I want to address the recent layoffs that have taken place at Novell. As is very obvious by now, there have been layoffs at Novell, and some of them did hit contributors to the openSUSE community employed by Novell.  It’s been painful and difficult for everyone involved. The fact that this is going on at many other companies doesn’t make it any easier or better.

We want to set the record straight and be as open as possible about how this affects the openSUSE Project, while also complying with all the requirements of being a public company and respecting the privacy of the individuals affected by the layoffs.

Novell has recently laid off less than 100 employees. Some of the reports have greatly exaggerated the numbers, but again — the number of people laid off is less than 100.

So, how does this impact the openSUSE Project? Obviously, there will be an impact, but Novell remains committed to openSUSE. We will work on opening the project further and improving the infrastructure to allow all contributors to participate as fully as possible in openSUSE.

Despite the layoffs, Novell is still investing in openSUSE and it remains and important part of the company’s Linux strategy. We will continue to open our planning and decision making processes. We are going to concentrate on our strengths and focus on the areas most important to our community. We can do anything, but we can’t do everything — so we will be making choices about the areas where we invest our time and effort. And we will see to it that the community has the tools and infrastructure to take openSUSE in directions we may not focus on.

Even though this is an outcome no one wanted, we need to move forward and continue improving openSUSE as a distro and as a project. It’s going to be a challenging year, to be sure, but I have every confidence in the team we have and in the community around openSUSE.

Time to start prepping for LinuxTag, which happens June 24 through June 27th this year in Berlin. If you’d like to submit an openSUSE related talk, please do so immediately (if not sooner) on the LinuxTag call for papers. Talks should be submitted before February 28th.

LinuxTag provides some detailed guidelines for submitting talks:

If you would like to be a speaker, you can submit key information on your proposal electronically through in the Virtual Conference Center (vCC) at https://www.linuxtag.org/vcc/. You do not need to submit the full text of your presentation in your initial response to this Call for Papers. The LinuxTag website contains additional tips for optimizing the content of presentations.

Presentations and proposals can be in German or English. The abstract accompanying your proposal should be in the same language as the proposed presentation. Choose the language in which you can best express yourself. The program committee especially welcomes submissions in English, since LinuxTag is an international event.

After the deadline for submissions, the program committee will evaluate the abstracts submitted with regard to content, clarity and technical depth. LinuxTag will then notify you if your proposal is accepted, and will provide a style sheet to guide you in preparing a full written version of your presentation — generally about ten pages of text — in the Open Document Format (ODF). This is the version that will appear in the conference proceedings. You may also submit presentation slides. From this point on, presentations and author information are submitted only through the vCC. The program committee does not accept such information by e-mail.

If you have any questions about openSUSE related talks, please drop me an email.

If you happen to be in the Los Angeles (or nearby) area, you don’t want to miss the Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) this weekend.

SCALE goes three days — Friday is mini-conferences (including Open Software Source in Education, and Women in Open Source) and Saturday and Sunday are the main conference days.

Our own Michael Meeks will be doing a talk on “An open office suite” and I’ll be doing the keynote on Sunday morning, and there are lots of other interesting speakers on the schedule as well.

And, of course, we’ll have an openSUSE booth at the show and will be discussing openSUSE and other sundry topics there. If you’d like to help in the booth, feel free to drop me an email.

The Linux Foundation has announced the call for papers for the first annual LinuxCon, which will take place September 21-23, 2009 in Portland, Oregon.

If you’re interested in speaking, submit your papers by April 15th (yes, Tax Day for those of us in the States… interesting timing…). You can find the info over on the LF Website.

This should be a great conference, so sign up and I hope to see you in Portland!

If you weren’t at FOSDEM this weekend, you missed some great talks and the opportunity to meet lots of free software folks. And I do mean lots — not sure if they have an accurate headcount of attendees, but it’s in the thousands.

Gave a talk on openSUSE on Saturday (slides in previous post). Will work on generalizing those slides a bit so other folks in the community can go out and talk about openSUSE as well. The one point I really wanted to highlight in the talk was all of the great things we have going on in and around openSUSE — particularly around openSUSE.

Some of the great projects I mentioned during the talk: openSUSE Education, MirrorBrain, e5 Datasoft’s work on ARM in the openSUSE Build Service, Csync, Nomad, Helping Hands, working on Netbook support, KIWI-LTSP, openFATE, Kablink, and much more. (If you’re working on an openSUSE-related project, including projects using the build service, and don’t see the project listed there — let me know!)

Having an awesome Linux distro is just part of the fun. Seeing how people use and remix the distro, that’s when things get truly interesting.

Back to FOSDEM itself. I didn’t get to attend too many talks, but sat in on some in the openSUSE Dev room and also caught Ted T’so talking about Ext4. I was just watching, not taking notes, so all I can really say in detail is “cool” and “wow, we’ve come a long way since I started using Linux 13 years ago…” I remember having a limitation on file sizes of 2GB… we’re a long way from that now. (I think there probably is still some limitation on the size of files, but that’s probably way bigger than the dinky 120GB hard disk in my ThinkPad…)

Talk about your “hallway track,” by the way. One of the things that I think about a lot is whether a conference has a good “hallway track,” which is to say — not only the sessions, but do you get anything done talking to people in the (big surprise here) hallway?

All of the tables for projects are in the hallways of ULB, and you have to navigate some pretty crowded halls on the way to and from tables and talks. (Imagine a sort of low-key rugby game, with backpacks…)

Really good show, and it’s obvious why it continues to draw major crowds.

Copy of the presentation I used for FOSDEM on openSUSE — would need to be modified a bit by anyone else who gave it, but might be a good template for other openSUSE presentations.

FOSDEM Presentation here!

Getting all my gear together to head to the airport in a few minutes for FOSDEM! This year, I will not miss the world-famous Beer Event, and I’m looking forward to seeing all the openSUSE contributors and users in Brussels.

I’ll be doing the openSUSE talk on Saturday from 14:00 to 15:00 in the main room, please drop by and check it out!

Also, you’ll find the openSUSE Dev Room schedule on the wiki - lots of great stuff there, please come by and check out the talks and meet the openSUSE team!

At the Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) to give a keynote and talk about openSUSE / work the openSUSE Booth.

At FOSDEM and speaking about openSUSE.