A kind invitation

Thursday, September 23rd, 2010

Delighted to receive this today, and to proxy it through to Planets U and G:

Dear Ubuntu Community Council members,

on behalf of the openSUSE Board, I would like to extend this
invitation to you and your community to join us at the
openSUSE Conference in Nuremberg, Germany October 20-23, 2010.

This year more than seventy talks and workshops explore the theme of
‘Collaboration Across Borders‘ in Free and Open Source software
communities, administration and development. We believe that the
program, which includes tracks about distributions, the free desktop and
community, reaches across the borders between our projects and we
would like to ask you to encourage your community to visit the
conference so we get the chance to meet face to face, talk to and
inspire each other.

More information including the program and details about the event you
can find in our announcement at http://bit.ly/oconf2010

Thank you in advance and see you in October! 🙂

Henne Vogelsang
openSUSE Board Member

We’ll gladly sponsor a member of the Ubuntu community council to go, busy finding out if anyone can make it. I can’t, but appreciate the sentiment and the action and think it would be great if members of the Ubuntu community can take up the invitation.

Regardless, best wishes for the conference!

15 Responses to “A kind invitation”

  1. A kind invitationMark Shuttleworth | 9nd.pl Says:

    […] mark […]

  2. Jonathan Carter Says:

    That’s very nice of them! Kudos to the openSUSE board!

  3. Mark Shuttleworth: A kind invitation « Sieben's blog Says:

    […] viaMark Shuttleworth: A kind invitation. […]

  4. Andrew Ampers Taylor Says:

    Looks good, but are Novell still involved?

    I can’t help remember what happened to the world’s top selling word processor called WordPerfect after Novell purchased it. But, I am probably being unkind. They possibly weren’t geared up to promote that sort of product.

  5. Cypher Says:

    And Planet K, does it stink? Or is there no KDE member in the UCom Council?

  6. Jorge Says:

    A few weeks ago Andrew Wafaa was looking for help getting more distros participating so we announced it via the debian derivatives list: http://lists.debian.org/debian-derivatives/

    I recall a post on -project so hopefully there will be some participation from Debian as well.

  7. s.r Says:

    It’s great. Scinece (and computer science too) couldn’t rich without communicating between different groups. I’d prefer it makes deeply interaction between all Linux programmers community not only Ubuntu (at least between Ubuntu and OpenSUSE). But… I’ve heard that Novell have some trubles in their business so it could be SUSE problems too.

  8. MANDY SAULS Says:

    Ek is seker iemand van UbuntuDuitsland
    sal dalk kan bywoon.
    Alles van die Beste met die OpenSUSE konferensie in Oktober.

  9. Ubuntu auf der openSUSE Conference 2010 : Karl-Tux-Stadt Says:

    […] trotzdem einen Vertreter des Ubuntu Community Council zur openSUSE Conference entsenden. Shuttleworth reagiert damit auf eine direkte Einladung des openSUSE Board an den Ubuntu Community Council. Er selbst habe […]

  10. Thomas T. (ungethym) Says:

    +1 to everyone improving the collaboration between FLOSS projects. We are all part of the big FLOSS community.

    Btw: openSUSE is a FLOSS community and many of the contributors are not payed by the main sponsor. Sure, Novell is a main sponsor but most of the other big distributions have their main sponsors, too.
    Andrew Ampers Taylor: I’m not sure if it’s fair to associate the community with things the sponsor has “done” years a go. openSUSE has moved and is still moving into an excellent direction. So please give us a chance and judge us by the things we do and not by the things somebody else has done.

  11. Tom Says:

    This is great.

    I really SHOULD be all about making the Linux pie bigger and not about eating each others pie.

  12. mark Says:

    @Cypher

    I don’t believe I’m syndicated on Planet KDE, so me blogging it won’t reach that audience. Please don’t be rude and insulting, you’re only demeaning yourself.

  13. Ubuntu all’openSuse conference | Giovanni Raco Says:

    […] Shuttleworth ha annunciato sul suo blog che Canonical sponsorizzerà la partecipazione di un membro dell’Ubuntu community council […]

  14. mac Says:

    Keeping in mind your post on tribalism (“the grandaddy of all forms of discrimination”, if I remember correctly your words) I am happy too to see Ubuntu and OpenSuse communicating.

    Nevertheless, unless something has changed since I last checked, Novell is the main (sole?) sponsors behind OpenSuse, and Novell does have a very poor record when it comes to free software.

    Far from suggesting that the Ubuntu community council should turn down the offer, I still think that the difference in philosophy between a “free-as-in-spirit” distro like Ubuntu and a “free-as-in-license” distro like OpenSuse are worth being underlined and discussed (maybe directly there?).

    Again: it is not about bragging about a supposedly “higher purity of principles” or trying to be unkind towards our host. It’s just that the very concept of borders implies the concept of different countries, and my way of imagining a “cross-border event” is not that of an event that cancel or hide differences, but that of an event where these are explored, examined, compared… for each “country” to acquire a fuller perspective of themselves, but also for the general public to get a better, more informed picture of the world “out there”.

    So: while I am glad to see this invitation, I would also expect the Ubuntu “delegate” to strongly advocate – also in that forum – for those values that Novell’s involved with the project has partially undermined for OpenSuse.

    Have a nice conference!

  15. HauserQuaid Says:

    Nice, very nice. That’s how it should be done, collaboration is the biggest potential strength of Linux Desktop.