the end everybody is on the same page. I must say, I expected productivity here but not that much. The people in the Team are all old dogs, but apparently old dogs that can learn new tricks! Everybody is very open minded, positive and honest.

Dinner and then we take the projector we brought and turn the barn into a cinema. I fall asleep shortly after the opening credits…

Wednesday

Today we are going to prioritize the tasks we want to do. But first things first. We talked a lot about what we do, what we want to do and so on. This morning is for the how. So we talk about development methods, structural things like communications channels, meeting culture and things like this. In the end we agree on trying one of the hip agile methods. It fits us perfectly because the general direction we worked out by now for the team is “Growing Community by Enabling Community”. This will require us to jump from task to task and from topic to topic. Everybody is very eager to try this out.

Now that we know how to do things and what we want to do we start the prioritization. We again do this by a -1,0,+1 vote. This is it, our first sprints are set and over Dinner we split up into 3 groups and have our first planning phase. Time to check out the second castle that is around the corner. We arrive there by nightfall so there is not much to see. But we find a nice tavern in the valley for some beverages. During the evening Vincent and Lubos get into an ice-cream eating contest.

Thursday

Wrap up time! We want to leave at 11am so we can be at the office at 4′ish. A lot of us have more travel to do afterwards. There are bits and pieces here and there we still need to talk about but mainly we gather the next steps we want to do, like when to meet, how to tell the world about this team event and “marketing” in general. We also do a small retrospective on this kick-off and try to come up with a nicer name than multiplier team. At 11 we do the obligatory group photo and afterwards head out to the next bus stop in Pottenstein. We go the hike route, mostly on the road. 100 meters out i manage to trash my camera by smashing it on the pavement. The rest of the walk I talk to Egbert about the ongoing Board effort to establish an openSUSE foundation. He was long enough in the X.org board who also started a foundation and has a lot of insights. At around 3pm we arrive in Pottenstein and an hour later we part at the central station again.

Conclusion: Holy Moly! This was productive! This is a bunch of people that will do great things for the openSUSE project. Not that they did not do so already, most of them are already leading figures in the project, but together we will rock the boat for sure. I’m looking forward to work with these guys to grow the community by enabling the community!

Despite the fact that it’s been around since 1994, openSUSE Linux remains a work in progress. It’s not perfect, nor does anyone pretend it is. The places where it needs the most immediate improvement are also a matter of debate: what’s crucially important to some is only marginally important to others. Still, there’s no question that there are key areas where openSUSE Linux is superior — not just adding individual features, but things that are actively functional. I’m going to run down several major areas where openSUSE Linux, as an operating system and as a platform, is cool.

Package Management

The way packages (RPM packages in the case of openSUSE Linux) are handled is with a complete package management stack that is built around libzypp. It consists of several applications that take care of all the gory details of software installation. The package format lets you express hard or weak dependencies, suggestions for completion of other software, versions, conflicts and so on. The tools can handle single packages, patches or groups of packages called patterns. If you are using openSUSE odds are you obtain the software you need from the distribution’s repository with a click and be done with it. But this is not the coolest thing. openSUSE provides everboy, including commercial software vendors the means to offer their products for Linux. Not only openSUSE Linux but also every other major Linux Distribution out there using one unified tool: the openSUSE Build Service. Potential program vendors have a lot of choices:

1) devote time and effort — and money — (like with any other operating system) to ensuring that their program installs, runs, and stays cohesive on a variety of distributions.

2) Push their programs from their Build Service repository to a given distro’s repository. For openSUSE this works even with the Build Service Collaboration features.

3) Use their own instance of the openSUSE Build Service and provide the software repositories on their own infastructure.

Option #3 is pretty much the best solution for any proprietary software vendor. #1 Ensures that the commercial vendor takes care of the Linux portion of his customers #2, which has the advantage of making applications immediately available to the user of any given distribution, and cuts down on the amount of work needed by an end user to get something installed.

Because the demand for commercial apps on Linux is relatively slender right now, this solution isn’t as pronounced: most people just get their offerings from their local repository. In the long run, though, if commercial apps take root on Linux, it will become that much bigger an chance to making Linux a platform for the commercial vendors application.

The feeds are not always valid for now, the HTML::Entities encoding seems to miss some parts sometimes. Might be invalid input as well. This needs some further investigation but you can already beta test it. Just point your RSS aggregator to

http://lists.opensuse.org/$LISTNAME/mailinglist.rss

If you have any problems please contact me. Have fun…