Richard Brown, openSUSE Board Chairman, talked this morning about a possible future for the standard openSUSE distribution at osc 15 and I’m pretty excited about it!
You can grab the slides from Richard’s ownCloud server. Take a look and get involved in the discussion over on the openSUSE Project mailing list. It is sure to be a fun time to have some input on the future of openSUSE as a distribution.
I’ll have more to say in the future.
As announced by Richard Brown, openSUSE Board Chairman, SUSE is preparing to release a large portion of its SUSE Linux Enterprise sources to openSUSE Project. Here’s the first paragraph from the announcement on the openSUSE Project mailing list:
SUSE is preparing to pro-actively release a significant portion of the SUSE Linux Enterprise source code, including a regular stream of maintenance updates, to the openSUSE Project.
I’m really excited about this change and I think it will benefit both SUSE and openSUSE in both the short and long terms.
The openSUSE Conference is being held starting May 1 and more information will be available then. I’ll post the video to Richard’s talk when it is posted.
UPDATE: Here is a link to the slides used for the presentation this morning. I’ll have a later post with the slides and video embedded when it is available.
Forbes contributor, Dan Woods, posted an interest article titled Will There Ever Be Another Red Hat? While not a wholly interesting article to me (not much new being said I haven’t been following for years), but this question stood out to me:
Will any company ever get to $1 billion or even $500 million in revenue from open source subscriptions and have a chance of being profitable?
I don’t know what the exact financials are from SUSE currently, but from what I can glean, and from what is said during different events I have attended, their business is growing at a double-digit percentage rate which means that they will be nearing the lower of those two numbers at some point in the future (just based on simple math).
And that growth has been happening while the division was spun out of Novell, retooled, and now is in the process of integrating with Micro Focus and being part of a larger strategy for that company.
While I don’t know if SUSE will ever be another Red Hat, maybe that is alright. SUSE is continuing to make contributions to the open source world and making money to employ people to continue to do so. To me, that is a great thing to see.
I have been privileged to be a part of the authorized beta for Novell OES 2015, and it has been a great experience so far. The public beta was announced recently, and I encourage anyone who is even mildly interested to download and give it a look.
There are many tweaks and improvements in the release, but primary on my list are the following:
Both are directly related to file sharing, and both will end up making my list easier. The public beta includes a beta version of the Novell Client for Windows along with the OES build itself.
Give it a try and report any bugs you find. It isn’t Microsoft’s enterprise stack, but that can be a good thing.
Yesterday it was decided to plan and run a small, one-day internal conference focused on technology at Martin Luther College. I’ve been to a number of technology conferences and get-togethers over the years, but this is the first time I am being relied on to plan and manage such an event.
So I’m going to blog about the process … obviously.
To start, I’d love to be able to “sit down” and talk with people who have already run an internal conference. I know there are challenges when you are talking about bringing in many “non-technical” people to talk about the use of technology, so I’d love to be able to get a wider perspective on things.
This is new ground both for me and for the campus and I want to make it worthwhile so that we can continue to hold events like this internally to better improve the organization without the need for catastrophes to be staring us down.
So, I’ll post more in the future but I’d love to hear from people who have experience with this or would just like to sit down and talk through the concept.