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
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…
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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 new project for this year, please also open ASAP a new
issue for each project and label it accordingly:
More information about being a mentor and submitting mentoring projects
you can find on our openSUSE 101 page (http://101.opensuse.org/) or the
official Google page (https://developers.google.com/open-source/gsoc/).
If you have questions, please feel free to contact me!
GSoC was in the past a great opportunity to recruit new people for the
openSUSE project and it is great experience to teach young developers
the power of Open Source! We hope to get a lot of support from you!
Thanks
Christian Bruckmayer
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-----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.
Election team will update election schedule and inform you about next
steps as soon as possible (whether we can continue/recover current poll
or if we will need to start from scratch).
Kind regards from election team
Martin Pluskal
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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 information.
You should compile the following information for the letter:
Full Name (First, Middle, Last)
Place of Employment
Date you started with your employer
Job Title
Date of Birth
Passport Number
Passport Date of Issue
Passport Date of Expiration
Passport Place of Issue
Dates of Travel
oSC17 will be in Nuremberg, Germany, from May 26 to May 28. Please sign
in and register for the event at https://events.opensuse.org. After your
are registered, please consider submitting a talk.
v/r
Doug
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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 :
...
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
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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 register.
If you plan on attending the openSUSE Conference and are required to get
a visa, please email me (ddemaio(a)opensuse.org) ASAP. Just title the
subject of the email oSC17 Visa. The earlier you contact me for a visa,
the more time you will have to prepare.
v/r
Doug
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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 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/cboltzhttps://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 ;-)
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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]
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