Calling all San Franciscans! The openSUSE Project (or at least selected members thereof) is hosting an openSUSE Day at LinuxWorld Expo next Wednesday, and we want to see you there.

We’re going to be giving out two Chumby’s (er, that’s two total — not two per attendee…) as door prizes at the openSUSE Day and we’ll also be handing out assorted openSUSE swag — such as t-shirts, Geekos, openSUSE DVDs, and other goodies that you won’t want to miss out on.

And, if all the swag wasn’t enough reason to drop by, you’ll also have a chance to hear some great talks about openSUSE and technologies in openSUSE. And be sure to head by the openSUSE booth and see openSUSE on display and ask whatever questions you might have about openSUSE 11.0 and the openSUSE Build Service.

It’s been hard to read any of the open source Planet aggregators or check Twitter recently without catching references to the Linux Hater’s Blog.

I read it on occasion, and generally tend to agree with about 50% to 70% of any given post on the LHB. For example, now that Jeremy has drawn the anonymous blogger’s attention, he decides to rip into his issues with Samba, which mostly boil down to it’s a pita to configure.

Of course, my first response would be that Samba is pretty easy to configure using YaST’s Samba module, but the larger point he makes is valid:

If you want to provide a feature as part of a platform, you can’t just write the code and say “here’s the config file! have at it!”. When you do that, you get a bunch of other people who don’t really understand the configuration space writing config tools for you that all suck in one way or another. If you want to introduce a core feature to the desktop “platform”, you really have to make vertical integration easy, or even do it yourself. Samba, as far as I can tell, hasn’t done this. They’ve written a solid engine with tons of features, but have ignored the the core problem that very few people understand how to configure the damn thing. They’ve effectively left it to others, and the others have failed. Where as Microsoft? yea, their server code might even be inferior, but configuring shares is pretty damn easy in comparison.

Which really brings me to the main topic of this post: the silo effect. As far as I can tell, the silo effect has been around since the dawn of software development. Most software needs to integrate with other software, yet most development teams communicate very little with the teams that write the software they need to integrate with. Perhaps samba could talk to the kernel people, and the fuse people, and the freedesktop people, and the kde people, and the gnome people, and engineer a top to bottom solution that makes samba usable for desktop users. Sure. As some of you flamers like to say, just wait until 2020, and it’ll be there.

As far as I can tell, in the OSS world, the silo effect seems to be magnified. Which is ironic, since one of the things OSS was supposed to do is kinda solve this whole silo thing in the first place. Everyone can see each other’s code. Everyone can modify each other’s code. If the developers of some project didn’t care about your goals, you could always take their code, and do it yourself. Right? There’s open mailing lists and bug trackers so that communication is as easy and as smooth as possible, right?

I do think some of this is going on, but maybe not fast enough. Once you get to the user interface where it’s time to configure a service, things fall down quite a bit. (If this wasn’t true, I wouldn’t be able to list “Apache” on my resume as something I have experience with — who’d care? Obviously, it’s recognized that Apache and the other FOSS server software I’ve worked with professionally is, to be diplomatic, involved enough to manage and configure to count as a skill.)

So, I hope the hater keeps on hating — and I hope that FOSS proponents and developers listen up. It hurts a bit sometimes to hear that your favorite project isn’t seen as perfection itself — but Linux needs some constructive (and LHB is mostly constructive criticism, even if it’s a little sharp around the edges) criticism.

What’s really encouraging to me is the number of Linux and FOSS folks who’ve embraced the LHB instead of trying to deflect criticism. I think that’s healthy and a sign that the overall community is maturing. (I’m not sure the LHB would have been embraced a few years ago…)

If you’re wondering where everybody has gone this week, it’s probably Portland, Oregon, where O’Reilly is holding its 10th Open Source Convention (OSCON).

This will be my third year attending OSCON, my first as an exhibitor rather than as a reporter. I’m going to be doing one talk (on openSUSE, natch), moderating a panel on “The Evolution of Community,” and hanging out at the openSUSE booth quite a lot.

OSCON is one of the bigger gatherings of open source folks, and it’s always a lot of fun. Plus, Portland is a fun city to visit, not least of which because it’s home to Powell’s book store, the largest independent new and used book store in the world. If you’re in the Portland area for OSCON (or any other reason) I heartily recommend dropping by Powell’s if you have a couple of hours to kill, some money to burn, and extra room in your carry-ons. (That last one is vitally important…)

If you’re at OSCON, you also won’t want to miss Nat Friedman’s talk “The Future of Linux is Software Appliances,” Joseph Hill’s talk on writing Rich Internet Applications with Moonlight, and Brent McConnell’s presentation on Kablink, “The New Architecture of Collaboration.”

See you at OSCON!

I did a quickie interview with Brian over on OStatic last week, but I wanted to also give him a shout-out on this blog. Brian is the newly minted community manager and editor for the LSB Developer Network with the Linux Foundation.You probably know Brian best from his work over on Linux Today.

The LSB Developer Network has a lot of potential to help Linux reach more ISVs, so I look forward to seeing Brian whip it into shape.

Techworld has an article up on KOffice 2.0 alpha 8, running on Windows. As most people already know, the KDE folks have been working to make sure that KDE 4 stuff runs on Windows and Mac OS X as well as Linux, *BSD, and assorted free software platforms.

In general, I think this is a good thing — I’ve long been on record supporting shipping some proprietary software on Linux if it means getting more people on Linux. Better to run a 98% FOSS desktop, in my opinion, than to be stuck with a completely proprietary system with a few pieces of free/open source software.

But I wonder, strategically, whether porting KDE apps to Windows and Mac OS X is going to lead to people switching, or if it’s going to lead to people not switching because they can get the FOSS apps on other platforms and have less motivation to switch.

On the one hand, I think so — it makes it much easier for people to switch if they can do it gradually. Get used to Firefox, KOffice or OpenOffice.org, and all the nifty programs from the KDE folks on top of Windows or Mac OS X, and it’s that much easier to switch a little down the road because a Linux environment with those apps is going to be much more familiar.

On the other hand, if you already have a set of nice FOSS apps running on an OS you’re familiar with, what’s the motivation to switch? I think it’s great that Firefox is garnering such a big slice of the browser market, for example, but I don’t know too many people who’ve switched from Windows to Linux because of FF.

I’d be curious to hear opinions either way. Is KDE 4 for Windows/OS X going to bring new users to Linux, or just boost the amount of FOSS used on those platforms?

Apparently the nice folks over at SourceForge.net are having a tattoo artist at their Community Choice Awards next week at OSCON. Ross Turk asked whether I’d like a “tech-related tattoo” on Twitter. Sure, I said, I’ll get one if we can hit one million openSUSE 11.0 installs by the time of the party next week.

Now, that’s not terribly likely, but hey — if we hit the 1 million mark, I’ll totally get a Geeko tattoo. If we just hit 300K, I’ll just dye my hair green. So, if you’d like to see me sporting a geeko tattoo, start hitting up your friends, family, co-workers, and random strangers to install openSUSE 11.0!

Want to become an expert on Evolution? (The mail client, that is…) Join the Helping Hands project on Friday, July 18th for “Things You Didn’t Know About Evolution,” which is being presented by the Go-Evo Developer Team.

It’ll be held in the opensuse-gnome IRC channel on Freenode at 14:30 UTC. (That’s 16:30 for those of you in Germany, 10:30 for folks on the East coast of the U.S. like me, and a slightly early 7:30 for folks on the West coast. Click the link for the time in your timezone…)

If you know anyone who’s just started using openSUSE, how about spreading the word? I’m sure lots of openSUSE users would find this session helpful. I might just have to join this one myself, actually… I am sure there’s plenty I don’t know about Evolution.

Also, I know the Helping Hands team is looking for people to present on topics outside of GNOME (so far all the HH activity has been GNOME-specific, but that’s not the long-term goal) so if you’re a KDE fan or YaST guru, step up and share the knowledge.

LugRadio Live UK is coming up next weekend, and the openSUSE project will be in attendance. Roger Whittaker and Andrew Wafaa are going to be representing the green at LRL, and (assuming the shipping gods are kind to us) handing out openSUSE 11.0 DVDs to all and sundry.

If you’d like to assist at the booth, get in touch with Roger. A big thanks to both Roger and Andrew for taking the initiative at LRL!

OK, “summer tour,” might be stretching it a bit, but it sounded nice in the headline. However, we’re going to be out and about this summer and the next two events are OSCON and LinuxWorld Expo in Portland, Oregon, and San Francisco, California, respectively.

We’ll have booths at both shows, and we’ll be doing the openSUSE Day at LWE, with a ton of great talks and openSUSE 11.0 DVDs, some door prizes not to be missed, and lots of fun in general. We’d love to see an enormous crowd at LWE, so bring your friends, family, co-workers, ameniable strangers… you get the idea.

Mozilla’s Christopher Blizzard has whipped up something pretty cool — Whoisi, a search engine/tracker to follow your friends’ feeds and other online output.

So, for instance, if you want to follow Blizzard’s online trail, just go to his Whoisi page and you can see his most recent updates on Flickr, Twitter, Identi.ca, LinkedIn, etc. (Or you could check out my page, or just hit up a random user.)

I’d encourage everybody in the openSUSE community to set up a page for themselves if they have a blog or other online presence that Whoisi can track.