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.

If you weren’t at FOSDEM this weekend, you missed some great talks and the opportunity to meet lots of free software folks. And I do mean lots — not sure if they have an accurate headcount of attendees, but it’s in the thousands.

Gave a talk on openSUSE on Saturday (slides in previous post). Will work on generalizing those slides a bit so other folks in the community can go out and talk about openSUSE as well. The one point I really wanted to highlight in the talk was all of the great things we have going on in and around openSUSE — particularly around openSUSE.

Some of the great projects I mentioned during the talk: openSUSE Education, MirrorBrain, e5 Datasoft’s work on ARM in the openSUSE Build Service, Csync, Nomad, Helping Hands, working on Netbook support, KIWI-LTSP, openFATE, Kablink, and much more. (If you’re working on an openSUSE-related project, including projects using the build service, and don’t see the project listed there — let me know!)

Having an awesome Linux distro is just part of the fun. Seeing how people use and remix the distro, that’s when things get truly interesting.

Back to FOSDEM itself. I didn’t get to attend too many talks, but sat in on some in the openSUSE Dev room and also caught Ted T’so talking about Ext4. I was just watching, not taking notes, so all I can really say in detail is “cool” and “wow, we’ve come a long way since I started using Linux 13 years ago…” I remember having a limitation on file sizes of 2GB… we’re a long way from that now. (I think there probably is still some limitation on the size of files, but that’s probably way bigger than the dinky 120GB hard disk in my ThinkPad…)

Talk about your “hallway track,” by the way. One of the things that I think about a lot is whether a conference has a good “hallway track,” which is to say — not only the sessions, but do you get anything done talking to people in the (big surprise here) hallway?

All of the tables for projects are in the hallways of ULB, and you have to navigate some pretty crowded halls on the way to and from tables and talks. (Imagine a sort of low-key rugby game, with backpacks…)

Really good show, and it’s obvious why it continues to draw major crowds.

If you happen to microblog (and you should!) you probably will want to sign up for the !opensuse group on Identi.ca.

Note that the bang (!) indicates a group (like @user and #subject) and not “not opensuse” as it might seem. (I’m thinking that the bang may not have been the best symbol to indicate a group, but that’s just me.)

This is the first sign I’ve seen of Identi.ca features really pulling ahead of Twitter. For the most part, I’ve been gravitating towards Twitter because 1) it has the most people, and 2) the tools for using Twitter are more advanced and easier to get hold of. (Like Power Twitter for Firefox.)

If you’ve already signed up, spread the word!

I’ve installed openSUSE 11.1 on a couple of systems, but my work-issued laptop is still running 11.0. I wanted to wait until the release fun quieted down before I made the switch on my main work machine, but today’s the day — I’m backing up my data right now, and getting ready to do a fresh install of openSUSE 11.1 x86_64 on my beloved ThinkPad.

(Done, and everything works beautifully…)

One of the things that we want to do as a project is to have more community involvement in major decisions, like the release schedule. Right now, we’re discussing the proposed 11.2 release schedule on the openSUSE-Project mailing list. Yes, 11.1 is not out the door yet, and we’re already talking about the 11.2 release.

From Michael’s email on opensuse-project:

First we talked about July ‘09 release to come close to an 8 months release cycle. But KDE 4.3 is scheduled for release on June 30th and probably an OpenOffice.org release will be out end of June as well – both wouldn’t make it into a July openSUSE 11.2. Therfor we’re now thinking about a September release. Beside of getting the most current OpenOffice and KDE in this would even have one additional upside. It probably would be just in front of our openSUSE conference. So the conference could be used for very a focused openSUSE 11.3 planning. But it has its downside as well. Finalization of the release would happen during the summer holiday season. To address this we we added one Beta to stretch the development time a bit.

Here’s what we’re talking about:

2009-02-05 openSUSE 11.2 Alpha 0
2009-03-05 openSUSE 11.2 Alpha 1
2009-04-02 openSUSE 11.2 Alpha 2
2009-04-30 openSUSE 11.2 Alpha 3
2009-05-28 openSUSE 11.2 Alpha 4
2009-06-25 openSUSE 11.2 Beta 1
2009-07-09 openSUSE 11.2 Beta 2
2009-07-24 openSUSE 11.2 Beta 3
2009-08-06 openSUSE 11.2 Beta 4
2009-08-20 openSUSE 11.2 RC1
2009-09-03 openSUSE 11.2 GM
2009-09-10 openSUSE 11.2 Public Release

The downside of this is that it would probably miss the GNOME release. But I’m not sure we can satisfy all schedules. (If anyone can persuade the GNOME & KDE folks to sync up their release schedules, that would be spiffy.)

If you’re interested in participating in the discussion, head over to openSUSE-project and chime in. If you’re not subscribed, now would be a great time to do so! (To subscribe to the project mailing list, just send an email to opensuse-project+subscribe@opensuse.org)

Looking around, I’m seeing a lot of great stuff going on in the openSUSE community — watching the openSUSE-marketing list, I’m seeing a lot of work being done on Sneak Peeks and publishing and translating openSUSE Weekly News.

And there’s more! The Contrib repo is moving forward, which should be a major step forward in terms of getting new packages in and maintained by community members and making those easy to access for openSUSE users.

There’s work being done to support ARM in the openSUSE Build Service. I had a chance to sit down with Martin Mohring in Munich to talk about ARM and openSUSE on new platforms while I was in Germany last week, and I’m really impressed and excited by all the work that’s going into supporting ARM with openSUSE, and the possibilities.

Oh, and I keep hearing something about a release next week, too… If you haven’t, make sure you grab one of the countdown banners and display them proudly on your Website! Like so:

I guess this is why Ars says that openSUSE is one of the best distros of the year:

OpenSUSE is one of the oldest Linux distributions, but it has gone through some significant changes since its original launch in 1994. Under Novell’s stewardship, OpenSUSE has become significantly more inclusive and community-driven. The distro announced its first community-elected board this year and has grown its base of contributors considerably. The distro has also made major technical advancements, including major improvements to its package management system and support for installation from a Live CD.

OpenSUSE delivers a powerful user experience and is one of the few distros that provides equally outstanding support for both GNOME and KDE. Its KDE 4 environment is the best out there, which is why OpenSUSE has become the reference distro for all of our KDE reviews. Its GNOME environment is also top-notch and provides the perfect selection of applications in the default installation.

I’m continually impressed and inspired by all the work that goes into openSUSE. As always, there’s always more work ahead. But, if you step back and look at the state of the project today compared to a year ago, or two years ago, there’s been clear progress on every front — and no signs of slowing down.

Martin already sent out an announcement about the upcoming hackfest for Monday, but I wanted to bring it up again.The details:

• We’ll meet in IRC on Freenode, in the #opensuse-project channel.
• Hours are 11:00 to 18:00 CET (that’s 05:00 to 12:00 EST)
• Everyone is welcome to participate!

We’ll be going through the wiki and organizing content for “beginners” to openSUSE so that on the launch day, we can point people to the best resources we have so new users can easily find what we have and benefit from the documentation that exists. Of course, people are welcome to contribute new info where we’re already missing info.