I got a nice surprise this morning when I woke up — a note in my inbox that Banshee 1.0 alpha is available. Our own Aaron Bockover has a lot to say about the new release over on his blog:

This is the first release that shows off the hard work we’ve done on rewriting the core of Banshee. There were a number of critical flaws in previous releases due primarily to the fact that writing custom data models for the GtkTreeView was not possible until very recently in Gtk#.

We took some much needed time to redesign the database layer of Banshee to be able to deliver powerful model/query/cache level features and provide a framework to build on for years to come.

I decided to ditch the GtkTreeView and it has paid off. On top of this model sits a slick new list view rendered using Cairo. We control 100% of the drawing, so we can take this thing anywhere we want in the future – things you can only dream of with the GtkTreeView. You’ll already notice some nice GUI “bling” when using the view – try reordering columns.

With all of these core architecture changes, what we have now is a truly flexible framework for developing our prized Banshee.

Even though I’ve been a diehard fan of Amarok for some time, I’ve been playing with Banshee on my laptop for some time — and was happy, except that it had a serious glitch in organizing my music. For some reason, the version of Banshee shipped with 10.3 wouldn’t sort tracks in the right order.

I took advantage of the one-click install this morning first thing, and I’m glad to see that little problem has been sorted out nicely. So far, the 1.0 release looks like it’s shaping up nicely. As Aaron points out, 1.0 alpha is not yet at feature parity with previous releases — but they’re working on it.

Speaking of one-click install — all you happy 10.3 users can grab it right away too:

Also note, if you install it with one-click, it will be installed in conjunction with the previous Banshee. It will show up with a different icon under the Multimedia menu in GNOME, or run from the command line as banshee-1.

Big thanks to Aaron and all the rest of the Banshee team!

Martin Schlander has written an interesting post on Novell from the openSUSE community perspective. I wanted to take the time to blog a bit about some of his points, and also talk about where I see the Novell/openSUSE relationship going.

Martin says that “volunteers and the Novell employees working on openSUSE generally get along great and in a very productive way” but “sometimes you wonder if the parts of Novell that are _not_ involved with openSUSE is friend or enemy. Every now and then they do something that really hurts us.”

He mentions several issues, including confusion over KDE’s standing in Novell’s enterprise products, some comments about openSUSE being “just ‘bleeding edge for geeks and enthusiasts,’” and the most recent issue — the Flash login page for Bugzilla that caused a short-lived stir.

A couple of points on Martin’s post:

I think it’s necessary to recognize and acknowledge that mistakes have been made, and that there have been times when Novell may not have communicated as well as it could have or may have made decisions that turned out poorly. However, it’s important to recognize that Novell isn’t being an enemy simply because it has made mistakes or product decisions (ZMD) that, in retrospect, turn out to be poor choices.

No one is perfect, but I know Novell is full of people who want to do the right thing(s) for the openSUSE and open source community. For example, even though the Flash login page was obviously not the right choice for openSUSE users, it was fixed quickly.

As for comments in the past made by other Novell spokespeople that openSUSE is ‘just bleeding edge,’ — that is not the goal for openSUSE, and I want to be sure that openSUSE is a leading edge distribution for all users. The distinguishing features that set openSUSE and SUSE Linux Enterprise apart should be the following:

• Support
• ISV certifications
• IHV certifications
• Management tools
• Software Ecosystem

In short, I want to make sure that we deliver the best distro we can with openSUSE, and allow Novell to use that as the core of the enterprise offering — that they build the aforementioned support plans, certifications, management tools, and so forth on top of an already stable distro. (Seeing as how I run openSUSE on my machines, I have a rather strong incentive to make sure that it’s the best it can be…)

We will experiment with new technologies in openSUSE — but I hope that the end result will be enjoyable leading edge features. This is, I’m not ashamed to point out, an area where interested community members can help us with greatly — by testing alphas and betas (or just running Factory) and letting us know when something is buggy.

And I also want to encourage Martin and others to feel free to contact me when you think Novell or the project has a problem that needs to be addressed, or if you have a suggestion on how we can improve. (I’d also happily accept any comments about things we’re doing right, though I know people are rarely motivated to comment on positive experiences. Still — I’d like to let other Novell folks know when they’re being recognized as doing a good job.)

If you have a bug or whatnot, please follow the appropriate channels — but if you see areas where we could improve our cooperation with the openSUSE community and things of that nature, please get in touch. Please be patient if you email me and don’t get an immediate response — I get rather a lot of email (and I’m not counting the spam…) and travel more than is conductive to speedy email response, but I will do my best to reply and follow up on any issues that affect the community.

Just a quick reminder — there’s a KDE team IRC meeting tomorrow (Wednesday, March 12) at 19:00 GMT/UTC.

The meeting happens on Freenode at #opensuse-kde and the following topics are on the agenda for tomorrow:

• openSUSE-KDE Easter egg painting
• talks at LinuxTag and Akademy
• kdepim testing results
• KDE 4 blocker list revisited, topics for 11.0
• potential SoC projects
• old action items

Also, the following standing items:

• We should think about our future work (see KDE/Challenges)
• KDE4 packages and development environment on openSUSE
• Identifying SUSE specific issues vs upstream issues more closely
• Bug reports against KDE component

Barring emergencies (it’s the week before BrainShare… lots going on in Novell-land this week!) I will be there. Hope to “see” you there as well.

One of the most important aspects of any open source community is its support system — the ways new users and developers get help, and the ways experienced users and developers are able to contribute support.

The openSUSE community has several avenues of support — including IRC, mailing lists, and several Web forums. While our Web forums — suseforums.net, suselinuxsupport.de, and the forums that are hosted at forums.novell.com — provide great avenues of support, it would be much more optimal if users could look to a single forum site.

The good news is, that’s exactly what we’re working towards.

Here’s the official announcement:

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!

This is a project that was started long before I joined Novell, and has involved a lot of hard work on the parts of the respective forum owners and maintainers. (And will involve a lot of additional hard work finalizing the implementation and moving forward.) I won’t try to name all the participants, but I do want to say “thanks” to everyone who’s worked on this. (Thanks!) I know many people have dedicated a lot of their own time to making this happen, and that’s the kind of commitment that will take the openSUSE community very far.

We will continue to provide announcements as we finalize the implementation. Once the forums are live, you’ll be able to find them at forums.opensuse.org.

Last week, openSUSE board member Pascal Bleser sent out a notice to the openSUSE-project mailing list about the efforts to organize an election for the openSUSE board. Now that there’s been a bit of discussion on the topic, I wanted to bring it up here as well. (If you’re not subscribed to the -project mailing list, I’d strongly recommend subscribing — or at least checking the archives on a regular basis. Perhaps at some point we can also set it up so there’s an RSS feed of the discussion as well.)

Here’s a bit of what Pascal had to say:

We (the board) would like to start working on a proposal for organising
the elections of the next board.
As a first step, and also because we want it to be an open and
transparent process, we’d like to hear about ideas and recommendations
about how we should do that.

There are obviously a few gotchas with the process for elections.
First of all, we don’t want to give the impression the board is
arranging things to re-elect itself. We most probably won’t have a
totally bullet proof process wrt that, but we’ll do our best weighing
what’s feasible (and reasonable). As I wrote a few times before, I’m
afraid there is a certain amount of trust that has to be put in our
hands, as we don’t want the process to be overly complicated either.

Secondly, we do think that members should have a higher weight, as they
have signed the Guiding Principles and are recognized as active
contributors. Maybe we should even restrict the right to vote to
“official members”. To be discussed.

And last but not least, here are a few immutable aspects, as defined in
the Guiding Principles [1]:
* we shall vote to elect 4 board members
* 2 of them must be community members (i.e. not Novell employees)
* 2 of them must be Novell employees
* the chair is a Novell employee and appointed by Novell

What the board is trying to nail down now are the essential questions:

• How do we vote for new board members?
• Who gets to vote for the board?
• How do we authenticate and verify that eligible voters get a single vote (no more, no less)?
• How long do we allow for the entire process — nomination, campaigning, and voting?
• How long should board members serve?
• What happens if a board member has to step down? If a Novell-employed board member leaves Novell, or if board member not employed by Novell takes a job with Novell after the elections?
• Most of all, how do we do everything fairly?

And so forth. A lot of questions, and a lot of potential solutions. It’s been a pretty good discussion, and it’s clear that there’s a lot of interest in the process.

To help open it up and start streamlining the process, I’ve started a draft page on the wiki outlining with what I hope is an accurate representation of what has been discussed so far. And I do mean it’s a draft — I’m editing it as I speak… Feel free to jump in!

In case you missed the news, a new minor release of KDE is out — KDE 4.0.2 was released on Wednesday.

This release includes improvements for Plasma — the panel can be resized and options have been streamlined a bit to make it easier to use, and there have been some improvements to KHTML. A full list of the changes is available on the KDE Web site.

KDE 4 will be part of openSUSE 11, but you don’t need to wait until the openSUSE 11 release to get KDE4 goodness right now, though. As with 4.0 and 4.0.1, we have packages available for one-click install on openSUSE 10.3 and Factory right now, and instructions to install KDE 4.0.2 are available as well.

If you haven’t test driven KDE 4 yet, I strongly recommend taking a look.

I’ve had a look at our statistics for February, and they look pretty good. More than 120,000 users installed openSUSE 10.3 in February. 124,780 to be exact. That’s a pretty good clip for a release that’s been out since October. Our total install base for 10.3 is at 765,722.

To put it in perspective, we had 137,831 installs in January, and 124,878 installs in December. Obviously, the holidays put a crimp in installs.

It’s difficult to come by hard numbers when you’re talking about Linux installations — particularly when you’re talking about community distros like openSUSE where anyone can download and install openSUSE and distribute install media to friends, family, etc.

Counting downloads doesn’t quite cut it because some people download openSUSE (or any other distro) and never install it. Some people might download it and install it on their computer, their friend’s computers, 100 computers at a school, and so on. We track people who opt-in to be counted after the install — so we probably miss some, but at least we rule out false positives as much as possible that way.

Note also that 10.3 installs don’t show the entire picture — we still show more than 10,000 installs of openSUSE 10.2 in February, too. We don’t know how many users are still running 10.2 or older versions, and we don’t know how many people have chosen not to be counted.

Community Participation

Let’s look at a few other numbers.

• 34,517 packages live in the openSUSE Build Service (OBS) — which is up 2.7% from last month.
• 4,570 users registered with OBS — up 14.3% from last month.
• 34,860 users are subscribed to openSUSE mailing lists — up 1.6% from January.
• We had 10,840,400 page views last month for opensuse.org. That’s up from 10,492,357 in January, and 9,376,785 in December.

I think the Build Service is showing nice, steady growth. Overall, we have a lot of steady growth for openSUSE — but, of course, we always have room for more. If you’re running an older version of openSUSE, I’d definitely encourage you to install 10.3. If you have friends and family that haven’t tried openSUSE yet, now’s a good time to get them on board.

This is a little off-topic, but I’m sitting here listening to the first part of Ghosts I-IV by Nine Inch Nails, which is being distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license. Now, technically, this license isn’t really “open source” as laid forth by the Open Source Definition, but it seems to me that the CC licenses are about as close to open source as we’re likely to see from most bands…

Nine Inch Nails isn’t the first band to release music under a Creative Commons license, of course. Look at, for example, Magnatune — tons of really interesting music, being distributed under CC and people have been very supportive. (Feel free to share your own examples of CC music in the comments. Always interested in more good stuff to listen to.)

But I find it really encouraging that a high-profile band like Nine Inch Nails is experimenting with an “open source” method of distributing music. (Should NIN properly be called a band since Trent Reznor does most of the studio work? Eh, I’ll go with “band” here.)

I wonder if NIN could be entertainment industry’s “Netscape”?

Which is to say, when the decision was made to open source the Netscape codebase, open source itself received a huge boost in terms of legitimacy and public awareness — so I wonder if NIN using a CC license could help bolster a more open model of distributing music. Granted, Netscape itself died off — because AOL chose to follow a proprietary model of development under the name Netscape — but the codebase has lived on and flourished.

I see a lot of parallels between software distribution and creation, and the creation and distribution of music. It’s obvious that the standard proprietary model of making and distributing music is failing — look at the continued decline in music sales, and the utter failure of the music industry to promote good music. Most of the CDs that get pushed out of the major labels these days are the musical equivalent of Microsoft Bob. Music that’s, in theory, supposed to appeal to a wide audience, but actually has no lasting appeal at all.

At the same time, the proprietary method of developing and distributing software is going by the wayside — and the entertainment industry could take a few lessons from the open source community here. Make it easier for fans to have access to music. Let people share music — which will, directly, contribute to increased sales. I can’t buy albums by a group I’ve never heard of, and forbidding sharing makes it much harder to discover new music.

I also wonder when, or if, we’ll see collaborative albums by people who’ve never met and who’ve just shared files online become a common method for producing music?

So, how’s it sound?

As a side note, I’ve listened to the first “album” (sigh… digital distribution has totally killed the album concept, hasn’t it?) and find it… interesting, but totally unlike the Nine Inch Nails I followed in my twenties. I have a hard time drawing a line between early NIN albums and performances (I had the good fortune to see NIN in St. Louis in the early 90s, in a very small club) and the current stuff.

I’m not saying NIN should sound the same from year to year, but when I listen to early R.E.M. and then pop in New Adventures in Hi-Fi I can see how they got from point A to point B. (Which is, for me, one of the rewarding things about listening to music — watching the evolution of a band and its music.)

I like Ghosts I, I can write to it, but I would really love to have another straightforward angsty and guitar-heavy album like Broken if Trent still has it in him…

Also, the final note here — the digital model is working for NIN here: I will be buying the full set, I’m curious to hear the rest after getting a sample and I want to support this model of distribution.