First LWE report

After three days of LWE, I'm both happy that it's over and I don't have to talk anymore and can just sit here at the gate waiting for the flight home, and sort-of sad that it's over, that it was so short and we couldn't talk to more people. openSUSE as a project doesn't immediately excite all people, but after explaining what it is about, everybody I talked to seemed to really like the idea.

Here's a list of the frequently asked questions at LWE, and my answers. Please note that this is by no means an official FAQ, but as I told everything written below in public already I can just as well blog it:

So, tell me about openSUSE!

The openSUSE project is where the development of the SUSE Linux distribution will happen from now on. We've had for a long time one common code tree on which we worked internally, and from which all our products, like SuSE Linux Professional or the enterprise offerings were branched at a certain point in time. All our developers and packagers are working on that tree, and will continue to do so, but now every change is visible immediately to the world so that people outside can download the latest versions, test and contribute to them.

Right now people can only download and test the beta builds and latest packages and report the bugs they find (we've opened up our Bugzilla for that). In the future, we want to offer a platform where people can upload code and RPM specfiles and have their packages built on our infrastructure, and rebuilt automatically whenever something in the distribution changes.

This way you can be sure that you always have a working rpm you can distribute to your users, and be notified when it doesn't compile cleanly any more because something you depend on changed - some library, the compiler, anything. This might not seem much at first glance, but in our experience this kind of automated build system is a great help in developing and maintaining any non-trivial application, and we want to offer our knowledge, our infrastructure and the necessary tools to people and projects in the open source community.

The distribution that is developed in the openSUSE project will be called SUSE Linux. Packages maintained by people from the outside may or may not end up on the distribution - we actually want to encourage people to also use our infrastructure for exotic or experimental stuff.

Is this like Sourcefourge?

No. We do not want to duplicate anything that already exists. The core functionality of sourceforge and similar sites is to host project development. Our core goal is to provide an infrastructure to make working RPM packages from code developed elsewhere, and to offer the advantages of automated distribution builds to developers.

Is this like rpmfind?

Yes and no. No, because rpmfind does not provide the infrastructure we're planning. Yes, because we hope that we attract people to build their packages on our servers, resulting in many more packages available to users than the ones we work on ourselves (which, by the way, are quite a few already).

Is this like Fedora?

Similar (there's no point in denying that), but not the same.

First, we want to be more open than we perceive the Fedora project to be towards contributions from the world. We will need to have the packages which make up our core distribution closely reviewed and under our control, just because the will eventually end up in our business products and have to be maintained and supported (by us).

But for packages that are not in this core set we can yield much of this control to package maintainers which are not employees, so we want the openSUSE project to be more flexible regarding new packages or experimental versions of existing ones.

Second, we still make a retail product from it, targeted at end users and developers alike.

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Other frequent questions were about the relationship to other products, the motivation of Novell to start the project at all, and many practical ones, like how to get involved and become a beta tester and whether one needs to register or not. This entry is long enough already, so I'll spare you the remainder of my sermons ;-)

Oh, and the chamaeleon printed on the DVD is definitely very, very cool.