OStatic

openSUSE recently announced the dates and agenda for its very first Community Week. Much like the Ubuntu team's OpenWeek, the purpose of Community Week is to assemble and introduce new contributors all over the Linux-using world to each other, and the openSUSE Project. And while developers are a vital part of an open source community and are encouraged to attend and get involved in openSUSE's Community Week, participants don't necessarily need programming skills -- only a willingness to learn, connect and pitch in the skills they possess.

Community Week kicks off on Monday, May 11th and concludes on May 17th. Most of the events take place on Freenode, with individual components (such as openSUSE-specific discussions on KDE, GNOME, or marketing) having their own unique #openSUSE-project channels and schedules.

It's one of the biggest gotchas for alternative operating systems -- at some point in the middle of one project's release cycle, some other component that's tied in some way to the original project's functionality gets a whizbang new update that's significant enough that full-fledged integration has to wait until the next release. Of course, there are ways around this for those who just can't wait, but these work arounds might not always be as straightforward as one would hope.

The KDE team continues to roll out updates, enhancements and new features for the KDE 4 desktop environment. The sticking point here is that different users on different machines might find the updates are neat little improvements -- or absolutely vital. And a distribution needs to balance stability and utility of its official packages with the needs of its userbase.

The openSUSE community recently took charge of this particular situation in the form of the openSUSE 11.1 KDE4 Reloaded respin. The installable liveCD, masterminded by Stephan 'Beineri' Binner, incorporates the openSUSE 11.1 image (complete with updates issued since its release) and the KDE 4.2.2 desktop.

For the past few weeks, off and on, I've heard some low-level, excited buzzing about iFolder. What is it? Think of it as an open source Dropbox service that lives on your servers under your jurisdiction, with a few added perks.

iFolder isn't new, per se, but it hasn't seen an updated source code release since 2007. Late last week, Novell, which sponsors the iFolder project, announced that iFolder 3.7.2 client and server packages -- as well as source code -- were available for download. The new release runs on Mac, Windows (including Vista) and Linux 32- and 64- bit environments. The push is now on to keep iFolder a very community-driven initiative.

In November, openSUSE implemented some significant changes to its licensing model, with the aim of making the distribution easier to remaster, re-work, and redistribute. At that time, openSUSE community manager, Joe Zonker Brockmeier, said that work was also underway to clarify openSUSE's trademark guidelines.

This week, the openSUSE Project released the newly re-examined trademark guidelines. The guidelines, available in PDF format, are designed to complement the new, easier to customize and redistribute openSUSE releases by explaining how to handle branding in different situations.

There was an interesting write up on Forbes.com this week discussing who contributes most to open source projects -- and why. Even though many open source projects have a commercial or institutional component that contributes some degree of direction (or funding) to software development, and even though many businesses and institutions use open source software regularly, the vast majority of contributions to these projects come from individuals.

Forbes' Dan Woods, after hearing Alfresco's Matt Asay and Eclipse's Ian Skerrett speak of this contributor gap, concluded that there must be something very different about how institutions contribute.

On Thursday, the openSUSE project will make available its stable 11.1 release. I was fortunate enough to take a sneak peek at the new release this week, and while the changes aren't quite as dizzying as those between 10.3 and 11.0 (understandably), they work nicely to make this new release both eye-catching and functional.

Though the final releases will be offered in a variety of architectures with DVD, network install, and liveCD images, I used one of the DVD install images. openSUSE offered an installer with the 11.0 liveCD, and in its 11.1 beta versions, and I imagine this has not changed. The DVD install process is slightly different than liveCD installers, but is just as straightforward and offers more from the get-go.

Today, both Ubuntu and openSUSE are releasing beta versions of their upcoming releases.

Ubuntu's 8.10 is in its first beta version, and openSUSE 11.1 plans on issuing its second beta release shortly.