Show season is afoot. I’ve spent the bulk of my day talking to people about upcoming shows, planning to attend shows, and worrying about the housekeeping tasks of being at the shows — like being on panels, giving talks, having the talks prepared, and whatnot.

It takes a lot to pull together a successful show — but one of the big gaps is trying to anticipate the audience that will be attending. What will the crowd look like, demographically? What kind of talks do they want to attend? What, collectively, are people going to be interested in at the time the show hits. You can easily give the same talk at two shows and have a packed room at one show, and a nearly empty room at the other. (And, of course, time slots and whatnot play a factor here, too — if you’re cursed with the “death slot” at a show, i.e., the last talk of the last day, you can kiss a packed room goodbye even if you’re the most popular speaker on the planet and handing out free money.)

A few folks suggested, while I was working on speakers for Ohio LinuxFest in 2007, that people were “bored” with the same speakers at each conference — i.e., don’t try to book someone that’s been at a lot of other shows, because “people are tired” of those speakers. I suppose that might be true — if you attend a lot of shows. My guess is that some people attend a lot of shows as part of their work requirements, and so they tend to see the same speakers over and over again. But the remainder of the audience — probably 95% — only goes to one or two events per year, tops.

As I’m planning on talks at several events, and also doing some event planning, I thought I’d throw the question out there — what kind of talks are you interested in? What topics would you like to see covered, and what things are not of interest?

Of course, I have topics I want to discuss — but I’m looking for suggestions and input. What things related to openSUSE are of specific interest these days? And, more generally, what sort of talks would you want to attend at open source events in general?

No matter how many talks and presentations I give, I’m always a bit flattered when I submit a presentation and have it accepted. I’m particularly pleased that I have been invited to speak at the first-ever LugRadio Live to be held in the U.S. — which will almost certainly be a shindig of epic proportions.

Also appearing from Novell, Miguel de Icaza and Aaron Bockover. And a slew of other excellent speakers as well. I’d like to see, oh, almost all of those talks. It’s a great lineup.

What will I be talking about? Well, without giving too much away, I’m going to be discussing ways that open source projects, and the contributors of said projects, can look to promote themselves and build community. In short — a sort of a Marketing 101 for Open Source.

The traditional model for marketing and PR doesn’t quite work for open source projects because you’re not selling a product, you don’t have the same sort of resources that marketing and PR teams have (i.e., no budget) and the goals are much different. It should also go without saying that bringing people into an open source community is much different than selling Coca-Cola.

Anyway — all that will be covered in my talk. LugRadio Live is being held April 12 and 13, in San Francisco, CA. The cost to register is a mere $10, so be sure to sign up now while space is available — I hope to see many, many openSUSE community members at LRL.

Also, we’re taking volunteers to help staff the community booth at LRL, so drop me a note if you’re interested in lending a hand.

Just trolling Planet SUSE and I see that Andreas Schneider has released source code for csync, “a user level file synchronizer to provide roaming home directories for Linux.” This might be something very interesting…

I use several Linux boxen, a laptop and a couple of desktop machines. I’m always interested in better ways to sync my info and data between them.

As I mentioned last week, I was lucky enough to get to go to FOSDEM last weekend and get to see what all the fuss has been about all these years. I’ve been hearing about FOSDEM for quite some time, but hadn’t had the chance to attend one until this year.

Obviously, I’ve been deprived. I’m not sure what the final turnout was — I’m not sure anyone knows what the final turnout was, since the event was free and there was no registration required for the event — but by the crowds in the halls of the ULB campus, I’d estimate it conservatively at several billion, give or take… actually the numbers I heard floating around were in the range of 4,000 attendees. I do know that Saturday’s crowd was enormous — and Sunday was slightly less packed, but we still had throngs of people at the openSUSE booth and through the halls.

One of the things that I look for in a conference is a good “hallway track” — which is to say, the conversations and meetings that happen outside the scheduled session tracks that you ostensibly attend a conference like FOSDEM for. Yes, the sessions at FOSDEM and other shows are often invaluable (and sometimes massive yawnfests, but that’s not usually the case) and you can learn a lot from a presentation, talk, or tutorial at a show.

However, the most valuable thing about shows, for me, is the opportunity to have actual in-person discussions with the people you typically only interact with via IM, IRC, email, or phone. Electronic communication is the backbone of our community, but it’s a lossy form of communication and a pale comparison to sitting down with one or more people and being able to have a good discussion.

And many a good discussion was had. I had a great time meeting and talking to openSUSE contributors, got a lot of great input about things we could do to promote openSUSE and grow its community, and have some ideas for shows in the future. (Also found out that I share a birthday with Coolo, who also celebrated his birthday at FOSDEM on Saturday.)

I took a few pictures at FOSDEM, but haven’t plopped them up on Flickr yet. However, Carlos is racking up an impressive number of links to FOSDEM pics at Flickr on his blog. (Sorry you didn’t get to attend this year, Carlos, maybe next year?) Also, check out Francis Giannaros’ post on FOSDEM and news.opensuse.org.

The only disappointment at the show, for me, is that I didn’t win anything in the FOSDEM drawing… but, I did come away with a spiffy FOSDEM t-shirt (because, you know, I didn’t have any t-shirts before…) and I’m satisfied knowing that my 25 Euros went to supporting FOSDEM. I still think it would have been more satisfying to have supported FOSDEM and have come away with a Nokia 810, but such is life.

To the FOSDEM organizers, congrats on a show well done. I can’t wait to attend next year.

Miguel has a great round-up of Mono-related projects from Hackweek, which includes a Gtk# client for Bugzilla, a revamp of the regular expression library for Mono, packaging Mono for Maemo4, and much more.

He also mentions Tasky, which seems to be taking off already — I’ve spoken to folks from two other distributions this weekend at FOSDEM that are talking about packaging Tasky for their distros. It’s pretty impressive to think that a tool can go from design to development to distribution to thousands (millions?) of Linux users in just a few weeks.

Just getting ready to pack up my laptop and head to FOSDEM — the openSUSE team is going to be at FOSDEM in full force with a developer room and booth. We have some awesome talks scheduled — including talks on YaST, system imaging with KIWI, one click install, desktop accessibility, plans for openSUSE 11, and workshops on packaging using the open build service. (I’ll also be talking very briefly on Saturday morning.)

A big thanks to Martin Lasarsch, who has put in a ton of work organizing our presence at FOSDEM, and all the openSUSE folks who are attending, staffing the booth, and giving talks this weekend at FOSDEM.

If you’re attending FOSDEM, please be sure to drop by the booth and say hello. See you at FOSDEM!

In case you’ve missed it so far, Microsoft announced today that they’d be changing its business practices to better support interoperability with the open source community. Rather than recapping the news, I’ll just point you at some of the coverage so far:

• Microsoft Pledges Not to Sue Over Open Source
• Microsoft makes boldest move yet embracing open source
• Reading the fine print on Microsoft’s new open-source promises
• Red Hat was right, Novell was wrong

Let’s look at that last one for a second.

It’s interesting that, given the scope and potential implications of Microsoft’s announcement, Matt’s first response is to go after Novell again. He does backtrack a bit after he notices that the pledge is only for non-commercial entities, but says nothing of the anti-Novell shot he took before fully digesting the details of the Microsoft announcement.

But since Matt specifically mentioned me in the first post, I thought some sort of response was warranted.

Novell and the Community

I do appreciate Matt’s confidence in my ability to help Novell find its footing with the open source community. Given Matt’s fondness for taking Novell’s leadership to task, I’m not sure if his endorsement is going to be particularly helpful there…

But, seriously, I do think Novell’s leadership is interested in doing right by the community and learning how to have an effective partnership with the open source community that works for everybody. Right now I’m in our Nuremberg office to meet with some of the folks who are the backbone of the openSUSE project and to find out what we can do to meet some of the goals we have for the project. Specifically, how we can:

• Raise the visibility of openSUSE and other open source projects within Novell.
• Grow the community by attracting new users and contributors.
• Give existing community members the tools they need to contribute effectively and ensure that they have a say in deciding the direction and development goals of openSUSE and other projects.
• Figure out how to allow other companies to sponsor openSUSE and bring additional resources to bear on its development.

Since Matt’s looking at Novell from the outside, he can’t see what I’ve been seeing in my brief time with Novell so far — that there’s a strong commitment to the open source community from the teams I am working with, and a desire to work hand-in-hand with the open source community at large.

One of the advantages for open source is that there are many opportunities for code-reuse — one of the tragedies of open source is that code-reuse doesn’t happen as often as it could, for a number of reasons. I’m always happy to see when something developed for one project — like YaST — can be used to benefit other projects that aren’t directly related to the main project.

That’s a long-winded intro for the news that the YaST team has separated its user interface library from the rest of the YaST infrastructure, so that other applications can take advantage of the UI library:

The YaST UI library provides a very simple API to build rather complex but still consistent user interfaces. The particular implementation of the interface depends on the chosen backend - Qt, Gtk+ or ncurses. The primary target for this library is YaST, Yet Another Setup Tool developed for installation and configuration of SUSE products.

However, the library was very deeply tight to the rest of YaST infrastructure which made it nearly impossible to use it outside of YaST. Not anymore. Very soon, there will be packages available in openSUSE that provide the library independently of YaST, so any application that might need to provide both graphical as well as textual interface can easily do so. They provide also examples how to use the library from pure C++.

This is exactly the kind of thing that makes open source so damn awesome. With any luck, we’ll be seeing all sorts of applications taking advantage of this YaSTy goodness, and saving time by not having to re-invent the wheel.

I love the smell of fresh alphas in the morning! Stephan Kulow is making it dead easy to test the latest and greatest openSUSE with Factory live CDs. So, if you want to hack on Factory, but don’t have a spare system to run it on (and don’t want to be running bleeding edge software on your main desktop) then these CDs are for you. (They come in tasty GNOME and KDE flavors, too!)

So, if you’d like help hack on openSUSE, lend a little testing assistance, or if you just want to bask in the warm glow of software that’s being prepped for openSUSE 11.0, grab some live CDs and have fun with it!

As I mentioned on the blog a few days ago, I’d planned to start putting short updates related to openSUSE on my Twitter feed, but I haven’t been able to reach the site since yesterday, at least. Anyone else having this problem? I haven’t been using Twitter much, previously, but it sort of defeats the purpose if you can’t reach the site on a regular basis…