The elusive Thirsty Thirteen
At the end of the year it is the time for reviews and the openSUSE Booster team did not want to let that opportunity slip. So what was important in 2010 from an openSUSE Boosters perspective? What happened, what progress was made, how did the boosters help openSUSE? A report from Klaas Freitag. (more…)
picture by Robert Lihm
Next years FOSDEM takes place again in Brussels on Feb 5th and 6th 2011 and openSUSE will be present as usual!
Apart of the well known high level open Source tech conference there will be for the 2nd time the Distribution Miniconf. The Miniconf provides the perfect place for different projects to share ideas, talk about challenges each project has and to foster collaboration – and as openSUSE is all about collaboration we want to play a major role there.
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On Saturday the 27th of November a Bug Day was organized to solve the issue with Zombie bugs, bugs against old, non-maintained versions of openSUSE. A team got together in the #opensuse-bug channel on the freenode network to review the bugs for any important and still valid information, otherwise closing them to clean up bugzilla.
We are pleased to announce the Greek sub-forum is now live and ready for business. I have been working closely with: @warlordfff, who will be one of the Forum Moderators. The full list of openSUSE forum Moderators can be seen here: http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Forums_team
openSUSE forums offers a warm welcome to all language groups and we are especially pleased to see the successful launch of the Greek Forum. Now if only I was fluent in Greek! I could make this announcement look really impressive. Enjoy.
The old openSUSE:11.3:Contrib signing key got deleted by an accident, so we have to generate the new one and sign all packages in this repo with it. It is safe to accept key with the following fingerprint when yast/zypper ask you to do so:
4FC8 6B50 8808 B7D7 D36C 59E3 CC9C 2F60 7296 AFB2
Sorry for the inconvenience!
Community,
during our bi-weekly Board Meetings on IRC we have a regular agenda topic “Where do we need to improve?”. We’re very much interested in ideas you may have to improve the inner workings of the Community/Project and we also like to provide an opportunity to step up and make us aware of complaints you may have with various aspects of the Community/Project. We’re particular interested in addressing those issues that are both fast and easy to fix while providing a significant advantage to our success and the sake of our community.
Is this thing on? *tap* *tap*. Good evening friends, this is your openSUSE Board speaking. If you didn’t hear yet, Novell has agreed to be acquired by Attachmate Corporation. What does that mean for the openSUSE Project? We don’t know exactly yet because our crystal ball is currently in the shop and therefore fortune-telling is not our greatest talent ;-) However, we have other talents: we are a software developer community and we’re here to work on one of the greatest GNU/Linux distributions and other world class software distribution tools to advance Free and Open Source software together with the global FOSS community!
For now, we don’t know much about Attachmate, we have had no dealings with them yet and, as Novell is a publicly traded company, all of this is as new to us as to anyone else. But the openSUSE Project has had, since its beginning, a very vibrant cooperation with Novell, especially with Novell’s SUSE business, and we are looking forward to continuing this once Novell and SUSE become part of Attachmate! Our best wishes go out to the people of our community that are employed by Novell and SUSE, may this bring nothing but good things for you and your careers.
The second part of the deal relates to the intellectual property that is changing hands. Our hope is that this does not add to the minefield that software patents are today for Free and Open Source software developers. The openSUSE Board generally believes, like the rest of the global FOSS community, that software patents impede innovation and are inconsistent with Open Source and Free Software.
What makes us proud is that Attachmate wants to further and strengthen the SUSE brand, which is based also on products and technology built by the openSUSE Project. Furthermore we are more than willing and looking forward to teaching another corporation about the principles, values and strengths of the Free and Open Source software development model. If you are reading this as an Attachmate employee, we would like to encourage you to just swing by and talk to us about the opportunites we can offer you to participate in this project!
And apart from all that it’s business as usual and we are continuing to work on, rather than predicting, the future of this project and have a lot of fun!
By the way if you wonder what that means practically, the next step into the future of this project is described in the post below: Our great bug squashing day on Saturday. See you there!
Your openSUSE Board
UPDATE
Meanwhile Attachmate released the following statement:
In conjunction with the announcement today on the signing of a definitive agreement to acquire, upon closing, Novell, Inc. (NASDAQ: NOVL), Attachmate Corporation released the following statement:
“The openSUSE project is an important part of the SUSE business,” commented Jeff Hawn, chairman and CEO of Attachmate Corporation. “As noted in the agreement announced today, Attachmate plans to operate SUSE as a stand-alone business unit after the transaction closes. If this transaction closes, then after closing, Attachmate Corporation anticipates no change to the relationship between the SUSE business and the openSUSE project as a result of this transaction.”
The openSUSE Community News letter is published each week and the forum section has been edited since March 2009 by @caf4926. Starting issue 149 @knurpht (A Global Moderator for the openSUSE Forum) will be editing the Forum section of the news letter. @knurpht is well placed to find and list interesting threads from the forum. This should ensure the continuation of a great community news letter.
Frank Karlitschek will show us on Saturday at 9:30 the project he’s working on to simplify the way software gets to users. Frank has deep knowledge in open source communities as member of the KDE e.V. Board of Directors and eg. as driver behind the open-PC project and some more activities he’s doing.
What makes developers and users happy ?
Currently developers create great software solving the user’s problem. But getting the software in a consumable way, simple, fast and efficient to the user nowadays still comes with some challenges. And marketing of the software isn’t covered either yet. So, maybe this situation could be improved.
This is the first public presentation of on ongoing project to radically simplify the work for the developers and make new applications available for end users in just a few minutes.
If you have not registered for the conference yet, please do so here to assure we have enough chairs. Our yearly conference is free of charge, offers interesting talks and gives you the best chance to meet many cool people in person!
This Wednesday the 2nd openSUSE Conference 2010 opens its doors and we are very happy to announce the third keynote today.
The Desktop and the Cloud – Thoughts about Freedom on Thursday morning at 9:30 am. How relevant is the desktop in a world where computing is happening in the cloud?
The motto for our conference is one of the basic ideas of openSUSE: Collaboration across borders. This is why we are especially proud to have this subject addressed in a keynote by two key people from the free desktop world: Cornelius Schumacher, president of KDE e.V., and Vincent Untz, former president of the GNOME Foundation.
They’ll show how KDE and GNOME evolved on their mission to bring user-friendly Free Software to users, where they stand today, and why the Free Desktop is needed to protect our freedoms in a cloudy world.
If you have not registered for the conference yet, please do so here to assure we have enough chairs. Our yearly conference is free of charge, offers interesting talks and gives you the best chance to meet many cool people in person!
