OStatic

In September, the openSUSE project urged its contributors and members to help choose a new board. The board was to consist of two Novell-affiliated and two non-Novell members chosen by the community, and chaired by a fifth Novell-appointed member.

Earlier this week, the results of the board election were announced. Community participation was impressive, with 178 of the 237 eligible voters casting at least one of the four votes (two for each category) they were allowed.

Ubuntu community manager Jono Bacon announced Wednesday the Ubuntu Open Week schedule for the Jaunty release. Ubuntu Open Weeks are routinely held right after a release to welcome and encourage new contributors to get involved in work on the next release.

The Open Week for Jaunty takes place next week (November 3rd through the 7th) on the #ubuntu-classroom channel on IRC.

Last week, I had the pleasure of getting some unique insight into the Ubuntu 8.10 release ( Intrepid Ibex ) from Canonical's marketing manager, Gerry Carr. The finalized server and desktop editions of the 8.10 release will be available for download October 30th, and host a variety of new tools and features.

Bruce Byfield at Datamation wrote about some of the attitudes found in open source circles he feels are selling the community short. He lists some of the usual suspects, such as community infighting focused more on personality conflicts than differing development philosophies.

He mentions some attitudes that seem, at face value, not terribly off-putting -- to the open source enthusiast. However, open source advocates (or at least, effective ones) don't talk about open software solely to fellow enthusiasts.

ReadWriteWeb points readers to a report released by the 451 Group stating that open source is not a true business model, but more of a business tactic.

Traditionally, the open source business model is perceived as free/open software, with paid support and configuration services. The report found, however, that many of the responding open source businesses incorporate some commercially licensed software in their product line. It also found that the paid support/free software idea -- while theoretically, at least, valid -- is multi-layered, complex, and highly variable between software product, software company, and industry.

Free Software Magazine recently took a closer look at the Linux legacy. The legacy -- Linux's reputation precedes it, even in the realm of the average user. This reputation is, of course, that Linux is (pick one of your choice): hard, incompatible with most hardware, command line only -- the list goes on.

It's a fitting observation, as the operating system hits its seventeenth year, that there are a great many people out there aware of Linux now who have been aware of it for some time. And to some, Linux in 2008 seems identical to Linux in 2001, or 1998.

If the fact that the ParanoidLinux distribution (now in an alpha-alpha stage ) is based on a work of science fiction isn't unsettling, consider two key peripheral issues.

The first unsettling issue is that in some censorship-centric areas of the world, an operating system granting a user anonymity could be literally life-saving.

The second unsettling issue is that an effort is being made to package security tools -- ones that exist in current Linux and BSD systems, or are readily available through repositories -- into yet another distribution.

A few years ago I stumbled upon the efforts of the Victoria Linux Users Group. They are an active, involved group, but not particularly unlike any other LUG. I was pointed in the direction of their Linux in Victoria brochure.

Yes, its date of publication was 1997. What makes this brochure different is that it is open. Perhaps this is less impressive in light of the advent of wikis, but the purpose and intent of the brochure is still remarkable, and well worth expanding upon.

This model could easily extend beyond brochures, and benefit more of the FOSS community than the local LUGs.

The Linux Foundation recently posted a video interview with Linus Torvalds that took place at September's Linux Kernel Summit. Torvalds, the man behind the Linux kernel, and the project's chief coordinator, is always interesting to hear and the ten minute video is well worth watching.

Torvalds' insights range from disarmingly truthful (email is a fine method for communicating, but the Summit is needed because it's good to see people) to keenly introspective (kernel and userland issues are rough, because no one sees things in quite the same terms).

Recently, there has been a lot of buzz surrounding the Moblin Project, designed to bring open source applications to mobile devices. Though the news generally focuses on big name distributions getting involved, Moblin still features the community feel and involvement that draws many to open source projects.

One tool that Moblin offers the community to (hopefully) encourage participation is the Moblin Image Creator. The MIC allows developers to easily define projects, build them for mobile platforms, add applications and function sets to the target system images, and easily create images for live distributions (with the option of enabling rewrites/persistence), installation, or testing in virtual terminals.