A friend of mine sent me a note about Jeff Shantz’s post on his initial impression of the openSUSE Project thanks to a couple of helpful responses:

it certainly struck me that these replies that I received were illustrative of a working, functional open source community — the end goal is to improve the product, and if one person doesn’t have time to continue working on a particular piece, then maybe someone else can. No territorial markings or egotism. Just one common goal to get it done.

So thanks to both Daniel and Jan (and my mentor, Marek Stopka, of course!) for a good initial experience in the openSUSE community! I look forward to making many future contributions.

Of course, for every person who is willing to put their neck out and blog about a good (or bad) experience, there are hundreds or thousands who don’t bother.

But please keep this in mind when interacting on the mailing lists. A positive, helpful response can make all the difference. We need to be doing our best to help new users and contributors, rather than spraying (as Karsten Wade often says) “community repellent” on potential contributors and users.

So, as Jeff says - thanks to Jan Weber and J. Daniel Schmidt. Glad to see this sort of attention being focused on openSUSE contributors.

I know I’m already looking forward to 11.2, but that’s not a surprise. The good news is, we’ve also made the list of “25 highly anticipated open source releases” for 2009 on ComputerWorld.  Moonlight and Moonshine also get a shout-out.

It’s going to be a long wait until November, but it’ll be worth it…

Good stuff here: The openSUSE Education project gets a shout out in this post on ZDNet.

Cost will certainly give people a reason to switch, but I don’t think a crappy economy or poverty in a developing country is the only reason to use Linux and open source software. I won’t even get into the argument of exposing kids to a variety of computing environments. I think the biggest reason to use Linux (aside from potential cost savings if you can develop some in-house *nix expertise) is simply the giant body of software that is freely available.

The OpenSUSE Education project is a great example. Desktop software included with this project ranges from computer science applications for kids to the R statistical programming interface. Server software ranges from OpenSIS to Joomla.

Go show Chris some love in the comments if you have a moment, and do read the full article. (And he’s right — openSUSE Education project is a great example…)

I’m seeing a bit more interest in sending things to opensuse-announce lately, which is a good thing (in my opinion) but I’d like some feedback from other community members on what does and doesn’t belong on the -announce mailing list.

The description of the announce mailing list here says that announce is for “announcements concerning the openSUSE Project” which is good, if a bit vague.

Obviously, meeting announcements and reminders should go to the announcement mailing list. Things like downtime announcements and news that affects the entire project seems like a no-brainer as well.

But what about announcements that are specific to sub-projects or things like meeting minutes, requests for testing of beta packages (like, say OpenOffice.org)?

The goal is to make sure that important project news is seen by anyone who would be interested and/or affected by something will see it — not trivial, given the size of our overall community and the amount of things going on at any given time.

At the same time, sending too many announcements means that some percentage of people will leave announce because the traffic is too high. Something I’m very wary of - we need to increase the number of subscribers to -announce anyway, not lose subscribers.  It’s not uncommon that I hear someone say “I didn’t know about that!” when it was sent to -announce fairly recently…

Posting to opensuse-announce:

If you’re doing something of interest to the large openSUSE community, feel free to send an announcement to the -announce mailing list: The list is moderated, so if it’s not appropriate for the list, it shouldn’t go through. (Though there have been a few things that have slipped through moderation…)

What should an announcement look like?

Check over the archives if you’d like to see things that have gone before. Generally - you want to have a descriptive headline that makes it clear why the announcement is relevant/interesting.

If possible, the first line or two of the email should give the most important details (the “who, where, when, what, why and how” of the announcement) and then fill in detail in subsequent paragraphs.

• Announcements don’t need to be long: They can be a couple of sentences if that’s all that’s necessary.
• Announcements don’t need to be formal or great prose: Conversational tone is fine, and the announcement doesn’t have to sound like it was written by a professional copywriter. (Avoiding spelling and basic grammatical errors is a good thing, though.)
• Announcements should have all the relevant details and/or a link to a wiki page with everything that the reader needs.
• It’s a good idea to include contact info for follow-up questions.

If you’re unsure about whether your news is “worthy” of -announce, feel free to email me or ask on the opensuse-marketing list.

Finally - note that you need to be subscribed to opensuse-announce in order to post to the list.

Subscribing to opensuse-announce:

If you’re not already subscribed to opensuse-announce, it’s easy to do and just takes a few seconds. (The whole process can be completed in under a minute, usually.)

Just send an email to opensuse-announce+subscribe@opensuse.org. (You don’t need a subject or body for the mail.) Then look for a note in your inbox that asks you to reply to confirm the subscription.

If you want to unsubscribe, it’s just as easy: send an email to opensuse-announce+unsubscribe.

A question has come up a few times recently that I’d like to throw out for discussion: How can we show some of our outstanding contributors that we recognize and appreciate their efforts, without offending other contributors who are also doing outstanding work?

While I was in Nuremberg last week, I had several conversations (and a few online) about the fact that we have some really excellent community contributors and wouldn’t it be great if we could have awards or something to say “thanks!” and recognize those folks publicly.

I know of quite a few people who definitely deserve an award for all their hard work on openSUSE — both inside and outside of Novell’s walls. And that’s just the people I’ve noticed — which is to say, no matter how you slice it, we’d end up missing some people.

Thoughts and suggestions?

Reading this post by Max Spevack, I’m more convinced than ever that the openSUSE Project made the right call on KDE 3.5 inclusion in openSUSE 11.1:

John is still using Fedora 8 in part because he’s not a big fan of KDE 4 — an interesting data point. When I mentioned that Fedora 10 would include KDE 4.1 (addressing a lot of the stability problems that people have disliked in Fedora 9), he indicated that it wasn’t KDE 4.0 versus 4.1 that was the problem, but more that he simply preferred the general KDE 3 architecture. This is not the first time we’ve heard about loyal KDE users who prefer KDE 3 to KDE 4, but it’s an anecdote that I thought our KDE team might want to hear. I wonder if there is sufficient demand for the older KDE as to warrant a Fedora Spin that is essentially “Fedora 10 but with the latest KDE 3.x code instead of KDE 4.x code”. I use GNOME, so I don’t presume to make suggestions. I’m just trying to offer some reporting, and let the KDE experts make the decisions that they think are best.

A reminder, KDE 3.5x and KDE 4.1x will both be available on openSUSE media for openSUSE 11.1 — meaning the DVD images and DVDs produced for shows and so forth — but KDE 3.5 will be listed as one of the “extra” desktop environments, rather than as a primary DE in the installer.

Michael was kind enough to write about the openSUSE survey results over on openSUSE News. The survey results are fairly interesting, some of the responses are encouraging, some not so much.

The first thing that caught my eye is the gender response — less than 2% of respondents are women. The gender gap in FOSS has been a known problem for some time, but this is a problem we still need to address.

As for computer skills, only 5% of the respondents said their computer skills were basic. The encouraging part for this response is that nearly 38% of the respondents said that they were “experienced users without technical skills.” So slightly more than 42% of users consider themselves unskilled with computers, but still run openSUSE at least part of the time, which is a good thing. (Though it would be valuable if we could track those users in some way and see if they evaluate their skills differently after using openSUSE for a year — i.e., if they learn more about using computers and become interested in developing computing skills through using openSUSE, or if they are content to remain at their current technical level.)

No surprise here: developers and system admins make up more than 30% of the audience, and students are 25.2% of the audience. Something I see over and over again is that students make up a disproportionate percentage of the open source community. (Also, many open source developers tend to become involved with FOSS in college or late high school.)

Stability tops the list of choice when it comes to criteria for choosing software, followed by security, usability, and hardware support.

Here’s a somewhat contradictory result: about 34% of our respondents said that an OSS license was one of the most important features when choosing software, and about 39% said that multimedia support was a chief concern. I wonder how many people listed both multimedia support and OSS license as one of the most important criteria, seeing as those two criteria often conflict?

KDE3 topped the desktop list with 38.5%, and KDE4 clocked in with 29.8%, and GNOME with 26.9%. Xfce rules a modest 1.1% of users’ desktops. (Unfortunately, the survey didn’t have a “I use KDE, GNOME, and Xfce on different machines” option.)

About 25% of the respondents say that they’re involved in the project in one way or another — bug reporting being the most popular activity with about 13%, and forum participation also making up about 13%. Packaging is at less than 3% — I’d like to see that much higher by the time we do the next survey.

What should we do to improve future releases? A whopping 67.8% response rate for “improve hardware support.” This is, as always, a goal for the project — but it wouldn’t hurt to drop a note to your hardware manufacturers and mention that 1) you use Linux, and 2) you will consider a competitor of theirs in the future if they don’t support Linux.

Many thanks to all who participated. One last question — what should we ask next time we do a survey?

Planet SUSE now has an exciting new flavor: Portuguese! (Just so you don’t miss ‘em, we also have Planet SUSE in German, Spanish, and Polish.) Thanks much to James Ogley for setting that up.

I’m really glad to see Planet SUSE continuing to expand to new languages. Good sign for a healthy and growing community. I do hope the bilingual bloggers on Portuguese Planet SUSE will also keep posting in English when possible — my Portuguese is not so good…

Also, a reminder — if you’re involved in the SUSE/openSUSE community and want to be aggregated on one of the planets, please send James a note and let him know where to find the feed.

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…)

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.