January 2017

[opensuse-project] How we will use the GSoC money
by Vincent Untz 18 Jul '24

18 Jul '24

Hi, (let's see how a public discussion about money goes :-)) The Google Summer of Code brings us great students, but also means that the openSUSE project will get $8000 (if I'm not mistaken) at the end of the summer. That's $500 per student. A while ago, I requested comments on my blog about what to do with the money, but didn't get any feedback. So I take this as "do what you feel is best", and this mail is about the plan. As a reminder, the main issue is that we will likely not have the … [View More]

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[opensuse-project] openSUSE Members retirement
by Michal Hrusecky 27 May '17

27 May '17

Hi everybody, as you all know, we have the openSUSE Members, a group of contributors through their sustained and substantial contributors that are eligible to participate in elections, have @opensuse.org mail and other perks. We have now about 600 of them, but as you can see[1] in last openSUSE Board elections only 150 of them voted. This could mean two things - either most of the members are not interested in elections or plenty of them are simply no longer around. I guess the truth is … [View More]somewhere in middle. This is something we need to know when we take project wide decisions in order to correctly assess the communities interest in the topic. This is a recurring topic that has been discussed at the openSUSE Board Face to Face meeting last year, oSC 15, and on this list several times over the last few years. Taking these into consideration, we (in the board) think it would be a good idea to implement something to help with ensuring our Membership list accurately reflects our current Membership. I have put together a tool which attempts to detect an openSUSE Members activity on mailing lists, OBS, bugzilla, maybe more. This tool will remember when we last saw openSUSE Member on any of those channels and if they doesn't show for 6 months, we will send them an e-mail asking whether they still wants to be a member. A response to that email will automatically count as activity and preserve the Members status. If there is no response within 30 days of the notification, the Member will be 'retired' and be considered a 'Member emeritus'. If someone is retired incorrectly, or a 'Member emeritus' returns to the Project and wants a restoration of their voting privilege, they will be unretired without question by the Membership Committee. There are few implementation details to be worked out, so we don't expect this to go live overnight but consider this a "statement of intent" and an explanation of how we expect things to work before we start testing the process. ==== To answer some of the obvious questions: Q: Shouldn't we retire inactive members anyway after measuring and evaluating their activity? A: No, that would be too hard, too subjective and it could bother people that we cannot measure automatically. Automatic measurement is just an indicator that those people are no longer interested, but they might be just working on project aspects we cannot measure. openSUSE Members are members until THEY no longer want to be. We believe this system preserves that principle. Q: Wouldn't it offend active contributors if they will be falsely accused of not being interested? A: I hope not. If period will be long enough (6 months) and if we monitor even mailing lists, people will usually show up somewhere. We intend to word the 'ping' email in a way that is not judgemental, but just makes it clear that we have failed to automatically find evidence of contribution so want to make sure they are still interested in remaining a Member. Q: Doesn't it change the meaning of the openSUSE Member? A: Not really. So far once you got a membership status, it was forever without question. Now it would be forever as long as you are interested. No big change, just a little difference. Q: What if mail with warning gets lost? A: If you lose your membership by accident by losing an e-mail, you can still contact membership committee and as a retired member you will be reinstated immediately without voting/verification that takes time. And you should fix your e-mail in connect.opensuse.org in that case ;-) Q: Will retired members retain their email & IRC cloak perks? A: No, the intention is that retired members will no longer be eligible for @opensuse.org email addresses and Freenode IRC cloaks. [1] https://connect.opensuse.org/pg/polls/read/pluskalm/49480/opensuse-board-el… -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe(a)opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner(a)opensuse.org [View Less]

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[opensuse-project] GSoC 2017
by Christian Bruckmayer 01 Mar '17

01 Mar '17

Good evening and happy new year, as a new year just started, it is also time to prepare for another round of Google Summer of Code. The organization application period is approaching fast: 19.01.2017 - 09.02.2017 Since last year we collect all our GSoC projects in this repository: https://github.com/openSUSE/mentoring/issues Meanwhile I closed all projects from last year, if you submitted one and it is still valid, please open a new issue and just copy over and/or update! If you have a … [View More]

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[opensuse-project] Elections on hold
by Martin Pluskal 30 Jan '17

30 Jan '17

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA256 Hello I have to regretfully inform you, that due to technical difficulties in our tool connect.opensuse.org we have to put current elections on hold. I deeply apologize for any inconvenience this might have caused to you. Technical problems that many of you noticed on the mailinglist proven to have more than visual consequences and our administrators are now looking in the issue trying to figure out how to solve the underlying problem. … [View More]

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[opensuse-project] visa letter request
by Douglas DeMaio 27 Jan '17

27 Jan '17

For people planning to attend the openSUSE Conference who need a visa letter request, please contact me. Some non-European Union citizens may be required to visit an embassy and have a formed signed to receive a travel visa. If you plan on attending oSC17 from a non-EU country, please be sure to review http://www.auswaertiges-amt.de/EN/EinreiseUndAufenthalt/StaatenlisteVisumpf… to see if you are coming from a countries that requires a visa. Email ddemaio (at) opensuse.org for more … [View More]

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[opensuse-project] openSUSE Board elections 2016/2017 - Phase 2 (voting begins)
by Martin Pluskal 24 Jan '17

24 Jan '17

Hello It is my pleasure to announce that voting for openSUSE board [0] has begun [2] - so please don't forget to cast your vote at: http://bit.ly/2jYi5xt [1] Voting will last until 2017-02-01 and on 2017-02-02 results will be announced, you can cast three votes, all members [2][3] are eligible for voting. Cheers and good luck to all candidates Martin Pluskal 0. https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Board_election 1. https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Board_election#Phase_2:_Election 2. https:/… [View More]

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[opensuse-project] Is openSUSE free software? And if not, should it be?
by Axel Braun 14 Jan '17

14 Jan '17

Dear project members, background of the question is a discussion I recently had with R. Stallman. According to his point of view, openSUSE is not free software, as unfree components are installed. Lets take a look at the definition of freedom [1]. Free software allows you to - execute a program - distribute it - analyze and modify the source code - re-distribute the modified program. This matches for the most part the license for openSUSE, see /etc/YaST2/ licenses/base/license.txt : ... … [View More]With the exception of certain files containing the “openSUSE” trademark discussed below, the license terms for the components permit you to copy and redistribute the component. With the potential exception of certain firmware files, the license terms for the components permit you to copy, modify, and redistribute the component, in both source code and binary code forms. This agreement does not limit your rights under, or grant you rights that supersede, the license terms of any particular component. .... Except for the part ' With the potential exception of certain firmware files' , this gives us all required freedoms. Firmware is usually tricky....so looking at this I found some Firmware files with the License string 'openSUSE-Firmware', and [2] on the net (but not sure how up-to-date this page is). Does anyone know the rationale behind openSUSE-Firmware license? openSUSE comes by default with the OSS and non-OSS repository. Richards remark here was that files from non-OSS are installed without making the user aware about the nature of these unfree components. This is true, although the permission is asked for every of the two installed programs (AdobeICCProfiles and a gstreamer-fluendo-mp3). Most users do probably not realize the point of proprietary software here. And the benefit of AdobeICC is limited if you are not using color management. I see the bias between free software and useability: If you desperately need some proprietary firmware to get your hardware up and running, you will see the freedom aspect only in the second row. As a distribution, we should make sure that a wide range of hardware is supported. On the other hand, and as openSUSE explains free software in its flyers (without stating THAT oS is free), we should try to install only free components in the first glance. But we could leave the user the choice (during installation) to include non- free componentes / non-oss repo. By this we can make sure that exotic software as well gets supported, if we separate the non-free Firmware into the non-OSS Repo. Does that sound reasonable? Discussion please! Axel [1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html [2] https://de.opensuse.org/Firmware -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe(a)opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner(a)opensuse.org [View Less]

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[opensuse-project] Organizational Meeting for openSUSE Conference 2017
by Douglas DeMaio 13 Jan '17

13 Jan '17

Hi all, We will have our first organizational meeting for the planning of the openSUSE Conference 2017 on Wednesday, Feb. 1, on the openSUSE-project IRC channel on freenode at 1800 UTC. We want to get in one meeting before FOSDEM this year and we will begin regular weekly meeting at the same time and location beginning Feb. 21. If you have not registered for the conference or submitted a proposal, visit https://events.opensuse.org and do so when you have time available to submit and … [View More]

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[opensuse-project] Another Board candidate ;-)
by Christian Boltz 02 Jan '17

02 Jan '17

Hello, I was nominated to run for the board, and finally decided to run ;-) I use openSUSE since years (actually it was still „SuSE Linux“ with lowercase „u“ back then), started annoying people in bugzilla, err, started betatesting in the 9.2 beta phase. Since then, I reported more than 1200 bugs. Later, OBS ruined my bugzilla statistics by introducing the option to send a SR ;-) More recently, I helped in fighting the wiki spam, which also means I‘m admin on the english wiki since … [View More]then, and had some fun[tm] with the current server admin. I‘m one of the founding members of the Heroes team (thanks to Sarah for getting the right people together at oSC16!) Currently, I work on the base server setup (using salt) for our new infrastructure and updating the wiki to an up-to-date MediaWiki version. You can find me on several mailinglists and on IRC, and of course I still scare people in bugzilla. I‘m also a regular visitor and speaker at the openSUSE Conference, and visit other conferences as time permits. Besides openSUSE, I work on AppArmor and PostfixAdmin – both upstream and as packager. Also, I‘m admin on several webservers (all running with Leap). My day job has nothing to do with computers. I produce something you can drink that is named after a software we ship in openSUSE ;-) Oh, and I collect funny quotes from various mailinglists, IRC, bugzilla etc. that then end up as random signatures under my mails, so be careful what you write ;-) Issues I can see - You probably know „DRY“, so – see the next paragraph Aims/Goals - speed! We have too many issues hanging around for too long, and that‘s annoying for people who suffer from them. Especially small things should (and can!) be solved quickly. - clear responsibilities! Part of the speed problem is that it‘s sometimes hard to find out who can fix something, and hunting down people takes time. - don‘t talk (too much) – do it! Sometimes we need to discuss things, but often just doing them works best. Obviously I can‘t do everything alone, so I want to encourage people to help whereever they can. „I don‘t have knownledge how to do this“ doesn‘t count – for example, updating a wiki page or reporting a bug isn‘t hard ;-) and typically people really start to report bugs once they understand that this gives them the right to complain (quoting Pascal Bleser: „Always file a bug: if it‘s not in Bugzilla, then it‘s not there“) - longer days! Maybe I should move to Bajor – I heard they have 26 hour days there, which would solve some of my time problems ;-)) Why you should vote for me? - I tend to kick people to ensure they work faster and fix things. This is your chance to kick me! - Help me to find out if I can get the thing in the (non-random) signature of this mail done! Things I‘ll never do: - use a stable release on my main computer – Tumbleweed is just too good ;-) - open a bugreport if fxing it and sending a SR is faster - be too serious – hey, our motto is „Have a lot of fun...“ ;-) - drink beer ;-) (sorry, not even openSUSE beer) Contact Details: Mail: see sender address for one of my mail addresses ;-) - or use my IRC nick @opensuse.org IRC: cboltz http://blog.cboltz.de (some more posts would be nice, but then you wouldn‘t believe the „don‘t talk – do it!“ ;-) https://connect.opensuse.org/pg/profile/cboltz https://en.opensuse.org/user:cboltz I wish all candidates good luck, hope that we‘ll see lots of voters – and wish everybody all the best for 2017! Regards, Christian Boltz PS: Non-random signature – and while I have serious doubts about the second paragraph, I‘m very sure about the first ;-) -- If you run for the Board this year and get elected, I can see my sanity would be doomed But in a good way ;) [Richard Brown] -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe(a)opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner(a)opensuse.org [View Less]

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[opensuse-project] openSUSE Board elections 2016/2017 - Phase 1
by Martin Pluskal 02 Jan '17

02 Jan '17

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA256 Hello We are entering Phase 1 of openSUSE Board elections, meaning campaign time before voting starts (which starts on 2017-01-21). I am pleased to confirm that we have following candidates: * Aaron Luna <aaronluna75(a)gmail.com> + https://en.opensuse.org/User:Aaronluna75 + http://www.opensusemexico.com + https://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-project/2016-12/msg00078.html * Sarah Julia Kriesch <ada.lovelace(a)gmx.de> + https://… [View More]

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