May 2010 - openSUSE Project - openSUSE Mailing Lists

[opensuse-project] Last Survey
by Sascha 'saigkill' Manns 25 Jun '10

25 Jun '10

Hello Mates, two month ago we started an online survey. Is the Survey now closed? Exists any results? -- Sincerely yours Sascha Manns openSUSE Community & Support Agent openSUSE Marketing Team Blog: http://saigkill.wordpress.com Web: http://www.open-slx.de (openSUSE Box Support German) Web: http://www.open-slx.com (openSUSE Box Support English)

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[opensuse-project] Strategy Discussion
by Marcus Moeller 02 Jun '10

02 Jun '10

Hi all. I have noticed the Strategy Discussion on the news: http://news.opensuse.org/2010/05/20/opensuse-strategy-meeting/ and would like to share some ideas. As I was off for quite a while (helping out on Fedora/CentOS as well, e.g. organizing this years FUDCon EMEA) I want to point those who don't remember me to my personal page on the wiki, first: http://en.opensuse.org/User:MarcusMoeller But now back to the topic. The SWOT doc already contains some useful information, but first question I would like to ask is what are you heading for? Imho there are two major points: the product itself and the community around it. I have picked up some imported points from the SWOT and commented below: W: Novell is not seen - like Red Hat - as Open Source friend `-> this is definitely true. Maybe Novell could act as Sponsor for more oS events. But first of all, Novell should communicate their aims clearly (besides 'We support Linux, as long we are making money from it', which is what a large part of the community thinks). Besides that, recently announced Novell products like 'ZENworks Application Virtualization' are only available for Windows and there are no clear statements if there will be a Linux version available, ever (which Red Hat clearly communicated to their community/customers with their latest virtualization product RHEV, where all components will be available for Linux, too.) S: decent .net support with mono (?) `-> this is only visible for a real small part of the community. Most of them does not really accept the joint-venture with M$ (which has not been communicated very well in the past) and see not benefits in Mono. We have to point out the real advantages of interoperability, here. Maybe some good example (maybe even commercial) .NET apps that work on Windows as well as on Linux would help. W: Bad QA `-> I once brought up the idea of an open QA group, where every interested contributor could take part. Afterwards it has been announced, but with limited slots (afair 30 ppl) Why that? If ppl want to contribute, please let them! Maybe: http://en.opensuse.org/Testing_Team has to be re-introduced, either in the news or in weekly newsletter. (which would be in general a good idea, to introduce team and is how we handle it at CentOS) W: lots of cool features are not documented, thus not used or integrated `-> At Fedora, the artwork team recently introduced the one page release notes, which contains the highlights of the newly released distribution. I would suggest to create one for oS, too (we need a good designer and one who has some Scribus knowledge for that, maybe gnokii or jimmac could help out there.) T: Distribution becomes a commodity and all distributions become more or less equal `-> yeah, it would be nice to only have one distro in the future, but I guess that won't happen :) S: no appstore `-> Gamestore could be taken as base. Pavol already did some nice work on that. W: factory not very usable `-> I would suggest to release less, but better tested milestones and RCs W: no openSUSE community manager even when there is an openSUSE community manager `-> I think that's not fair for zonker. He had some good ideas and spent a lot of effort in different areas. Maybe he was just not that known/visible outside the openSUSE community (and maybe even inside). I would also suggest to remove spotlight.os.org, lizards.os.org and only use the planet and the news. Besides that news should be also announced on social networks like identi.ca and linux.com. I spent some effort on that, but was quite alone, till now. (Besides that, if you like my ideas, you could try to hire me, but only part-wise as I like my main job :)) W: no organized (language-)local communities, nothing that connects them to the openSUSE.org project; Ambassadors not functional `-> the ambassadors project started quite chaotic. The main complaints where missing swag and support from Novell. But the groundwork has been done now and this is where the plants will grow. W: not enough presence on universities (but that applies for FOSS in general ...) `-> we are already doing oS install fests twice a year (on new students laptops) here at the ETH where usually about 40 ppl attend. Maybe we could just communicate it better, to motivate others to do the same. (Btw. asked for swag this year, but did not even get a reply since zonker is gone). O: alot of control ceded to the community in the past year and just need to be taken `-> this needs to be described clearly. Which are the areas where ppl can contribute? E.g. package maintaining is very unstructured. first of all there has to be a mentor process, clear package guidelines, followed by a review process. Every approved packager should be able to do package reviews, afterwards, despises which 'package group' he/she is packaging for. Mentoring is necessary for the Ambassadors project as well. T: next gen is not interested in low-level stuff such as OSes any more, so we'll get an old community ... `-> Maybe not an OS community but at least a Ruby one :) S: boosters team `-> clearly communicate what they are doing or hide it completely from the public. What's happening now is quite worse. (e.g. website updates not announced, will the wiki content be moved over via script or manually, as saigkill already started to move the weekly news manually, how is wiki i18n handled in the future). All that could be avoided with communication. If necessary, one needs to be hired blogging about what boosters are doing, regularly. A FAQ for the website renewal would also help. So nough said for today (which is only a minimal subset of my ideas :)) Best Regards Marcus -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe(a)opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help(a)opensuse.org

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[opensuse-project] Linux-Kongress 2010 in Nuernberg (CfP) closes 1st of June
by Andreas Jaeger 31 May '10

31 May '10

FYI, just noticed the following and would like to invite all of you! the program committee of Linux Kongress chose Nuernberg as the location for Linux-Kongress in 2010. (Sept 21 -- 24, the first two days are for tutorials, as usual.) Deadline for the submissions is tomorrow (Tuesday, 1st of June), please send in your proposals for presentations and tutorials! Links: http://www.linux-kongress.org/2010/ http://www.linux-kongress.org/2010/cfp.html Hope to see many of you in Nuernberg! Andreas -- Andreas Jaeger, Program Manager openSUSE, aj(a){novell.com,opensuse.org} Twitter: jaegerandi | Identica: jaegerandi SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, GF: Markus Rex, HRB 16746 (AG Nürnberg) Maxfeldstr. 5, 90409 Nürnberg, Germany GPG fingerprint = 93A3 365E CE47 B889 DF7F FED1 389A 563C C272 A126

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[opensuse-project] eclipse in openSUSE
by Stephen Shaw 28 May '10

28 May '10

I've started to mess around with doing android application development. As some of you might know google has provided an eclipse plugin that makes developing in eclipse nice with some of the features it adds to the IDE. The unfortunate part with this is that it has a minimum requirement of eclipse 3.4.2. Currently only 3.4.0 is available. I've tried installing the packages that come with openSUSE as well as the packages in the Java:packages OBS project and then adding the update repositories in hopes of having eclipse update itself. So far I've been unsuccessful at trying to do this. Each time has product some error during the process. Unfortunately, my experience with java is very minimal and so I don't fully understand how all the guts work and interact with each other. So, my proposal and I'd be willing to help out is to get java up to par on openSUSE. I don't know if we could borrow some of this stuff from Fedora as they seem to have a lot of this stuff already packaged and are rpm based? Cheers, Stephen -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe(a)opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help(a)opensuse.org

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Re: [opensuse-project] Strategy Discussion
by Carlos Ribeiro 26 May '10

26 May '10

** Reply Requested by 5/26/2010 (Wednesday) ** >>> Greg Freemyer <greg.freemyer(a)gmail.com> 25 Maio, 2010 >>> On Tue, May 25, 2010 at 3:43 PM, Gerald Pfeifer <gp(a)novell.com> wrote: > On Mon, 24 May 2010, Carlos Ribeiro wrote: >> My question is what happens with all of this investments. Not all of >> them but most part of my friends from SAMBA, AppArmor And Mono, is not >> working for Novell anymore !!! Someone have the answers for this >> questions? Why Novell decided to not run anymore with this Hack guys? > > Not sure what you are after, but I assume you are aware of the fact that > Novell is paying hundreds of engineers to work on Linux And Linux-based > products? And that's not even counting my team or me where we are hacking > in the evenings And weekends mostly. ;-) > > Open Source project are what we (as contributors) make them. > > openSUSE is what we (as contributors) make it. > > Gerald I don't know if Carlos knows, but it is NOT well known in my opinion. And having the main marketing prepare presentations that team members around the globe can use for small And large events would really help to get the word out IMHO. The only way to know if someone knows something is making questions. Or not ? Then we started in a perfect way, Or not ? fyi: A few years ago I attended an all day Intel / RH roadshow. It only had one speaker at a time, but all they did was delve into Linux contributions that one of two had made. In general it focused on stuff released in the last 12 months, but it also had some coming attractions kinds of things. My thought is the core team develop a few presentations like the above every 6 months Or so. Then reserve it for big events the first month Or so it's available And maybe even only use Novell people to give the initial presentations. But after that make it available for anyone to use at local events. Good initiative. Maybe this presentation could be done every a month in a format of live webcasts. Then published later. Greg -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe(a)opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help(a)opensuse.org -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe(a)opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help(a)opensuse.org

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[opensuse-project] Updates to Legal documents: openSUSE Distribution licencse and Site license
by Andreas Jaeger 25 May '10

25 May '10

During a review of the current legal documents, our legal team found a couple of things they suggest us to change. I'm listening the changes below and plan to update the documents in the next days. http://en.opensuse.org/Legal will get a new section called "openSUSE Build Service" which will get added after the section called "Contributions to openSUSE". The new section currently reads as follows and I'm discussing now to change the "Service" to the "Build Service": ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ openSUSE Build Service (the “Service”) You understand and agree that the Service is provided on an AS IS and AS AVAILABLE basis. Novell may discontinue the Service at any time. Novell disclaims all responsibility and liability for the availability or reliability of the Service. Novell also reserves the right to modify, suspend or discontinue the Service with or without notice at any time and without any liability to you. You should back up any of your data stored in the Service. Support services, if any, are available by means of separate agreement with Novell. You represent and warrant that (a) all of the information provided by you to Novell to participate in the Services is correct and current; and (b) you have all necessary right, power and authority to enter into these Terms of Service. You are responsible for maintaining the confidentiality of your Service password and account, and are responsible for all activities that occur thereunder. Novell reserves the right to refuse service to anyone at any time without notice for any reason. After a period of inactivity, Novell reserves the right to disable or terminate your account. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The changes to the distribution document come from a review about creating modified versions of openSUSE and the ownership of these modified versions. To this end, there are three related changes: 1) We are making it clear that people who create modified copies of openSUSE (such as LiveDVDs or appliances with additional software) own their creation. The openSUSE Project only claims ownership of the original bits. 2) We are clarifying that The openSUSE Project is not claiming ownership of all the packages within the distribution. The upstream projects own their code (e.g. the FSF owns GCC). 3) We are ensuring people understand their right to modify openSUSE, as long as they follow the Trademark Guidelines. While the first paragraph makes it clear that the collective copyright is licensed under an open source license, and the Trademark Guidelines address modified works, we wanted to make it clear further down as well. The changes are all in Paragraph 3, and I've marked the three changes (one removal, two additions below): openSUSE 11.2 and each of its components, including the source code, documentation, appearance, structure, and organization, are copyrighted by The openSUSE Project and others and are protected under copyright and other laws. Title to openSUSE 11.2 and any component, or to any copy (deleted: "modification, or merged portion") , will remain with the aforementioned (new) "or its licensors", subject to the applicable license. The "openSUSE" trademark is a trademark of Novell, Inc. in the US and other countries and is used by permission. This agreement permits you to distribute unmodified (new) "or modified" copies of openSUSE 11.2 using the “openSUSE” trademark on the condition that you follow The openSUSE Project’s trademark guidelines located at http://www.opensuse.org/Legal. You must abide by these trademark guidelines when distributing openSUSE 11.2, regardless of whether openSUSE 11.2 has been modified. Andreas -- Andreas Jaeger, Program Manager openSUSE, aj(a){novell.com,opensuse.org} Twitter: jaegerandi | Identica: jaegerandi SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, GF: Markus Rex, HRB 16746 (AG Nürnberg) Maxfeldstr. 5, 90409 Nürnberg, Germany GPG fingerprint = 93A3 365E CE47 B889 DF7F FED1 389A 563C C272 A126

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Re: [opensuse-project] Strategy Discussion
by Carlos Ribeiro 24 May '10

24 May '10

** Reply Requested by 5/24/2010 (Monday) ** >>> C <smaug42(a)gmail.com> 21 Maio, 2010 >>> On Fri, May 21, 2010 at 22:52, Andreas Jaeger wrote: >> W: Novell is not seen - like Red Hat - as Open Source friend >> `-> this is definitely true. Maybe Novell could act as Sponsor for >> more oS events. But first of all, Novell should communicate their aims > > This is an interesting question in itself. Will throwing money at Open > Source events help here? >That's a tough one... throwing money at it probably isn't the >solution... neither is ignoring it. At least for Novell Brazil office, they really understand the importance of Novell to be more involved with openSource events, they have no dedicated guys to work on it, but if we create a good opensource business plan, showing the most important events in our region and how many lead/people this kind of events bring to Novell corporation, ... They probably will sponsor us, for example, Itaipu that is t largest dam working hydroelectric power plant in its generating capacity and turns to be Novell customer inside Linux Community Events, another example could be Banco of Brazil - The biggest bank here, Novell also has found this opportunity during a Linux Community Event. >Open source events are... in my opinion, under-marketed. Take the >upcoming LinuxTag in Berlin. Some of us (who are close enough to >attend) know about it... I go every year... but even though I know >about it, I tend to totally forget about it until it's almost too >late.. because it's not marketed.. it's not "in my face" so to speak. >It's a nice event... Could be under-market but this is our business, we must be there, without opensuse presence our lifes turn to be quite impossible. - And to make this happen, I mean, we need to develop a winner business plan to show to our sponsor. >Or another.. the OOoCon. This year it's in Budapest... how many >outside of the regulars know about it? >What open source events, or openSUSE events are people going to be i>nterested in? What target audience would we aim for? The new user? >The developer? How do you get the word out to that target audience? My sugestion is: - We need to create a kind of powerfull big list for events we think is important for us. Example I don't know events in India, budapest.... and I'm quite sure none of the openSUSE Board know the most important events in Latin America and Brazil. Our road map could be 1 - identify the regional and maybe importants linux events 2 - Find out if we already have some of our sponsor running there, example, Novell, HP, AMD. 3 - Create a Linux/Community Events worlwide list to help us to have a better vision, because if WE DO NOT KNOW THE existence of it, how will we be asking our sponsors to join us? C. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe(a)opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help(a)opensuse.org -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe(a)opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help(a)opensuse.org

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Re: [opensuse-project] News about openSUSE Strategy
by Carlos Ribeiro 24 May '10

24 May '10

** Reply Requested by 5/24/2010 (Monday) ** Dear Folks >>> Vincent Untz <vuntz(a)opensuse.org> 21 Maio, 2010 >>> Hi, Le jeudi 20 mai 2010, à 17:25 +0200, Pavol Rusnak a écrit : > After much discussion, we're finally ready to bring together these > important bits of information into a cohesive statement that everyone > can unify around. As such, we, the members of the Strategy Team, will be > meeting in Nuremberg the weekend of May 28th to formalize a draft of our > strategy that will be available publicly for open discussion and comment. >First, I'm really glad to see this happening: it's something that was >very much needed, and I certainly have high expectations now :-) >Do you have an idea how the discussion and comments around the draft >will be handled? I just want to be sure we know how we'll process them >before we get them -- for example, what happens if we get some strong "I >disagree" comments? We need this feedback, maybe and of course I could be wrong, but I think this is the most important feedback. Without "strong disagree" feedback we will not be able to understand why they choose other distros instead of glorious openSUSE ;-) >Of course, I'd love to read the non-formalized draft, but that just me >being curious ;-) It's good to have a small group come with a proposal >as a first step. [...] > For more information about our work, please feel free to review our > documents at http://en.opensuse.org/Documents. And we'll be sure to keep > you informed of our progress results from this exciting retreat. >Should we feel free to edit those documents? Or should we send feedback >by mail, on IRC, etc.? >I'd probably need to read everything a second time (first read was >definitely interesting), but one thing that looked completely >wrong/off-topic was this line in SWOT about "Novell - openSUSE >relationship" >W: freedesktop.org is a complete failure, LSB is a dead horse, lack of >will, too much corporation, etc. >What's the link between fd.o or LSB and Novell or openSUSE? Good question. also I think this question must be asked to Novell Linux Executives. >Thanks, Vincent -- Les gens heureux ne sont pas pressés. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe(a)opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help(a)opensuse.org -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe(a)opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help(a)opensuse.org

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[opensuse-project] Bento: add openSUSE Weekly News
by Sascha 'saigkill' Manns 22 May '10

22 May '10

Hello Mates, i just would like to propose to add the Weekly News in the Community Section of the Bento Theme. -- Sincerely yours Sascha Manns open-slx GmbH openSUSE Community & Support Agent openSUSE Marketing Team Blog: http://saigkill.wordpress.com Web: http://www.open-slx.de (openSUSE Box Support German) Web: http://www.open-slx.com (openSUSE Box Support English)

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[opensuse-project] News about openSUSE Strategy
by Pavol Rusnak 21 May '10

21 May '10

Hi everyone! For the past few months we, the openSUSE Board [1], together with the great help from Kurt Garloff [2],Jan Weber [3] and Andreas Jaeger [4], held a series of strategy sessions to address the future of openSUSE. We discussed the role of openSUSE as a community and project and looked at data from a variety of sources, including the recent openSUSE Survey [5] to identify and build a strategy of strength and empowerment within our community, with a goal of establishing a common unified ground for answering the question to ourselves and to the world... "Why openSUSE?" and openSUSE's role in the operating system market, both today and in the future. After much discussion, we're finally ready to bring together these important bits of information into a cohesive statement that everyone can unify around. As such, we, the members of the Strategy Team, will be meeting in Nuremberg the weekend of May 28th to formalize a draft of our strategy that will be available publicly for open discussion and comment. The weekend strategy retreat will be preceded by a General Board Meeting Friday morning and a Meet & Greet for the general public Friday evening. If you are in the Nuremberg area or are willing to travel to Nuremberg, we invite you for a sociable evening of chat and drinks at the SUSE-Nuremberg offices [6] at 6:00 p.m. Meet the Board, members of the openSUSE Boosters team and other SUSE guys there. We'll do a few short presentations but the focus lays clearly on communication and having fun. For more information about our work, please feel free to review our documents at http://en.opensuse.org/Documents. And we'll be sure to keep you informed of our progress results from this exciting retreat. [1] http://en.opensuse.org/Board [2] http://en.opensuse.org/User:Garloff [3] http://en.opensuse.org/User:Japa83 [4] http://en.opensuse.org/User:A_jaeger [5] http://en.opensuse.org/UX/openSUSE_Survey_2010 [6] SUSE Linux Products GmbH, Ground Floor/Erdgeschoß, Maxfeldstraße 5, 90409 -- Best Regards, openSUSE Board and Strategy Team -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe(a)opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help(a)opensuse.org

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