The openSUSE Project Turns Two

It happened again. Another year passed (flew by). Happy Birthday openSUSE!

Read on for a look back and some things to come.

There are tons of things we achieved…

In the past 365 days we successfully released openSUSE 10.2 with numerous improvements and new features. Up until now it has been installed hundreds of thousands of times. We brought the Build Service to a broader audience as an open source project with cool features like release management, build monitoring package tags, statistics, an ever improving command line client, patterns and one click installations. This must have impressed AMD because they quickly became a Platinum Sponsor. The software/download page was completely rewritten and relaunched. Several other sites appeared, including but not limited to opensuse-community.org, suse-art.org to share your openSUSE artwork, the Localization Portal to help bring openSUSE to your language, Benji’s package search tool, our own idea pool, several localized openSUSE wikis, and not to forget this site here.

We also made huge progress on other means of communication. For instance, we migrated about 40 mailing lists with 40,000 individual subscribers to the new mailing list server. In the meantime we have a bunch of new mailing lists, that’s over 50 now with 44,000 individual subscribers. We had nearly 30 meetings in our irc channels and also attended several successful fairs like FOSDEM or Linuxtag and, at the moment, the Linuxworld Expo. 34,000 people told us their view on topics such as openSUSE in general, network settings or proprietary software in our surveys. We opened up our Styleguides and our own cookbook-style book project for the openSUSE distribution: Lessons for Lizards.

While we are at the topic of opening up. The YaST, Limal and Zypp developers completely moved everything under the hood of openSUSE. We launched our own SVN server and are trying to bring the various package repositories together into one software portal. We also had some fascinating ideas implemented during our Hackweek, for instance a Build Service project that recompiles Debian packages or Giver for easy file sharing. The first versions of KIWI, our imaging technology, appeared which helps everybody to deploy their own versions of openSUSE . Everything is completely in the open. To manifest this spirit we worked together on some guiding principles for everyone to adhere to. All this in the light of our motto: openSUSE - Linux for open minds.

… and even more things to come!

Today the first beta release of openSUSE 10.3 with lots of new features arrives. The final release is only 2 months away! The localization project has taken over all the translations for 10.3. This weekend we will try to slash as many bugs as we can. We are working vigorously on building the distribution inside the Build Service and implementing a framework for contributions. The Software Portal is coming on, and more and more people are joining the openSUSE packagers team. There are more openSUSE images built with KIWI coming; the latest addition is an image for USB sticks. We will have weekly interviews here under the category People of openSUSE. The final draft of the guiding principles was just released and we have to form the openSUSE Board. Also in the pipe are various re-designs of our web pages. The splash on www.opensuse.org and the download/software pages will be followed by the wikis and the Build Service. And this won’t be everything that is coming in the next year, we promise!

So enjoy this day and have some cake or a drink on openSUSE.

Happy Birthday!