OSS: Federation, SUSE, Red Hat/Fedora and OSI Sessions

So, foss-north 2019 happened. 260 visitors. 33 speakers. Four days of madness.

During my opening of the second day I mentioned some social media statistics. Only 7 of our speakers had mastodon accounts, but 30 had twitter accounts.

Arriving to the conference venue on a bike was quite pleasant (thanks to bicycle paths almost everywhere in city and amount of parks). One thing which I forgot is the bike lock, but I met Richard Brown and he offered to lock our bikes together.

First thing which brought my attention was some QR-code on the registration desk which says something like “This is not the first one, search better,” so I had to walk around and try to find correct one. There were 10 of them in different places of Biergarten, each is asking you some question about openSUSE (logos, abbreviations, versions and so on). Once you find all of them and answer correctly, you can pick up prize on registration desk. I really enjoyed this so I proposed this idea for our events.

I have missed first half of the talks with fixing problem with dynamic BuildRequires and second half by talking with Michael Schröder about libsolv-related things. We’ve discussed what modularity would mean for libsolv, some known corner-cases and I promised to write document which describes how it is supposed to be handled (some kind of test cases).

Then there was some kind of meetup of OBS (Open Build Service) community (both developers and users) where OBS-related things were discussed. I wish we could have something like “RPM buildsystems meetup” where people could discuss problems in different buildsystems (Koji, OBS) and share solutions.

At this year’s Red Hat Summit, Red Hat announced Thorntail 2.4 general availability for Red Hat customers through a subscription to Red Hat Application Runtimes. Red Hat Application Runtimes provides application developers with a variety of application runtimes running on the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform.

If you weren’t lucky enough to attend the recent Red Hat Summit or you went but couldn’t make it to all the container-related sessions, worry not. We teamed up with Scott McCarty, Principal Technology Product Manager–Containers at Red Hat, to bring you an overview of what you missed.

A passionate and dedicated community offers few of these comforts. Participating in something like the open organization community at Opensource.com—which turns four years old this week—means acquiescing to dynamism, to constant change. Every day brings novelty. Every correspondence is packed with possibility. Every interaction reveals undisclosed pathways.

To a certain type of person (me again), it can be downright terrifying.

But that unrelenting and genuine surprise is the very source of a community's richness, its sheer abundance. If a community is the nucleus of all those reactions that catalyze innovations and breakthroughs, then unpredictability and serendipity are its fuel. I've learned to appreciate it—more accurately, perhaps, to stand in awe of it. Four years ago, when the Opensource.com team heeded Jim Whitehurst's call to build a space for others to "share your thoughts and opinions… on how you think we can all lead and work better in the future" (see the final page of The Open Organization), we had little more than a mandate, a platform, and a vision. We'd be an open organization committed to studying, learning from, and propagating open organizations. The rest was a surprise—or rather, a series of surprises:

The corresponding License-Review summary is online at https://opensource.org/LicenseReview052019 and covers extensive debate on the Cryptographic Autonomy License, as well as discussion on a BSD license variant.

In May, the License-Review mailing list saw extensive debate on the Cryptographic Autonomy License. The list also discussed a BSD variant used by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and the Master-Console license.

The corresponding License-Discuss summary is online at https://opensource.org/LicenseDiscuss052019 and covers an announcement regarding the role of the License-Review list, discussion on the comprehensiveness of the approved license list, and other topics.