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!

It’s still early after the launch, but I think we’ve been pretty successful in getting the word out about openSUSE. Here’s what I’m seeing on the Internet the Monday after the launch:

• LinuxPlanet’s Dan Lynch takes a look at KDE4 in openSUSE 11.0 and finds it “a good improvement on openSUSE 10.3.”
• An interview over on InternetNews with Sean Michael Kerner.
• Another over on BetaNews.
• Coverage on The Inquirer, noting that the server was “borked” when they tried to reach it. (Try again, guys!) Not surprising, we had huge server load immediately after the official release. (And before, actually — people really wanted a shot at the download…)
• Another write-up on ZDNet.co.uk.
• Builder.au announces the release.
• DistroWatch has some kind words and statistics about 11.0:
  It is illustrated in the table below, which ranks the major distribution releases according to the number of unique hits their respective pages received during the first three days after the release. As can be seen, with over 16,500 unique hits, openSUSE 11.0 is second only to Ubuntu in terms of post-release interest in the distribution among the DistroWatch visitors.
• openSUSE 11.0 also got a glowing review from DownloadSquad:
  OpenSUSE has always been a strong option for new Linux users, and users who wanted a distribution they could grow with. We always had a few reservations about recommending it, mainly because of speed and package handling issues. OpenSUSE has made monstrous strides in these areas between the 10.3 release and today.
• Also a nice review on Linux.com:
  openSUSE 11.0 is a fabulous release. The pretty new graphics set the stage for significant improvements under the surface. All the time and energy put into the package management system has paid off. Including KDE 4 is not as big of a risk for openSUSE as it might be for other major distributions because of the conservative and intuitive way KDE 4 is set up. openSUSE has given me hope that I could actually like KDE 4.

There’s quite a lot more out there — I’ll be posting more comprehensive roundups shortly.Feel free to leave links to coverage in the comments — I don’t want to miss anything!

I couldn’t help but notice that the Apple camp is having a big shindig today with some announcements that the press and fan blogs are salivating over. I’ve noted a number of times — Apple gets far more coverage in the mainstream and tech press than its market share alone warrants, which in turn seems to be helping drive interest in Apple and increasing the company’s market share. How do we learn from the Cupertino crowd and get the same effect?

Many people credit Apple’s success with creating a slick operating system, and sexy hardware — but they forget that Apple has always been a press darling, even before they unveiled OS X, the iPod, and even their first rebound success, the iMacs. Might be hard to remember, but the iPod has only been around since 2001, the fruit-colored iMacs launched in 1998, and OS X in 2001 as well.

So, what is it that Apple has that other tech companies don’t — and, more importantly, what could the Linux community do to capture the same kind of attention, or can we?

Part of Apple’s media savvy is its exclusiveness — Apple holds its cards close to the vest, and its playing “hard to get,” makes it more interesting.

Obviously, it’s hard to do that for a Linux distro — everything is out in the open, so there’s no real opportunity for a big unveil.

So, I’m curious — what could we do to build the same kind of excitement about Linux (in general) and openSUSE (specifically) with the press to push Linux in front of users who aren’t familiar with Linux, who haven’t yet tried Linux, but might be willing and/or interested?

The FOSSCamp idea is, from one angle, fairly dicey — you take a bunch of people interested in topics that are generally similar (in this case, free and open source software), mix well, and allow them to come up with an agenda that’s their own and which will (one hopes) be productive.

I’ve always been an advocate of a strong “hallway track” for shows — i.e., ample opportunity for attendees to mix it up outside of a structured set of sessions. I’ve been to too many shows where you start to feel like a hamster on a wheel — too busy running from one session to the next to actually stop, breathe, and chat with the other attendees and presenters.

Yes, it’s wonderful to listen to experts talk about the topics they are expert in, but one can only stand so much being talked at without any time to talk with people. At least that’s true for me — maybe I’m just scarred from too many years in college.

But FOSSCamp is essentially all hallway track, right? Maybe that is pushing it a bit too far in the other direction.

In some cases, that might be true. However, it seems that this FOSSCamp managed to get the balance right. I attended several sessions that seemed very useful — including one where the original session didn’t happen due to the session leader not showing up, so we eventually just wound up having a discussion (mostly) about communication between projects, how best to provide software to a community for testing (I admit it, I couldn’t help slipping in several plugs for the openSUSE Build Service here…), and the best ways to credit other projects for work included in a distro (for example, the need for acknowledging where features come from, and how best to give credit).

So, big bonus for the FOSSCamp model of allowing attendees to build their own conference — this works when the attendees are motivated to be involved and share knowledge.

(In the interest of giving credit, I should mention that FOSSCamp was sponsored by Canonical/Ubuntu, prior to their developer summit this week.)

We also had good planned sessions Saturday morning around Packagekit and Saturday afternoon around distro collaboration. There were also good sessions on Friday, but I think Saturday was the better day — after all involved had one day to get acquainted and (for me) a day to overcome jet lag a bit.

In general, I think the FOSSCamp model is a really good one. I’d like to see more conferences have at least one FOSSCamp style day — probably best if served up in the middle of the conference so that attendees have an opportunity to get settled, get acquainted a bit, and confer a bit on what sessions most people might benefit from/like to attend.

One of the things I’ve been working on today is a reviewer’s guide for openSUSE 11.0 — something to send out to those who are reviewing openSUSE 11.0 for the press (as well as anyone else who might want to read it…)

So, I’ve been compiling a list of features we need to cover, from large (KDE4, GNOME 2.22, new installer) to small (RPM payload switched to lzma). Of course, two heads are better than one, so I thought it’d be worth polling the openSUSE community to see what new features or improvements in openSUSE 11.0 are making life better for users.

This post by Melissa Shapiro of Mozilla illustrates (one of the reasons) why Firefox and the Mozilla Foundation is doing so well at getting the word out about Firefox and other news from the foundation — because they’re not relying on the press release as a sole means of getting the word out.

It’s also because Mozilla views marketing as a conversation rather than as a one-way street that begins with a press release and ends with a “did you get our press release” call to a reporter in the hopes that they’ll do all the work in spreading Mozilla’s story.

How does this related to openSUSE? (Aside from the fact that most of us run Firefox and include it in the distro, of course…) I’m talking about the news that we’ve launched lizards.opensuse.org.

The lizards site is a multi-author WordPress blog to help encourage openSUSE members to blog about what they’re doing. Many members have stepped up already and are aggregated on Planet openSUSE, and our blogging Lizards will be as well, but we also recognized that we needed to give some of our community a little extra nudge to get blogging.

Note that lizards is a platform for openSUSE-related discussions only — let’s leave the lolcats to personal blogs and whatnot — but we should look forward to a lot more discussion of the great work that’s going into openSUSE.

(I couldn’t help whipping up a lolcat to go with the discussion…)

Getting back to the press release… as a project, we still need to put out announcements and the occasional press release — as a non-practicing journalist, I can attest to the importance of a press release for reference purposes when writing stories, but I’ve rarely been moved to write a story because of one.

However,  in conjunction with announcements and releases, we need to supplement that kind of communication heavily with discussion on our blogs and using other means to reach the openSUSE community and beyond with news and information that will help build our community and add to it.

So, I look forward to watching the lizard grow fat and happy with posts about what’s going on in openSUSE. Thanks much to the openSUSE contributors who have already started posting on the site!

Speaking of IRC — just a reminder to watch the openSUSE meetings page on the wiki. Today there’s a KDE meeting in just a little while (at 19:00 UTC/20:00 CET) and a GNOME meeting tomorrow at 17:00 UTC/18:00 CET. Please be sure to attend if you’re interested in KDE or GNOME. (Or both…)

If you can’t attend and/or just want to know what’s discussed, the logs are posted after the meetings — so check the wiki for the transcripts after the meetings.

This is a little off-topic, but I’m sitting here listening to the first part of Ghosts I-IV by Nine Inch Nails, which is being distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license. Now, technically, this license isn’t really “open source” as laid forth by the Open Source Definition, but it seems to me that the CC licenses are about as close to open source as we’re likely to see from most bands…

Nine Inch Nails isn’t the first band to release music under a Creative Commons license, of course. Look at, for example, Magnatune — tons of really interesting music, being distributed under CC and people have been very supportive. (Feel free to share your own examples of CC music in the comments. Always interested in more good stuff to listen to.)

But I find it really encouraging that a high-profile band like Nine Inch Nails is experimenting with an “open source” method of distributing music. (Should NIN properly be called a band since Trent Reznor does most of the studio work? Eh, I’ll go with “band” here.)

I wonder if NIN could be entertainment industry’s “Netscape”?

Which is to say, when the decision was made to open source the Netscape codebase, open source itself received a huge boost in terms of legitimacy and public awareness — so I wonder if NIN using a CC license could help bolster a more open model of distributing music. Granted, Netscape itself died off — because AOL chose to follow a proprietary model of development under the name Netscape — but the codebase has lived on and flourished.

I see a lot of parallels between software distribution and creation, and the creation and distribution of music. It’s obvious that the standard proprietary model of making and distributing music is failing — look at the continued decline in music sales, and the utter failure of the music industry to promote good music. Most of the CDs that get pushed out of the major labels these days are the musical equivalent of Microsoft Bob. Music that’s, in theory, supposed to appeal to a wide audience, but actually has no lasting appeal at all.

At the same time, the proprietary method of developing and distributing software is going by the wayside — and the entertainment industry could take a few lessons from the open source community here. Make it easier for fans to have access to music. Let people share music — which will, directly, contribute to increased sales. I can’t buy albums by a group I’ve never heard of, and forbidding sharing makes it much harder to discover new music.

I also wonder when, or if, we’ll see collaborative albums by people who’ve never met and who’ve just shared files online become a common method for producing music?

So, how’s it sound?

As a side note, I’ve listened to the first “album” (sigh… digital distribution has totally killed the album concept, hasn’t it?) and find it… interesting, but totally unlike the Nine Inch Nails I followed in my twenties. I have a hard time drawing a line between early NIN albums and performances (I had the good fortune to see NIN in St. Louis in the early 90s, in a very small club) and the current stuff.

I’m not saying NIN should sound the same from year to year, but when I listen to early R.E.M. and then pop in New Adventures in Hi-Fi I can see how they got from point A to point B. (Which is, for me, one of the rewarding things about listening to music — watching the evolution of a band and its music.)

I like Ghosts I, I can write to it, but I would really love to have another straightforward angsty and guitar-heavy album like Broken if Trent still has it in him…

Also, the final note here — the digital model is working for NIN here: I will be buying the full set, I’m curious to hear the rest after getting a sample and I want to support this model of distribution.

Show season is afoot. I’ve spent the bulk of my day talking to people about upcoming shows, planning to attend shows, and worrying about the housekeeping tasks of being at the shows — like being on panels, giving talks, having the talks prepared, and whatnot.

It takes a lot to pull together a successful show — but one of the big gaps is trying to anticipate the audience that will be attending. What will the crowd look like, demographically? What kind of talks do they want to attend? What, collectively, are people going to be interested in at the time the show hits. You can easily give the same talk at two shows and have a packed room at one show, and a nearly empty room at the other. (And, of course, time slots and whatnot play a factor here, too — if you’re cursed with the “death slot” at a show, i.e., the last talk of the last day, you can kiss a packed room goodbye even if you’re the most popular speaker on the planet and handing out free money.)

A few folks suggested, while I was working on speakers for Ohio LinuxFest in 2007, that people were “bored” with the same speakers at each conference — i.e., don’t try to book someone that’s been at a lot of other shows, because “people are tired” of those speakers. I suppose that might be true — if you attend a lot of shows. My guess is that some people attend a lot of shows as part of their work requirements, and so they tend to see the same speakers over and over again. But the remainder of the audience — probably 95% — only goes to one or two events per year, tops.

As I’m planning on talks at several events, and also doing some event planning, I thought I’d throw the question out there — what kind of talks are you interested in? What topics would you like to see covered, and what things are not of interest?

Of course, I have topics I want to discuss — but I’m looking for suggestions and input. What things related to openSUSE are of specific interest these days? And, more generally, what sort of talks would you want to attend at open source events in general?

After watching the Linux and open source space for the better part of 12 years, it’s occurred to me several times that our largest problem is not technical — it’s promotions. Think about it — Linux is a fantastic desktop OS, and would be even better with more user momentum behind it (because we’d have far greater hardware support, etc.) — so why isn’t Linux taking the world by storm?

Partly because we have a PR problem. As Sarah Stokely

While desktop use of open source is less than one percent, this has been predicted to double this year. And with market penetration approaching 25 percent, open source browser Firefox is gradually eroding Internet Explorer’s lead in the browser market.

So how is it that even senior members of the IT sector can still be operating under the impression that open source has failed? This signals a big PR failure, not a technology failure. The visibility of open source is lagging way behind its capabilities. Despite being several decades old, open source and open licensing still needs proving to the market.

That’s so very, very true, and I’m glad to see people talking about the importance of marketing and PR for open source. Though marketing isn’t one of those things that open source developers get excited about, it is a necessary component to a successful project. Projects that fail to promote themselves usually don’t succeed.

This is something I’ll be talking about a lot — how openSUSE contributors (and other open source contributors) can help to promote the project.

I was brought on board, in part, to help increase the visibility of the openSUSE Project, and all the good stuff that’s being done by our developers. But, this isn’t something one person can do alone for any project — it’s possible for one person to spearhead the effort and be out in front of the project, but to be most effective, other folks from the community have to get involved too. So, what can you do?

A couple of things come to mind:

• Blog — I’d love to see openSUSE contributors blogging about their efforts and discussing the state of their projects — and, when needed, asking for help in areas where the project(s) could use assistance.
• Talk — I’ll be attending a lot of shows this year and giving talks about openSUSE and community issues. However, I’d like to see lots of openSUSE folks at shows and regional events discussing their specific projects and how to get involved with openSUSE. There are far too many LUG meetings and regional events for one human being to attend.
• Publish — Want to promote openSUSE and make some money, too? Yes! Publishers will actually pay for well-written articles that discuss open source technologies and/or tutorials that demonstrate how to use technologies. Lots of magazines and Web sites are hungry for author. Contact me if you want some advice on how to get in touch with these folks with a professional query letter. (Hint: writing “how about openSUSE?” to the editors address isn’t quite enough to convince an editor that you’re going to deliver a decent article…)
• Be Open and Friendly — I can’t stress this one enough. As an openSUSE user and contributor, you can help bring in more users simply by being friendly and supportive to new users. Never, ever “go negative” about other distros or OSes — just let people know what’s great about openSUSE, and they’ll be interested.

That’s four ways you can help promote openSUSE without any marketing background at all. You don’t know anything about “branding” or “messaging” to anyone — just take some time to publicize how you’re contributing to openSUSE (or other projects) and be positive about it. If the open source community can work together to overcome the technical hurdles that we’ve faced in creating Linux and the ecosystem of open source software we have today, surely we can tackle the PR problem.