Duncan is blogging about the differences in speed and memory usage between Yum and ZYpp — it looks like openSUSE users are in for quite a treat with openSUSE 11.0. Lots of pretty charts and everything — definitely worth a read if you’re interested in the speed of package management on openSUSE.

If you’re a Twitter user, and you’re “tweeting” about openSUSE, here’s a way to add some additional context to your tweets and help get the word out about openSUSE. While I was at Sun’s CommunityOne, I started noticing other users adding a hash tag in their posts — i.e., posting about #communityone instead of just “communityone.”

While Twitter doesn’t do anything special with hash tags, you can track hash tags on (of course) hashtags.org. As you can see, there’s not a lot of activity under #openSUSE just yet, but I’d like to see that change. I’ve been using #openSUSE a lot on Twitter lately, but I just realized this morning that your tweets are only indexed by hashtags.org if you follow the @hashtags bot, but (at least for now) the bot doesn’t post often (last post was about 3 months ago) so it’s not going to be a major pain to follow.

I’ve wondered whether it’d be reasonable to suggest following Twitter accounts on Planet SUSE, but it might be better if interested users could follow the #openSUSE RSS feed instead.

It’s still important for openSUSE contributors to blog about their work, I think, but Twitter might be a good supplement for blogging when you have something short and sweet to say. (You’d be surprised what you can pack into 140 characters, if you try.)

On an unrelated note — I think the 140 character limit might be a good one for slides in presentations: If you can’t fit an idea into a 140 character tweet, it’s too complicated to go on a single side.

Maybe we should have some real-time Twitter presentations about openSUSE for new users when 11.0 is released? Is that a good idea, or do I need more coffee? I’ll have some more coffee just in case, but any ideas about how to to use Twitter (and other methods…) to promote openSUSE are welcome in the comments.

Josh Berkus has a good piece on his IT Toolbox blog about his “Ten Ways to Destroy Your Project” (PDF and ODF here) presentation. He calls it community destroyers, I just call it community sabotage — ways to ensure that there’s no community around an open source project.

I’ve known Josh for quite a few years, and he’s definitely someone to listen to when it comes to building community. In my reporting days, I ran into Josh quite a bit — first when covering OpenOffice.org — he was a marketing volunteer for OpenOffice.org back in 2003 when I wrote about the project for LWN, about its efforts in creating a Community Council. And Josh has been heavily involved with PostgreSQL for many years, and is a tireless advocate for PostgreSQL and a very effective member of that community.

According to Josh, there are 10 ways (at least) to effectively hinder community around an open source project. (Taken from Zack Urlocker’s post about Josh’s talk…)

1. Have difficult tools
2. Encourage poisonous people
3. No documentation
4. Closed door meetings (or poorly announced ones)
5. Lots of legalese
6. Bad liason
7. Governance obfuscation
8. Screw around with the license
9. No outside contributors
10. Be silent

And, of course, the reverse is almost true — that is, look at the list, figure out the opposite of each item and do that instead. So, be sure to avoid unnecessary legalese (some, unfortunately, is probably necessary…), make sure your meetings are open and well-publicized, encourage contribution, provide documentation, and communicate, communicate, communicate.

I say almost true because the central point of community when talking about open source is, of course, a worthwhile project. Even if you do everything else right, you can’t really build community around software that nobody cares about.

I suspect you could come up with some ideas for building (or if you’re in the mood, destroying) a community that aren’t on the list here, but I think Josh has neatly summarized some of the most important functioning parts of community.

One of the things I’ve been working on today is a reviewer’s guide for openSUSE 11.0 — something to send out to those who are reviewing openSUSE 11.0 for the press (as well as anyone else who might want to read it…)

So, I’ve been compiling a list of features we need to cover, from large (KDE4, GNOME 2.22, new installer) to small (RPM payload switched to lzma). Of course, two heads are better than one, so I thought it’d be worth polling the openSUSE community to see what new features or improvements in openSUSE 11.0 are making life better for users.

If you have a few minutes to spare this weekend, and haven’t done this yet, contribute just a few minutes to the open source census. What’s the aim of the Census? Pretty ambitious:

The Open Source Census is the first collaborative, global project to count the number of installations for each open source software package. We realize that’s pretty ambitious, but we figure you have to think big. Of course, we know we can’t count every single installation of open source software in the world, but we believe it’s possible to obtain a sample large enough to be representative.

Since open source is not subject to a single point of control, it’s really hard to gather accurate data. So it’s vitally important for open source advocates to participate in efforts like this to help gather more accurate data.

Instructions are here - it’s really simple and only takes a little while. I think it took about 15 minutes on my ThinkPad T61 for the scanner to run, but it’s something you can kick off and then go do something else. So, download the client, register with the project, and then run the client before you go out to lunch or start your normal weekend activities — it’ll be done long before you come back.

So, take a few minutes to be counted, and have a lot of fun this weekend.

If Oracle had its way, there’d be one Linux distro — but who would do the development? According to this post by Paula Rooney, Oracle’s Edward Screven says that Linux distro vendors should compete “purely on the support side of the business.”

That, of course, is complete nonsense.

The tension between Linux vendors to bring in customers through added features and continual development is what helps the Linux community move forward. Without that tension, Linux wouldn’t have matured as quickly as it did, and it wouldn’t continue to improve at such a rapid pace.

I’d also like to know which company is supposed to pick up the burden of development? Oracle isn’t doing it — they’re contributing to Kernel development upstream, but not doing much in the way of advancing Linux beyond that. While the multi-billion dollar company hitches a ride on Red Hat’s development infrastructure, Red Hat, Novell and other Linux vendors are investing in the future as well as supporting the here and now. Very nice for Oracle, not so nice for the rest of the community.

Even though Red Hat might be thrilled at the prospect of being the only Linux, I doubt they’d be thrilled about carrying the sole burden of developing everything to allow companies like Oracle to ride on their coattails.

If Novell adopted the Oracle model, we’d be able to save tons of money on development. We’d also be failing to hold up our responsibility as a Linux vendor to contribute to the foundation of our success. We’d also give Red Hat less incentive to innovate and work on new features. And we’d definitely be less interesting to our customers.

I also don’t fancy the idea of a single vendor in control of the operating system. Even when it’s open source — having multiple distributions is, while admittedly more challenging from the ISV standpoint — better for the market, and better for each vendor because they are not solely responsible for the entire development ecosystem.

Linux needs more contributors, not fewer contributors, and I don’t think all OS development or decision-making should rest in the hands of a single vendor. It’s too important to leave with one vendor or project. This is why I chastized Sun the other day for continuing to tilt at the Solaris windmill.

The Linux vendors do need to find ways to make it easier for ISVs like Oracle to target multiple Linux distros — and that’s why we support the Linux Standard Base — to find a standard that allows companies like Oracle to more easily support multiple distros, without doing away with actual development and advancement that Linux vendors provide.

This post by Melissa Shapiro of Mozilla illustrates (one of the reasons) why Firefox and the Mozilla Foundation is doing so well at getting the word out about Firefox and other news from the foundation — because they’re not relying on the press release as a sole means of getting the word out.

It’s also because Mozilla views marketing as a conversation rather than as a one-way street that begins with a press release and ends with a “did you get our press release” call to a reporter in the hopes that they’ll do all the work in spreading Mozilla’s story.

How does this related to openSUSE? (Aside from the fact that most of us run Firefox and include it in the distro, of course…) I’m talking about the news that we’ve launched lizards.opensuse.org.

The lizards site is a multi-author WordPress blog to help encourage openSUSE members to blog about what they’re doing. Many members have stepped up already and are aggregated on Planet openSUSE, and our blogging Lizards will be as well, but we also recognized that we needed to give some of our community a little extra nudge to get blogging.

Note that lizards is a platform for openSUSE-related discussions only — let’s leave the lolcats to personal blogs and whatnot — but we should look forward to a lot more discussion of the great work that’s going into openSUSE.

(I couldn’t help whipping up a lolcat to go with the discussion…)

Getting back to the press release… as a project, we still need to put out announcements and the occasional press release — as a non-practicing journalist, I can attest to the importance of a press release for reference purposes when writing stories, but I’ve rarely been moved to write a story because of one.

However,  in conjunction with announcements and releases, we need to supplement that kind of communication heavily with discussion on our blogs and using other means to reach the openSUSE community and beyond with news and information that will help build our community and add to it.

So, I look forward to watching the lizard grow fat and happy with posts about what’s going on in openSUSE. Thanks much to the openSUSE contributors who have already started posting on the site!

Sun finally pushed out its Project Indiana yesterday, in the form of a packaged version of OpenSolaris that looks quite a lot like a Linux distro — minus, of course, the kernel that gives Linux its name. On the one hand, I’m pleased to see any FOSS project moving forward. On the other hand, I’m wondering what problems Sun can solve with OpenSolaris that it can’t solve by participating in the Linux community?

The OpenSolaris release was timed to coincide with Sun’s CommunityOne conference yesterday, where I was invited to give a talk on openSUSE and appear on the distro panel with community leaders from Ubuntu (Jono Bacon), Fedora (Karsten Wade), and OpenSolaris (Glynn Foster) and moderated by Sun’s Barton George. (We also recorded a podcast shortly thereafter, which should be released in the next few weeks.)

Removing redundancy

The panel discussion was probably one of the most lively, and certainly the most fun, that I’ve been on. One of the things that we all seemed to agree on — there wasn’t a lot of strong disagreement on any topic, believe it or not — is that there’s a great deal of room for additional collaboration between projects to remove redundancy between distros and the efforts to fix bugs in upstream projects.

Glynn noted a few times that, when wearing his GNOME hat, he sees a lot of waste in different Linux distros fixing or developing things internally with respect to GNOME rather than doing so within GNOME itself.

I think we’re (we in this case being the Linux community in general) getting better in this regard and I’ve observed a lot more willingness to collaborate between distros and projects like GNOME and KDE in the past year than ever before. As Karsten points out “It turns out that, surprise surprise, for the vast majority of concerns, we are all in violent agreement. When you get down to where the differences exist, the less than 5% area, it is hugely gray.”

However, Karsten also compares the panelists to football captains “and it turns out that, aside from the uniforms and different team names, we’re all footballers and think the game should be played the same way.”

I think that’s true, with the exception of Sun — we’re all suited up to play “Linux,” and Sun’s taking the ball to its own field. While Sun collaborates in many of the same communities that Linux vendors and projects do, I’m a bit disappointed that Sun is trying to replicate the Linux experience with OpenSolaris while remaining separate and trying to build a parallel community to ours.

To abuse Karsten’s football analogy further, it’s like the difference between what the United States refers to as football, and what the rest of the world refers to as football. Similar in the respects that each game has a community, but the players are not interchangeable.

Control

Ultimately, I can’t help but think that the problem that Sun is trying to solve with OpenSolaris is not a technical one, but one of control. Specifically, the company is not ready to cede control over its operating system to the community at large, and so it is instead trying to build a community around OpenSolaris rather than joining the larger Linux effort.

If you look at the design decisions behind OpenSolaris — a GNOME-based desktop, an APT-like package manager, timed release cycle — Sun is clearly trying to ape Linux without actually being Linux. Perhaps Sun thinks its operating system is technically superior, and I’m sure there’s some of that — but the company could choose to license its software in a compatible manner and attempt to bring its benefits to Linux rather than pursing a silo-ed strategy.

Before the objection is raised, I’ll concede that control is also an issue for Linux vendors, but to a much lesser degree. As Sun’s Ian Murdock discovered with the failed DCC Alliance, major vendors and projects weren’t quite ready to cede control over the base distribution — but we all have the same general goals, and the work that Novell, Red Hat, Canonical, and others do towards Linux usually benefits the entire community. I don’t see a great deal of benefit in trying to create a parallel community controlled by a single vendor.

Even if Sun is successful in building a strong external community around OpenSolaris, it will take years of effort, and I think that Sun would benefit much more by concentrating on Linux than by trying to clone the Linux community with itself at the center.

I think that it’s in some sense ironic that Sun made its OpenSolaris announcement at a conference titled “CommunityOne” — community is in one sense about the individual members giving up some control in the interest of the greater good. It’s something Linux vendors are starting to learn, finally, and I hope that one day Sun learns it as well.

openSUSE 11.0 is getting good reviews — and it’s not even released yet! We put out openSUSE 11.0 beta 2 last week, and it’s already being looked at by the press. Ryan Paul over at Ars Technica has some nice things to say about how openSUSE 11.0 is shaping up:

There are a lot of things to like in openSUSE 11 and it will make a good choice for many users—it is already shaping up to provide better PulseAudio integration and stronger desktop search capabilities than Ubuntu, for instance. OpenSUSE also has excellent support for KDE 4, which is why we have used it as our reference platform for KDE testing and reviews.

He also has several good screenshots for the more visual types.

I haven’t had a chance to bang on the beta much yet, but when I get home from CommunityOne Tuesday, it’s at the top of my list. I think it’s time that the ThinkPad move over to the beta full time.