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

June 3, 7-9:15pm UTC
Participants:
Stephen Shaw, (decriptor)
Federico Mena Quintero, (federico1)
Hendrik Vogelsang, (henne)
Michael Löffler, (michl)
Bryen Yunashko, (suseROCKs)
Pascal Bleser, (yaloki)
Joe Brockmeier, (zonker)

List of topics:
* Ambassador program
Announced and already pretty many people signed in for it.

* Foundation
Zonker and michl will meeting with a Novell expert on such stuff on Monday June 9 to evaluate which possibilities we have and which way openSUSE should take.

* Membership requests
We are too lame, 15 requests out of the last round are waiting for more than 4 weeks for final approval now. Just another 70 requests were imported into the tool today.

* open openSUSE Factory for contribution
Henne drove this project inside Novell for a while now and we had at the Board several discussions around it. Meanwhile it is announced and is an important step to bring the whole project ahead.

* openSUSE Board presence at the openSUSE conference
There need to be a strong Board presence but in a very interactive way so no big presentation but rather round table conversations about the status of the project and its future.

* read and write access to news.openSUSE.org?
The Board suggest to extend the group of people with read and write access for news.opensuse.org. Anyone interested please send a mail to board@opensuse.org and as for write access or even suggest another person to get it. Approval body will be the openSUSE Board.

* Federico resigned due to work over load, Stephen Shaw (decriptor) is the uprunner and takes over his seat

LinuxTag is going well so far, but tomorrow will be the big day! The openSUSE Day takes place tomorrow (Saturday, June 27th) at LinuxTag, and we have a full track of excellent talks that will be of interest to new users as well as openSUSE contributors and users.

openSUSE Day kicks off at 10:00 a.m. (a completely reasonable and sane time, plenty of time to grab breakfast and coffee even if you’ve been to social events the evening before!) with a break for the LinuxTag keynotes between 13:00 and 15:00. Here’s the rest of the schedule:

• 10:00 - 10:30: openSUSE Day Introduction — Joe ‘Zonker’ Brockmeier
• 10:30 - 11:00: Easy-LTSP - Configure an openSUSE LTSP server easily - Jan Weber
• 11:00 - 12:00: Was ist neu in openSUSE 11.2? - Andreas Jaeger
• 12:00 - 13:00: Do it Yourself: openSUSE Home Theater PC - Henne Vogelsang
• 13:00 - 15:00: Break for keynote
• 15:00 - 16:00: Wine - Windows Applikation und Spiele für Linux - Marcus Meissner
• 16:00 - 16:30: Warum mein WLAN nicht funktioniert? - Helmut Schaa
• 16:30 - 17:00: AppArmor in der Praxis - Christian Boltz
• 17:00 - 18:00: SUSE Studio: Maßgeschneidertes Linux für Jedermann - Cornelius Schumacher

If you’re in or around Berlin, you don’t want to miss it!

As you know, Federico Mena-Quintero has ceded his seat on the openSUSE Board. We are all sad to see him go, but know we are grateful for his continued and ongoing contributions to the openSUSE Project.
The openSUSE Board is happy to announce Stephen Shaw (decriptor) to be a new openSUSE Board Member filling up the vacant seat after Federico’s resignation. We thank Stephen that he took up the position in such a quick and decent manner. We know Stephen for a long time and think he is a perfect fit due to his long term contribution and activities around the openSUSE community.
Stephen as of last years elections was the runner-up to Federico’s seat. He takes Federico’s seat and this seat is due for re-election this year in November.
Please join us in welcoming Stephen to the Board.  We look forward to his fresh ideas and contributions as we gear up for openSUSE Summit this coming September 17-20 in Nuremberg, Germany.

Sincerely,
Michael Loeffler
openSUSE Board Chairman

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

Some pretty good news for the ZYpp team! Ark Linux after some evaluation has choosen to use zypper with their next release.

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.)

This took a bit longer than we’d have liked, but we are now ready to unleash the openSUSE Trademark Guidelines (PDF). (See openSUSE News for the official announcement.)

I’d like to thank our legal team for their work on the guidelines, and also all of the members of the community who participated in drafting, reviewing, and providing expert input. And, also, a special thanks to the community members who patiently (more or less… :-)) waited for the guidelines to be finished.

One thing I want to stress: We’re putting these guidelines out because we want to encourage and simplify the use of openSUSE as a base for other projects. So, if you read the guidelines and see a problem, let us know. We expect that these will be revised at some point in the future, so feedback is welcome.

Also, the guidelines are just that: Guidelines. If you want to create your own openSUSE distro or use an openSUSE logo for something, the guidelines exist to make it simple to do that without having to get a separate agreement from our legal department to make it possible. They also explain when use of the marks is not permitted.

But, you can ask for permission to use the openSUSE marks even if you don’t fit within the permitted use case. We simply can’t grant blanket permission for all modified versions that include non-project modifications. If you have questions about using the openSUSE marks, please contact permission@novell.com.

We consulted with a number of other projects’ guidelines in drafting these. Unfortunately, there’s not a GPL of trademark guidelines — that is to say, while there are plenty of well-respected free and open source licenses for code, there isn’t a “standard” trademark policy that FOSS projects could simply re-use. That’s too bad, because I expect many projects spend quite a few man hours drafting policies and having them reviewed.

That said, we did draw from the guidelines of other projects, and have likewise made it possible to reuse ours — the openSUSE Trademark Guidelines are licensed under version 3.0 of the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license.

I want to address the recent layoffs that have taken place at Novell. As is very obvious by now, there have been layoffs at Novell, and some of them did hit contributors to the openSUSE community employed by Novell.  It’s been painful and difficult for everyone involved. The fact that this is going on at many other companies doesn’t make it any easier or better.

We want to set the record straight and be as open as possible about how this affects the openSUSE Project, while also complying with all the requirements of being a public company and respecting the privacy of the individuals affected by the layoffs.

Novell has recently laid off less than 100 employees. Some of the reports have greatly exaggerated the numbers, but again — the number of people laid off is less than 100.

So, how does this impact the openSUSE Project? Obviously, there will be an impact, but Novell remains committed to openSUSE. We will work on opening the project further and improving the infrastructure to allow all contributors to participate as fully as possible in openSUSE.

Despite the layoffs, Novell is still investing in openSUSE and it remains and important part of the company’s Linux strategy. We will continue to open our planning and decision making processes. We are going to concentrate on our strengths and focus on the areas most important to our community. We can do anything, but we can’t do everything — so we will be making choices about the areas where we invest our time and effort. And we will see to it that the community has the tools and infrastructure to take openSUSE in directions we may not focus on.

Even though this is an outcome no one wanted, we need to move forward and continue improving openSUSE as a distro and as a project. It’s going to be a challenging year, to be sure, but I have every confidence in the team we have and in the community around openSUSE.

Time to start prepping for LinuxTag, which happens June 24 through June 27th this year in Berlin. If you’d like to submit an openSUSE related talk, please do so immediately (if not sooner) on the LinuxTag call for papers. Talks should be submitted before February 28th.

LinuxTag provides some detailed guidelines for submitting talks:

If you would like to be a speaker, you can submit key information on your proposal electronically through in the Virtual Conference Center (vCC) at https://www.linuxtag.org/vcc/. You do not need to submit the full text of your presentation in your initial response to this Call for Papers. The LinuxTag website contains additional tips for optimizing the content of presentations.

Presentations and proposals can be in German or English. The abstract accompanying your proposal should be in the same language as the proposed presentation. Choose the language in which you can best express yourself. The program committee especially welcomes submissions in English, since LinuxTag is an international event.

After the deadline for submissions, the program committee will evaluate the abstracts submitted with regard to content, clarity and technical depth. LinuxTag will then notify you if your proposal is accepted, and will provide a style sheet to guide you in preparing a full written version of your presentation — generally about ten pages of text — in the Open Document Format (ODF). This is the version that will appear in the conference proceedings. You may also submit presentation slides. From this point on, presentations and author information are submitted only through the vCC. The program committee does not accept such information by e-mail.

If you have any questions about openSUSE related talks, please drop me an email.