after 7 years with SUSE and Novell I’ve chosen to change something in my life – and decided to accept a new job and will lay down my duties in the openSUSE project. I’ve been with the openSUSE project already prior to its launch in August 2005 and experienced a number of highs and lows. Overall the project  has been shaping up nicely, we reached a lot of our goals and the just passed openSUSE conference reflects this pretty well in my opinion.

Just to stop any rumours – I leave Novell because I found a new job in the trade show management area close to Nuremberg. Trade show management is where my expertise is and where I worked prior to coming to openSUSE. While I enjoyed the work at openSUSE, organizing the openSUSE conference meant doing what I really love and my new job will give me many more conferences and trade shows to plan and organise.  As I will leave Novell before the end of December the project needs a new openSUSE chairman who should serve until the openSUSE foundation is created.

Best wishes to the openSUSE project and the people behind it. I had a lot of fun over the past 7 years, met numerous outstanding people and learned a lot which will help me in my future life.

Best
Michael

Let’s spread the word about the openSUSE Conference and its motto “Collaboration across borders”, invite developers of other communities and other projects to join as a visitor or to give a presentation on a topic which affects all of us or lets do a workshop, hack session or just having fun. Call for papers is open till July 31 – so now is the time to shape the conference. Send in our proposal or idea to cfp@opensuse.org.

Robert and gnokii created some artwork for the openSUSE conference which is perfect to add it on web pages or to print out the posters to do some promotion in your area.

openSUSE Conference in short:

• October 20-23 in Nürnberg, Germany
• Free entrance
• 4 days conference with 4 tracks plus hack sessions and workshops
• Topics:
  • Technology and Upstream Development
  • Education and Science
  • Business
  • User and Home
• Everything is possible – just send an email to cfp@opensuse.org

We had big fun at the openSUSE booth showing mainly the openSUSE Build Service 2.0 and milestone 7 of openSUSE 11.3. Additional of this usual trade show program we served daily 3-4 small hack sessions on the booth to teach people in things like, Roll your first package in the Build Service, Insights into GNOME 3.0 or learning some Inkscape magic.  They all were well attended and gave room for intensive 1:few conversations. The biggest fun we had with “Henne’s handicraft workshop” which took place daily at 5pm at the booth and covered stuff like creating your openSUSE bag, match LinuxNacht dress cody by wearing an openSUSE pin etc.

In the conference I visited a few presentation to get more knowledge about SUSE Studio, Mono, open sourc in companies etc. I visited as well Microsoft’s keynote and I was not alone in the room
The keynote was given by James Utzschneider who’s heading the open source department at Microsoft since less then a year but is with Microsoft for over 15 years. He’s a good talker and it looks to me that he’s a smart guy as well. He was pretty clear on the open source strategy Microsoft is following:

• Microsoft changed heavily. Everything can be put on the table for disussion today but should be backed with good arguments.
• Customer are asking that Microsoft products work seamlessly with open source products where ever they are used at customers location. So, main goal here is to follow common standards and improve the interoperability in literally all areas to make the customers confident and stay with Microsoft products.
• Microsoft is a business company and is mainly driven through business cases – if the open source path is beneficial in $ for Microsoft – Microsoft will take it further down. Its pretty unlikely that things are done for the open source community just to make them happy.

We might get in touch with James as Microsoft could spice up the openSUSE conference in October. Ahh, with regards to that we informed pretty many other projects and developers at LinuxTag about the openSUSE conference and this years motto “Collaboration accross borders” and it was well received and we should be able to cover a number of interesting topics working together with communities other then the openSUSE one. Now it the time to shape the conference, call for papers is open till July 31.

Pavol put up a collection of photos which give a good summary of openSUSE @ LinuxTag 2010. We had fun at LinuxTag 2010, had many good conversations, got new valuable input in many areas and are keen on how LinuxTag evolves in the future.

We’ll do a launch party in our Nürnberg office on Thursday Nov 12, 7-10pm CET. We’ll try to attract people from the Nürnberg area and show them what’s new in openSUSE 11.2, hand out some media and show openSUSE 11.2 in action. Additional we’ll have a number of outstanding openSUSE folks from SUSE attending and looking forward having interesting discussion. With openSUSE 11.1 we opened up for the first time the “internal” release party to the public. This time we’d like to go one step further and having the launch party just for people interested in openSUSE. We appreciate and invite of course any buddies interested in openSUSE from the Nürnberg office.

What about doing a launch party in your area and share openSUSE 11.2 with others? Just add your party to the list of openSUSE launch parties.

• openSUSE Education
  Lars showed the benefits openSUSE Education has for schools and students and got in contact with a Nuernberg school which now want to move 30 clients to openSUSE Education.
  
• Games on Linux
  Andreas and Marco from live.linuX-gamers.net project showed impressively what games they offer from a Live-USB stick and received pretty many “wows” and “ahhs”. To them a special thanks for supporting the openSUSE project.
• openSUSE 11.2/Desktop
  Here Juergen showed the strength of GIMP by merging two ancient city maps of Nuernberg into one. With that he was a real visitor magnet.
  Will demonstrated the latest KDE and GNOME desktops. People were impressed by Digikam’s photo management capabilities, and interested to learn how the default KDE 4 desktop can be customized to resemble a more traditional KDE 3 or GNOME desktop, and that you can install thousands of different programs with YaST instead of having to download them from some website.
• Build Service, Participation etc.
  Pretty many visitors asked how they can contribute to openSUSE and were happy that they don’t have to be a developer to contribute. Wiki edits, translation and bug reports is sufficient. The more technical audience were impressed by the opportunities the Build Service offers them for their daily work.

Our room in the university was well attended till 11pm or so and we gave a talk each hour about different topics like “Introduction to openSUSE 11.2”, “Open Source philosophy”, openSUSE Education, Games on Linux and others. We handed out more then 500 openSUSE DVDs and had way more than 500 people attending our room.

People are interested in Linux and Linux is very well received. After a few focused questions which all started with “Does this … work with Linux?” people left our room, taking a DVD and saying, “If its that good, I’ll give it a try”. Most frequent question that evening was “How do you earn money?”. As many people know at which cost a Windows license or Windows Word come its not easy to understand that our products come for free and we charge for maintenance and support.

With our room at the university where several other events took place we could take advantage of an attractive venue for visitors. Thanks to that and thanks to our people who spent a Saturday night supporting openSUSE this was a successful participation and we should continue participate at “Lange Nacht der Wissenschaften” to fill the saying “From the local to the Global”.

So what do we have so far?

• a feature request from one of the KDE e.V. board members
• the feature asks to make KDE default. Reason for that, is to make openSUSE more simple for newbies and to make openSUSE the best KDE distribution around
• Through the discussion in the feature I’d translate that feature into put the radio button as default to KDE on the desktop selection screen during installation instead of today’s status where everybody needs to make a choice between
• the highest rated feature in openFATE until today
• a majority of people supporting this feature (currently approx. 90% pro, 1% neutral, 9% against)

What I clearly see as pro is:

• listening to our KDE community we may gain more KDE contributors. But don’t forget this feature is also about making openSUSE an outstanding KDE distribution. And for that just voting for a feature is not enough. For becoming an outstanding KDE distribution we need you to contribute
• we simplify the installation by one click for 2/3 of our users, according to question no. 11 in our  last openSUSE survey made in 11.0 time frame
• the GNOME users keep status quo and need to set the radio button as before

What I clearly see as con is:

• our pretty active GNOME community won’t be very happy about it
• our strength is to support choice and two major desktops
• with the CD you always get a default desktop

What might stay doubtful?

• Would changing a radio button really drive lots of users and contributors to us?
• Would already KDE as a default make us to an outstanding KDE distribution?
• Does openSUSE need a default desktop?

What I suggest?
Due to upcoming feature freeze for openSUSE 11.2 we have now only the possibility to default the radio button to KDE. But this is IMO more a diplomatic solution which doesn’t help much anybody. We should give the feature one or two more weeks to evolve and need to do the decision for openSUSE 11.2 by mid of August.

Some other observations I have with respect about this feature:

• inviting people through blogs, web pages, mailing lists or twitter to vote has potential to set the credibility of the voting system at risk as people not involved with openSUSE or not using openSUSE express their thoughts
• the feature shows the success of opening up the openSUSE project. Few years ago decisions were made by Novell and nowadays decisions are challenged by our community.
• I’m pretty happy about the way the discussion is handled (impartial, no bashing etc.)

May wisdom be with us – and may we get in openSUSE the best GNOME and the best KDE desktops!