Please see below the Meeting Minutes of the openSUSE Board. We welcome any feedback and recommend to use the opensuse-project mailing list so more people can participate. As always the openSUSE Board is reachable through board@openSUSE.org

May 20, 7-9pm UTC
Participants:
Michael Löffler, (michl)
Bryen Yunashko , (suseROCKs)
Pascal Bleser , (yaloki)

List of topics:

• Foundation
  We’ll investigate more into the creation of an openSUSE foundation. We reached out already to Novell how they feel about and received positive feedback. The foundation at the beginning should be a more independent body then openSUSE is today and should make it easier to collect donations in a transparent way to use directly for community efforts.
• Expanse spotlight.o.o to Board Members
  All openSUSE Board members will have access to spotlight.opensuse.org to post/blog there.
• openSUSE Membership requests
  The membership requests still are a pretty manual process. We imported out of users.opensuse.org another bunch of requests and are in the process of evaluation. But we need to admit we could have been faster with that.
• Status of “ambassador program”
  The Ambassador program will be announced soon by zonker (meanwhile happened)
• Add features to openFATE without being member?
  During community week the request was stated several times to make it possible to add new features for non-members as well. We had a discussion about it and the Board recommends to make this request happen as we think there are more up then down sides. See also Feature 306460

Next openSUSE Board Meeting on June 3, 7pm UTC

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.

In case you missed it, we’ve put out the openSUSE Summit Call for Participation here.

This is the chance for contributors to get up and lead on the topics that are near and dear to their hearts. Note that’s contributors and not only developers (though, of course, developers are very welcome!). Whether you contribute as a translator, wiki editor, packager, developer, member of the marketing team, etc., this is for all openSUSE contributors.

The summit is not going to be composed exclusively of presentations and such. Much of the summit will consist of workshops, birds of a feather, hack sessions, and other hands-on participatory sessions. So come prepared to give a lot of input and have a lot of fun!

Deadline is May 20th. Get those proposals in!

I typically don’t post about Novell enterprise products, but I’m making an exception here because this really affects the larger community and not just the corporate customers.

A few weeks ago, Novell released some videos to demo SUSE Linux Enterprise. The only problem was, they were released without captioning for deaf and hard-of-hearing people. This was due to the rush to finish the videos and release them in time for the launch.

I’m glad to say that this has now been made right, and the videos are available with captioning. Furthermore, in the future I know that Novell will be trying to make sure that videos are released with captioning right away, without any delay.

This is also something that the larger community should take into consideration. If possible, when making tutorials and videos, consider adding closed captioning.

Looking for captioning tools? Jon ‘maddog’ Hall has written a nice piece that discusses this issue over on Linux Pro Magazine:

What finally convinced me was the ease of doing the closed captions. Joner showed me a site where you can easily link to the existing video on various “video” sites, then use overstream to create a file that has the timing marks and the text for your native language. This file is called an “SRT” file. Once you have the marks and closed captioning correct, you can download the file and upload it to places like YouTube by editing your video’s information, clicking on “Captions and Subtitles” and uploading the SRT file.

You can also create another copy of the file, and either you (or a friend) can substitute another language for your native language. Then you have a foreign language subtitle!

Captioning and translation capability in one fell swoop! Can’t beat that.

Most people never have to think about captioning, so it’s one of those things too often overlooked. However, captioning makes a major difference for those who do need it. By going a few extra steps, your message reaches a larger, and grateful, audience.

I’d like to produce some openSUSE reference cards (like these, but a bit more colorful in general).

It’s a no-brainer to include Zypper commands on the card. What else should we find room for on a two-sided reference card? Thoughts:

• YaST Command Line
• openSUSE Build Service commands / interface
• Specific YaST Modules
• General Linux commands

Thoughts? Would like to produce something useful for new openSUSE users as well as openSUSE experts.

Today we announced (officially) that iFolder code has been pushed out and we have a new iFolder Web site.

So, you can grab the source code from SourceForge immediately. We’re working on packages for openSUSE 11.0 and 11.1, and there’s work being done to put iFolder into the openSUSE Build Service as well.

Of course, there’s lots to be done. The new iFolder site needs some love, and we’re working on getting iFolder into the openSUSE Build Service, packaged for openSUSE 11.0 and 11.1 (and later) and generally turning it into a kick-ass project.

I’ve already seen quite a bit of enthusiasm about the code release and the #ifolder channel on Freenode has been relatively lively.

This time around, we really want to make sure iFolder is a collaborative, community effort. Brent McConnell will be heading up the community efforts with iFolder, so he’s a good person to get to know. If you run into roadblocks, email me and Brent and let us know.

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…

Time is slipping away: If you’re interested in applying for the Google Summer of Code as a student (for openSUSE or any other project) you have a bit more than 73 hours — time runs out on Friday, April 3rd at 19:00 UTC.

Announcement for openSUSE here. If you have questions, please ask on the opensuse-project mailing list, or in IRC in the #opensuse-project or #opensuse-gsoc channels on Freenode. If you have general SoC questions, you can also ask in the #gsoc channel. Email me if you have additional questions, but asking on -project is probably the best way to go.

Another nice shout-out for the openSUSE community here: The USENIX association magazine, ;login, has recognized openSUSE as having the same level of protection against some of the recently discovered package management vulnerabilities as enterprise-class distros. Says Federico Lucifredi:

What’s more, the openSUSE and SUSE Linux Enterprise distros not only secure packages and package metadata with cryptographic signatures, but have addressed the more exotic attacks described by the paper as well, with the slow-data fix currently in Factory completing the picture. The upshot of this is that users can deploy updates safely whether they’re obtaining updates from a centralized network or through a decentralized system of community maintained mirrors.

The full article is available as a PDF. Definitely worth a read!

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…)