Zonker wrote the following:

I’m happy to announce that the openSUSE Project has been accepted to Google’s Summer of Code 2008! Now the real fun begins!

We’re now in the “interim period” for students to discuss application ideas with mentoring organizations. (That’d be us.) Students will then have from March 24th through March 31st to apply to Google. See our ideas page, and Google’s SoC 2008 FAQ for more info and timeline.

Kudos to Google for acting quickly on this — applications for organizations were due last Wednesday, and I was notified this afternoon that we had been accepted. That’s pretty speedy, given the number of applications I’m sure they had to read through.

Discussion about openSUSE’s participation in Google’s SoC 2008 is most appropriate on the opensuse-project mailing list.

In order to provide a better service to the existing openSUSE Community and to our new users, we’re pleased to announce that suseforums.net, suselinuxsupport.de and the openSUSE support forums at forums.novell.com (the three largest English speaking dedicated SUSE forums) are joining forces to merge into the new official openSUSE Forums at forums.opensuse.org.

Behind the scenes, a project team consisting of Novell employees, openSUSE Community members, and existing forums’ staff have been working on this project since the beginning of 2008. The new infrastructure will be hosted by Novell to ensure the highest possible quality of service.
Current plans are to migrate the existing active members of suseforums.net and suselinuxsupport.de into the official openSUSE Forums, simultaneously implementing Single Sign On for the whole openSUSE Community. We hope to make the transition as seamless as possible, and will go live Spring 2008. More information will be posted as available.

All in all, a big gain for the whole openSUSE Community!

I’d like to give a warm welcome to Joe ‘Zonker’ Brockmeier who joins the openSUSE project as “openSUSE community manager”. You can reach him directly at zonker@opensuse.org. He has his own openSUSE blog at http://zonker.opensuse.org, I advise to go over and see what he has to say himself!

He is a long time Linux user and does a lot of writing about Linux and open source for several publications and conributed to books as well. Prior to his new role as community manager for openSUSE he served Linux Magazine as Editor-in-Chief. His personal webpage is http://www.dissociatedpress.net.

The openSUSE community manager will act as community advocate and ombudsman thus relaying openSUSE community and users needs back to Novell. Therefore you will find Zonker on many community events. He will also drive marketing programs around openSUSE to make the project more successful and attract more developers and users.

Zonker will be travelling the next weeks and you can meet him and other openSUSE members at these two venues:

• at SCALE from 8th to 10th February
• at FOSDEM from 23th to 24th February

For those that wonder what happened with the “openSUSE Chief evangelist” position that was opened in October: this is exactly the position, we just found it more suitable to change the title of Joe.

I have talked a lot with Zonker through the last weeks and look forward to working with him - and look forward meeting him soon in person here in Nürnberg!

Andreas

We proudly announce shop.openSUSE.org. This is the place to find official openSUSE gear: T-shirts, mugs, caps, bags and more are available.

As many times requested by the community the shop will fulfill the need to offer openSUSE branded gear to a large audience at a reasonable price. The shop itself is driven by an external shop provider who offers us a broad variety of different products to sell. We are bound to his selection. If you wanna see more or other products out there or just want to give us feedback please contact us at shop@opensuse.org

Have a lot of fun!

We’d like to take this opportunity to wish all openSUSE users and contributors a very merry Christmas and an enjoyable holiday! Thank you all for the great work you’ve done this year and the achievements accomplished.

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281 contributors from the openSUSE community participated in a survey last month. The survey was part of a research project on the topic of firm-sponsored open source communities, hosted by the University of Oslo. Topics in the survey include:

• level of contribution
• reasons for participating
• attitude towards Novell

The results are now ready and can be found here:

• Commented version
• Simple presentation

The commented version includes some analysis of the results and statistical measures of correlation between questions in the survey. The simple version only shows the distribution of frequencies in percent, but also includes the answers to the open text fields in the survey.

The highlights of this week’s status mails, for your convenience as a news article!

• We are working on a new LiveCD with updated packages (beta version here).
• Unfortunately the online update last weekend caused some problems, so we are thinking about how to avoid this next time. More information on this soon.
• FOSDEM 2008 planing started, join the discussion later this week on the opensuse-project mailinglist. Great news from the OBS team: Klaas wrote a 6 page article for the German Linux Magazine about the Build Service!

More information is available in the specific mailing list posts; if you are not subscribed to the mailinglists you can also read them in the archive. Here are the direct links to the mails:

• Distribution
• Communication/Wiki/Events
• Build Service

The openSUSE board has been setup to lead the overall project. The board will: act as a central point of contact, help resolve conflicts, communicate community interests to Novell, facilitate communication with all areas of the community, and facilitate decision making processes where needed.

The board should provide guidance and support existing governance structures, but shouldn’t direct or control development, since community mechanisms exist to accomplish the goals of the project. The board should document decisions and policies.

The initial board has been appointed by Novell — in the future, the board members will be elected by the community and the chair person appointed by Novell. One of the missions of the board is to define a process to elect the next board.

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It’s official: the openSUSE project Guiding Principles are now in force. The Guiding Principles are a framework for the project and give everyone a clear view of who we are, what we stand for, what the project wants and how it works. The Guiding Principles document was created by the openSUSE community and is embraced by Novell - the founder and largest sponsor of the openSUSE project. This important document will help ensure the success and continued progress of the project. Along with the Guiding Principles, we are also launching the openSUSE Board to offer a central point of contact to the community and make community participation in project governance easier. The openSUSE Board consists of both external community members and community members employed by Novell .

We encourage all to support the Guiding Principles here. Create your profile and support the Guiding Principles.

We want to especially thank all contributors to the Guiding Principles, and last but not least, all community members who make the openSUSE project such a success.

Have a lot of fun!

Adrian Schröter
Andreas Jaeger
Benjamin Weber
Cornelius Schumacher
Federico Mena Quintero
Francis Giannaros
Gerald Pfeifer
Jeff Jaffe
Justin Steinman
Klaas Freitag
Martin Lasarsch
Martin Schlander
Michael Löffler
Pascal Bleser
Roger Levy

IP Exchange, a major german Internet Service Provider, is sponsoring the openSUSE project with internet connectivity. They provide a mirror server in their location with a up to 1 GBit/s, a fast connection from the openSUSE Build Service and the central openSUSE ftp server to the mirror servers.

During the launch of openSUSE 10.3 we did already benefit from the sponsoring of IP Exchange. It allowed us to get the ISOs fast to the mirrors and to the people downloading 10.3.

We highly appreciate the contribution of IP Exchange and like to thank in the name of the openSUSE community. This makes the openSUSE project even more attractive to Linux contributors all over the world.