We released the trademark guidelines last week and have gotten a fair amount of feedback (thanks!) and a few requests for using the mark outside the automatic use cases set out in the trademark guidelines.

Those requests are being considered right now - but I wanted to make one thing very clear (again): If you’d like to use the openSUSE marks, but the use case in the guidelines says that you would need to remove the marks, that doesn’t mean there’s no hope of using the marks!

If you want to use the openSUSE marks and don’t have automatic permission in the guidelines, please send an email to permission@novell.com and ask about it. The worst thing that can happen is that you’d be denied permission - but if  the marks are being used in a manner that reflects well on the openSUSE Project and helps spread openSUSE, there’s a good chance that permission would be granted - but that your use case is one where it’s felt that it should be reviewed first.

The permission process is relatively painless, and we really do want to be as open as possible - so don’t assume that because the guidelines don’t grant automatic use that you wouldn’t be granted use on review.

A lot of good feedback so far on the newly minted trademark policy. Thanks to all the community folks who’ve responded so far and made comments.

As we mentioned when the guidelines were announced, we expect to revise the guidelines after seeing what sorts of uses people want to make of the marks and find out what needs to change.

I’ve put up the guidelines on the wiki here and added another page here to start work on the next iteration of the guidelines.

We’ve also started a page here to outline areas where the guidelines are either unclear, too restrictive, not restrictive enough, or cases where we should have a registered trademark and we don’t.  If you’re interested in revising the policy, feel free to head over to the wiki and provide your input! (Feel free to discuss in the comments or on the mailing lists, but we can’t promise that all input not on the wiki will be considered.)

ChannelWeb picks openSUSE as one of the “10 coolest Open Source Projects of 2008,” alongside Fedora, Firefox, and OpenOffice.org. Good stuff. 

Nice little piece over on ComputerWorld by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols about the (unfortunately persistent) myth that software installation is more difficult on Linux than Windows…

Personally, I find the Linux method easier because not only do package managers install the programs, they also enable you to search for a program. Say you want a program to display Adobe PDF (Portable Document Format) files. In Windows, you need to find out what program you’ll need-Adobe Acrobat Reader, then download it, and then install it. Easy enough, but it could be easier.

With openSUSE, for example, I select Install Software from my main KDE menu. Install Software is part of openSUSE’s YaST administration program. I’m then presented with a menu where one of my options is to search for software. I put in ‘PDF,’ you see I don’t even need to know the name of the program that can handle PDF, and it shows me a listing of programs and their descriptions. At the top of the list is AcroRead from Adobe. I click on it and YaST takes care of downloading and installing it.

So, in short, with Linux I don’t need to even know the name of a program, I just search for what I need with the package manager and once I find something I like I just give it one click and that’s it. With Windows, searching, downloading and installing software is three separate operations. Advantage: Linux.

Advantage Linux, indeed. This is an area where openSUSE (and other Linux distros) shine — and it’d be good to get the word out about that.

Just a general note to all the contributors working on openSUSE 11.1 — if you are working on items that you think should be highlighted in release announcements for the betas and RCs, please drop me an email or leave a comment here.

This could be any of the following:

• Major feature change that users will find interesting (or alarming…)
• Major or minor change that you’d like to see tested extensively
• New hardware support (such as the EVDO/UMTS cards with NetworkManager in 11.0)
• New application
• Anything else extensively different from 11.0 that bears mentioning

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?

Tomorrow morning/afternoon/evening (depending on your time zone) we’ll be having an openSUSE Marketing meeting to discuss ways to promote openSUSE and projects within openSUSE.The meeting will be in the openSUSE-Project channel on Freenode at 15:00 UTC/17:00 CEST/11:00 EDT.

The agenda, so far, is over on the wiki — If you have anything to add, feel free to speak up on the openSUSE-marketing mailing list or just add a comment here. Right now, we have several things to discuss:

• openSUSE local groups
• Promote openSUSE in non-English-Speaking countries
• Helping Hands
• openSUSE TV
• openSUSE-tutorials.com
• Podcasts

Lots to do, but we’re always open to new good ideas.

In particular, would love some input on what everyone would like to hear in podcasts. For example - should we have an openSUSE Weekly News podcast in addition to the ever-popular text version?

This is pretty cool… we’ve worked with the Linux New Media folks to create an openSUSE-focused special edition of Linux Pro Magazine, which includes an openSUSE 11.0 DVD and is chock full of articles related to openSUSE. They’ve posted the installation chapter online, and will be posting more content from the magazine over time. (You can download the PDF, which is handy for sending it on to friends and family who might be trying openSUSE…)

But, I recommend getting a copy of the full issue on newsstands, too. We gave away copies of it at LWE, and the issue is very worthwhile. Not only a bunch of great articles, but their art staff are top-notch… grab a copy while you can.

Hello from San Francisco! LinuxWorld Expo is going pretty well so far — we ran out of DVDs at the booth yesterday, which was a pleasant problem to have — I hope all the folks who snagged a DVD went straight home and installed openSUSE 11.0 on their computer, their neighbor’s computer, and any other computers that happened to be lying around. The booth was busy most of the day, with a few lulls that I think coincided with keynotes.

We had a great booth staff — Martin Lasarsch, Adrian Schroeter, Duncan Mac-Vicar Prett, Ross Brunson, and volunteer Holden Aust were all fielding questions, tossing DVDs, and giving out some of the swag…

Today is the big day, though — we’ll be doing the openSUSE Day today in room 131 of the Moscone Center, which is just a short hop away from the exhibit floor. The schedule is on the wiki. We have quite a few really good talks. If you happen to be at LWE, be sure to stop by the openSUSE Day.

I can’t believe OSCON is over already. It seems like the week flew by, probably because there was almost zero downtime from the time I arrived in Portland until the time I went to the airport.

Tuesday we put up the booth. Well, to be completely accurate, Alexia and Kelli did most of the work, I “supervised” and provided helpful input in the form of “yeah, I think the counters look good there,” and actually installing openSUSE on the stock show machines we had at OSCON. Wednesday and Thursday were the exhibit days, and the openSUSE booth was continually busy — we gave away all of the openSUSE DVDs we had on hand (probably could have done with at least 100 more… which is a first, we usually have extras) and talked a lot about the new release.

Had our booth next to the Kablink guys, which was fun. I always enjoy hanging around with Brent, and I’m glad they had a chance to really show off their latest release with the new workflow features. I got a bit of a preview before the show, and it looks really good. (Also annoyed that it wasn’t around several years ago when I could have used the workflow features in publishing…)

Also spent some time talking to reporters, giving a talk about openSUSE, and moderating the “Evolution of Community” panel. The panel was awesome, we could have gone another hour easily, but the OSCON slots are tight. (The biggest downside of OSCON? The fact that you can’t possibly attend all the sessions you want to attend, and the slots are a bit on the short side with very little buffer between them. Usually just 5 minutes, which is just not enough time to get from point A to point B, especially if the session runs the slightest bit over — which they usually do!)

We discussed the various roles that community managers play, mistakes that companies make when interacting with the community, and whether it’s more difficult to be a community manager for a distro or for a single project. (It probably goes without saying that the distro community managers and single project community managers did not agree on this… :-))

Since I was moderating the panel, I didn’t really chime in too much on the answers, instead preferring to let Jono, Ross, John Mark, and Jeremy take the mic and give the benefit of their experience. I think it’d be good if we can continue the discussion on our respective blogs, though — and maybe rope a few more folks into the discussion. One thing’s for sure — things have changed over the past few years, and I’m sure they will continue to do so. Companies are taking their communities more seriously, and the communities can now communicate much more effectively with the the companies that interact with them.

Had a great time catching up with people that I only tend to see at conferences. As always, not enough time to have all the conversations I’d like to. Big thanks to Greg K-H for introducing us to Voodoo Donut. I was afraid I’d go through life without ever having seen a donut with breakfast cereal topping, but my life is now complete.