The early registration email to SUSE customers proclaims:

SUSE will have a dedicated and significant presence at BrainShare with participation in the keynotes, and with its own demo area in the IT Central, as well as its own conference session category with special Linux and Open Source session tracks. All components of the SUSE Business Unit (including the Enterprise Linux Server related business, the SUSE Studio/Appliance part, and the openSUSE project) will be presented to BrainShare attendees.

If I were a SUSE customer, I think I’d be trying harder than usual to get my boss to spring for sending me after all the changes that have occurred this year. Attachmate will be judged by its performance at this show, and I think the future of SUSE depends on it. I know that after my discussion with Nils Braukmann, SUSE president and general manager, I had some remaining questions about the future of the operating system and future technical innovation.

What do you want to hear from SUSE? Are you planning to attend BrainShare 2011?

Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is a global program that offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source software projects. Since 2005, the program has brought together nearly 2500 students and 2500 mentors and co-mentors from about 100 countries worldwide. The program works with open source, free software, and technology-related groups to identify and fund projects over a three month period. This year, 1,000 students have been selected to work on projects for over 130 open source organizations – see a full list of the GSoC sponsoring organizations for 2009. Through Google Summer of Code, accepted student applicants are paired with a mentor or mentors from the participating projects, thus gaining exposure to real-world software development scenarios and the opportunity for employment in areas related to their academic pursuits.

Zonker Brockmeier, Novell’s openSUSE Community Manager, is heading up the Novell participation in GSoC. Three of Novell’s sponsored open source initiatives are participating in the GSoC, hosting 24 student projects. The students with accepted projects will be mentored by Novell employees and community contributors with the openSUSE and Mono projects. The goal is to get students interested and potentially recruit future open source code contributors.

“I would say at least 25% or higher of past summer of code contributors have remained involved in projects,” shared Brockmeier. “We’ve seen fairly good return on the openSUSE project.”

Greg Lund-Chaix at Oregon State University’s open source laboratory has similar experiences with the GSoC program.

“We’re a bit different than most Summer of Code organizations in that we aren’t focused on one specific project,” Lund-Chaix explained. “We want to get more people involved with and support in open source in a broader sense. We certainly benefit internally from the work of our students, but the real benefit is the exposure of the students we mentor to the broader open source community.”

Participating organizations dedicate employee hours to help mentor the student developers. Neither Brockmeier or Lund-Chaix could quantify the hours spent, but both agreed the time was well-spent considering the outcome. For the students, the GSoC is supposed to be a full-time job, although it pays only a $1,000 stipend, making it attractive to only those dedicated students who can afford to give up a summer of potential earnings to gain coding experience.

After four years of experience, Google has improved the application process, improving the quality of submissions for the sponsor organizations.

“There were fewer proposals overall,” said Brockmeier. “But most organizations expressed they were seeing better quality this year.”

Lund-Chaix concurred, giving credit to the Melange tool team for streamlining the application review for sponsors.

“The quality of many of the proposals this year were definitely improved from previous years,” said Lund-Chaix. “There was no doubt whatsoever in our minds who we wanted to accept based on their applications. While we got the usual crop of frivolous or unacceptable applications, I was extremely pleased with the quality of many of the applications.”

I would love to hear from any past GSoC participants. If you have been a mentor or a student participant, share what you learned in the experience and how it has helped you in your career.

Other keynotes and panels during the week were from Linux kernel developers and representatives at IBM, Novell and Red Hat, among others. Thursday and Friday’s agenda included the ISV Summit, which focused on sharing the latest advancements in Linux and looking at best ways to work among the community. Other panel discussions and workgroup focus was on high-performance computing, file systems and systems management, among others.

We’re Linux video contest winner announced
The winner of the “We’re Linux” video contest was also announced at the summit. Amitay Tweeto, a 25-year-old graphic designer from Israel, beat out 90 contest entrants to win the grand prize for his video “What Does It Mean To Be Free?” Tweeto will receive a trip to Tokyo, Japan to participate in the Linux Foundation’s Japanese Linux Symposium in October 2009.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/qWEIQIv8zvY" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

Two runner-ups were also announced:

• Runner-up: “The Origin”
• Runner-up: “Linux Pub”

A combination of community votes and a panel of judges determined the winners:

• Matt Asay, CNET blogger and executive at Alfresco, Inc.;
• Larry Augustin, venture capitalist and former chairman of VA Software,
  and Linux Foundation board member;

• Jono Bacon, Ubuntu community manager;
• Joe Brockmeier, openSUSE community manager;
• Melinda Mettler, director, School of Advertising at the Academy of Art
  University; and

• Tim O’Reilly, founder and CEO, O’Reilly Media, Inc.

openSUSE Build Service added to Linux Developer Network
On Wednesday, Novell and the Linux Foundation jointly announced that the openSUSE Build Service will be added to the Linux Developer Network (LDN). The openSUSE Build Service enables developers to package software for all major Linux distributions, and is used to provide transparent infrastructure for the creation of the entire openSUSE distribution. Additionally, the openSUSE Project, a Novell sponsored and community-supported open source project, announced a new release of the openSUSE Build Service with support for compiling for the ARM platform.

The Linux Foundation will be providing an interface to the openSUSE Build Service via the Linux Developer Network site, so that developers can create packages for all major Linux distributions via LDN. The build service enables developers to create packages for CentOS, Debian, Fedora, Mandriva, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Ubuntu, in addition to openSUSE and SUSE Linux Enterprise. The addition of the openSUSE Build Service to the LDN compliments LDN’s popular AppChecker application, which enables developers to create portable applications for Linux. The build service is a perfect tool for LDN’s overall goal of assisting developers to deliver these portable applications.

The openSUSE project is also releasing the 1.6 version of the build service that includes support for compiling packages for the ARM platform, which is primarily used for embedded devices. The support for cross-architecture build support means that developers can create RPM or Debian packages for openSUSE, Ubuntu, Debian and Fedora. This work has been contributed by 5e DataSoft GmbH, working as part of the openSUSE community to add support for embedded devices based on ARM. 5e provides solutions based on openSUSE.

The latest release of the build service also includes support for building openSUSE appliances, live CDs, installable USB images, Xen images and VMware images. Developers can now create their own custom openSUSE distribution using the build service.

Joe ‘Zonker’ Brockmeier, openSUSE community manager, said, “This is the culmination of years of work by the openSUSE Project. The openSUSE Build Service has always been intended as a tool that would accelerate the general adoption of Linux. It’s gratifying to see the build service becoming part of the Linux Developer Network and being embraced by the larger community.”