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.

We’re going to be giving out two Chumby’s (er, that’s two total — not two per attendee…) as door prizes at the openSUSE Day and we’ll also be handing out assorted openSUSE swag — such as t-shirts, Geekos, openSUSE DVDs, and other goodies that you won’t want to miss out on.

And, if all the swag wasn’t enough reason to drop by, you’ll also have a chance to hear some great talks about openSUSE and technologies in openSUSE. And be sure to head by the openSUSE booth and see openSUSE on display and ask whatever questions you might have about openSUSE 11.0 and the openSUSE Build Service.

Still waiting for the OO.org folks to implement Vi-like keybindings, but the keyboard shortcuts are the next best thing…

The bug slaughter commences tomorrow, starting at 00:00 UTC and lasting all day. Join in on Freenode in the #opensuse-kernel channel.

Happy bug squashing!

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.

And, if you’re interested in virtual appliances, be sure to check out this post by Hubert Mantel. Hubert talks about the LimeJeOS project and how you can get it. What’s LimeJeOS? Glad you asked!

LimeJeOS is the openSUSE version of JeOS. The term JeOS (”Just enough Operating System”) refers to a customized operating system that precisely fits the needs of a particular application. LimeJeOS includes only the pieces of an operating system required to support a particular application and any other third-party components contained in the appliance. This makes the appliance smaller, more efficient, more secure, and offers better performance than an application running under a full, general-purpose operating system.

As the name suggests, “LimeJeOS” itself is not an appliance or an operating system; it is just the base for various possible appliances. LimeJeOS contains just the very basic parts of an operating system. The major goal is to make the system as small as possible while providing the possibility to install additional software. A LimeJeOS system itself is not very useful without additional packages. Besides an editor (a stripped version of vi) it just contains a package manager that allows the actual applications to be installed. Of course all the usual repositories can be used for that purpose; just with a regular, full-size Linux distribution.

So, just enough openSUSE to run an application, and no more. I hope we’ll be seeing lots of appliances based on openSUSE in the near future.

I read it on occasion, and generally tend to agree with about 50% to 70% of any given post on the LHB. For example, now that Jeremy has drawn the anonymous blogger’s attention, he decides to rip into his issues with Samba, which mostly boil down to it’s a pita to configure.

Of course, my first response would be that Samba is pretty easy to configure using YaST’s Samba module, but the larger point he makes is valid:

If you want to provide a feature as part of a platform, you can’t just write the code and say “here’s the config file! have at it!”. When you do that, you get a bunch of other people who don’t really understand the configuration space writing config tools for you that all suck in one way or another. If you want to introduce a core feature to the desktop “platform”, you really have to make vertical integration easy, or even do it yourself. Samba, as far as I can tell, hasn’t done this. They’ve written a solid engine with tons of features, but have ignored the the core problem that very few people understand how to configure the damn thing. They’ve effectively left it to others, and the others have failed. Where as Microsoft? yea, their server code might even be inferior, but configuring shares is pretty damn easy in comparison.

Which really brings me to the main topic of this post: the silo effect. As far as I can tell, the silo effect has been around since the dawn of software development. Most software needs to integrate with other software, yet most development teams communicate very little with the teams that write the software they need to integrate with. Perhaps samba could talk to the kernel people, and the fuse people, and the freedesktop people, and the kde people, and the gnome people, and engineer a top to bottom solution that makes samba usable for desktop users. Sure. As some of you flamers like to say, just wait until 2020, and it’ll be there.

As far as I can tell, in the OSS world, the silo effect seems to be magnified. Which is ironic, since one of the things OSS was supposed to do is kinda solve this whole silo thing in the first place. Everyone can see each other’s code. Everyone can modify each other’s code. If the developers of some project didn’t care about your goals, you could always take their code, and do it yourself. Right? There’s open mailing lists and bug trackers so that communication is as easy and as smooth as possible, right?

I do think some of this is going on, but maybe not fast enough. Once you get to the user interface where it’s time to configure a service, things fall down quite a bit. (If this wasn’t true, I wouldn’t be able to list “Apache” on my resume as something I have experience with — who’d care? Obviously, it’s recognized that Apache and the other FOSS server software I’ve worked with professionally is, to be diplomatic, involved enough to manage and configure to count as a skill.)

So, I hope the hater keeps on hating — and I hope that FOSS proponents and developers listen up. It hurts a bit sometimes to hear that your favorite project isn’t seen as perfection itself — but Linux needs some constructive (and LHB is mostly constructive criticism, even if it’s a little sharp around the edges) criticism.

What’s really encouraging to me is the number of Linux and FOSS folks who’ve embraced the LHB instead of trying to deflect criticism. I think that’s healthy and a sign that the overall community is maturing. (I’m not sure the LHB would have been embraced a few years ago…)

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!

The LSB Developer Network has a lot of potential to help Linux reach more ISVs, so I look forward to seeing Brian whip it into shape.

In general, I think this is a good thing — I’ve long been on record supporting shipping some proprietary software on Linux if it means getting more people on Linux. Better to run a 98% FOSS desktop, in my opinion, than to be stuck with a completely proprietary system with a few pieces of free/open source software.

But I wonder, strategically, whether porting KDE apps to Windows and Mac OS X is going to lead to people switching, or if it’s going to lead to people not switching because they can get the FOSS apps on other platforms and have less motivation to switch.

On the one hand, I think so — it makes it much easier for people to switch if they can do it gradually. Get used to Firefox, KOffice or OpenOffice.org, and all the nifty programs from the KDE folks on top of Windows or Mac OS X, and it’s that much easier to switch a little down the road because a Linux environment with those apps is going to be much more familiar.

On the other hand, if you already have a set of nice FOSS apps running on an OS you’re familiar with, what’s the motivation to switch? I think it’s great that Firefox is garnering such a big slice of the browser market, for example, but I don’t know too many people who’ve switched from Windows to Linux because of FF.

I’d be curious to hear opinions either way. Is KDE 4 for Windows/OS X going to bring new users to Linux, or just boost the amount of FOSS used on those platforms?