Fun and Controversy – openSUSE Conference Day Four

Saturday, June 25. The openSUSE Conference party on Friday night was loooooooong. No surprise – the famous SUSE band had rocked the hall!

But in consequence, this morning one very common question came up: would all the party monsters be back in time for the keynote?  Well – as openSUSE Conference is a super relaxed and really cool conference, this was easy to solve: we simply started 20 minutes later.

When my colleague Douglas DeMaio announced today’s keynote speaker Michael Miller, the room was well-filled, and Michael could enjoy sustained applause. After having attended oSC the last time in 2011, at all costs he wanted to make sure everybody would recognize him, and he introduced himself “I am Michael, and I use openSUSE”.  — Michael, you really grew up quickly during the past five years – surely only because you discovered openSUSE and you “found your way to the light” ;-). —

Then he promised us not to do a YaCK (No clue what YaCK is? Look at the photo!) – and we really had a lot of fun during the keynote!

Instead, Michael guided us through an historic retrospective of the past five years, and illustrated what we´ve reached together for openSUSE and SUSE during that time, until today. SUSE became an independently operating business, openSUSE could start with its own conference, and both are essentially growing since then.  Of course, currently we are also going through some interesting and uncertain times – the “Brexit” referendum results just shocked us this week, SUSECon 2016 will take place in Washington during the week of US Presidential Election which this year will be especially stretching. But with some political “statement” Michael succeeded in cheering up the audience. And the future looks great – SUSE is expanding and currently has more than 100 job openings, we have co-initiated and/or joined a bunch of new open source projects, and we are living a new and innovative way of a shared code package concept for Tumbleweed, openSUSE Leap and SUSE Linux Enterprise. “We are all green on the inside”.

Finally, Michael presented an additional highlight. For the very first time, the brand new SUSE fun video was publicly shown:  “Code Together”  with Geeko and our colleague Jeff Price (at the drums) in action – once again a damn cool music video parody, hopefully soon available from the SUSE Video Channel on YouTube.

— Michael, you definitely kept your promise – thanks for not delivering a YaCK (and after the election, worst case, ask the community to help find your family in Canada)!–

Next on stage was openSUSE’s chairman Richard Brown, arguing against additional repositories. His talk contained some provocative ideas and theses, and the lively discussion after the presentation took nearly just as long as the presentation itself. One of the amazing things about open source is that you don´t have to always conform with the majority. Sometimes you need to take on disruptive positions to stimulate creativity. I am sure all controversial discussions, ideas and statements initiated with this talk will lead to further discussions, more improvement and additional innovation.

Another talk I attended was done by Gerhard Schlotter. He explained how openSUSE runs its own infrastructure, and shared a lot of detailed information with the audience.

Luckily not too long ago I had the chance to get a guided tour through our server rooms at SUSE in Nuremberg, and I was quite impressed by the amount of physical and virtual machines hosted by our infrastructure team.

Weather forecasts weren´t that favorable for today, it was a bit cloudy during the morning, and predictions had it that during the day there would probably be some thunderstorm plus heavy rain. But fortunately, the sky cleared, and the openSUSE community could enjoy the nice beer garden at the Z-Bau for lunch or for networking, just like Michael and Andy!