Preparing for Spain

So tomorrow I'll leave town to go to my first Novell BrainShare in Barcelona and present the openSUSE project to Novell customers there. It's a rather expensive event for visitors, and I have no idea what kind of people will be there with what kind of questions, and if they want to hear about that hacker-community-freak project at all ;-)

The discussions on the openSUSE list gain momentum as the more difficult questions get asked - how will we manage to create a truly open project when we have to control the distribution rather tightly to keep the quality? Do we have to keep that control everywhere? Do we need only one distribution, or maybe three trees as Debian has, or a completely different model? How much work can we expect from people who want a feature in the distribution which we just won't accept? Is it ok to say - hey, build your own packages, create your own CDs, here's how we can help you?

What can a linux distributor _really_ give back to the community if not the knowledge how to make distributions? (Employing hackers, sure. We do, too.)

At the same time 10.0 needs time for the final polishing, so nobody here really had the time to fully participate in these discussions, but they are necessary, keep them coming. And if you're not yet on the opensuse mailing list, hop on now.