SUSE/OpenSUSE Interviews and How SLE is Built

I joined the “Ambassador” program in 2009, which later was renamed to openSUSE Advocate, and finally the program was dropped. In 2013, I joined the openSUSE Local Coordinators to help coordinating activities in the region. It was my way of contributing back. During those years, I would also test openSUSE RCs and report bugs, organize local meetups about Linux in general (some times openSUSE in particular) and blog about those activities. Then, in 2018 after an inspiring conversation with Richard Brown, while he was the openSUSE Chairman, I stepped up and joined the openSUSE Elections Committee, to volunteer in election tasks. It was a nice and enriching learning experience along with my fellow election officials back then, Gerry Makaro and Edwin Zakaria. I attended my first openSUSE Conference in May 2019 in Nuremberg. I did a presentation on how we’re using Podman in production in my workplace. I was extremely nervous to give this first talk in front of the openSUSE community but I met folks who cheered me up. I can’t forget the encouragement from Richard, Gertjan, Harris, Doug, Marina and the countless friends I made at the conference. Later during the conference, I was back on the stage, during the Lightning Talks, and I spoke while holding the openSUSE beer in one hand and the microphone in the other. Nervousness was all gone thanks to the magic of the community.

Edwin and Ary told me about their activities in Indonesia, particularly about the openSUSE Asia Summit. When the CfP for oSAS 2019 was opened, I did not hesitate to submit a talk, which was accepted, and months later I stood among some awesome openSUSE contributors in Bali, Indonesia. It was a great Summit where I discovered more of the openSUSE community. I met Gerald Pfeifer, the new chairman of openSUSE, and we talked about yoga, surrounded by all of the geeko fun, talks and workshops happening.

My name is Xabier Arbulu and I’m from Spain (Basque country), even though I live in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria enjoying a better weather. I have been working as a Software engineer around 6 years now, and I joined SUSE a bit more than a year ago. One of the major motivations was that I wanted to feel and explore how is to work in an organization where Open Source is more than just business. I really think that collaboration and transparency are the way to go. I work in the SLES4SAP and HA team where we provide solutions to the customers with critical mission applications.

One of my hobbies is to enjoy the nature (and the sports around this like hiking, surfing…), so it’s totally aligned with the path that SUSE started against the climate change and our planet conservation.

My name is William Brown, I’m a senior software engineer at SUSE. I’m from Brisbane Australia, and have been a software engineer for 5 years. Previously I was a system administrator at a major Australian university for 7 years. I am a photographer and also participate in judo and pole dance in my free time.

As for the “Minor Versions” of SLE, we decided (more than 14 years ago) to use a “Service Pack” Model for our SLE releases. The goal is to offer a predictable release cadence allowing our users to plan accordingly for their updates, but also to schedule our release with collections of maintenance updates and new features alike for a given major version. Back in the old days we promised to release a Service Pack every 12 to 18 months, but since SLE 12 GA (more than 5 years ago) we have decided to simplify and increase the regularity of our cadence by settling on a 12-month release cycle and supports previous service packs for 6 months after the release of the new service pack.

Why? Well, this decision was made based on our customers’ and partners’ feedback and also because of the general increase in the cadence of open source development. For example, just to name a few other open source projects, did you know that there is a upstream Linux Kernel minor version every two months, Mozilla is releasing a new Firefox version every 6 weeks, and GNOME creates a full stable release every 6 months?

Having two major SLE versions available with an annual release cadence for every “Minor Version”, which would normally be called a “Service Pack”, is part of our solution to solving the challenge of keeping up with the pace of open source projects, while at the same time offering choice and clarity to all our enterprise users.
We will discuss the SLE Release Schedule in a dedicated blog post, but before getting too technical, we would like to give you a deeper insight into our Release Management Team, i.e. the people and team behind these release processes.