Last July, following GUADEC there was some amount of controversy going on in the greater Linux community after Canonical, the company driving a large amount of Ubuntu development, was criticized for number of contributions it has made to the GNOME project. The resulting number of backlash amongst open source backlash-mongers led Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth to write a great post on tribalism.

The underlying point that I think Mark makes is very important: underneath our red hats, Meerkat and Lizard costumes, we all strive to build a stellar open-source operating system. Deep down, we're all penguins!

Mark's comments motivated one notable open-source contributor, Miguel de Icaza, the co-founder of both the GNOME and Mono projects, to help cut down on the tribalism. Shortly after the lobbing of insults calmed down, Miguel sent out a call to create a non-tribal version of StackOverflow for Unix and Linux users:

As we know, tribalism makes you stupid. So let us commit to the Linux and Unix Q&A site powered by StackOverflow that will help answer questions for Unix and Linux users of all distributions and blends.

It shouldn't be surprising but a huge number of folks registered their interest in the "StackExchange" site which is now open for (beta) business!

If you're unfamiliar with the whole StackOverflow/StackExchange concept, the gist of it is that the site is a community-specific question and answer site with community-driven feedback for questions and answers. In the ideal world, this means the most interesting/pressing questions are heavily upvoted, and then the best answers to those questions have a number of votes as well.

To visit the site you just need to bounce on over to unix.stackexchange.com

Thanks to a tip from our friend @decriptor, it looks like the Google Video Chat browser plugin is now available for openSUSE!.

If you visit the download page you can download an RPM for a 32-bit or a 64-bit openSUSE installation. The plugin should allow you to use video or voice chat to talk to all your GMail contacts straight from your web browser. Since I don't use GMail, I can't verify how well the plugin works, but I have successfully held a video chat with a friend using it via my n900.

Pretty spiffy!

Scalable Vector Graphic fans of the world rejoice – Open Source’s premier vector drawing application Inkscape has been bumped up to 0.48, adding lots of fixes and features for artists to get excited about in the process.

New & improved

The text tool in particular has received lots of attention and now has support for:

• "Line Spacing:" Distance between baselines of adjacent lines
• "Letter Spacing:" Spacing between letters
• "Word Spacing:" Spacing between words
• "Horizontal kerning"
• "Vertical shift"
• "Character rotation"

The new multi-mode spray tool allows users to quickly [create] effects that previously would take much longer to achieve.

Other changes include a handful of new extensions, improved exporting & select UI changes. More information can be found in the release notes.

Install Inkscape for openSUSE 11.3

This coming October in the beautiful German city of Nuremberg, the second international openSUSE conference will be held.

Before get out your jump to conclusions mat and assume this is just for openSUSE folks, it should be mentioned that the conference isn't just for lizard-lovers but also for all members of the open source community that can attend.

The "call for papers" has finished meaning the conference organizers are hard at work preparing the program for the event, which plans to bring folks together from various areas of the open source universe such as the Mozilla and Debian projects. The conference should be interesting for hackers and users alike with Bird-Of-a-Feather sessions, open discussions and of course, plenty of hacking on open source!

Unfortunately the conference details aren't all hammered out, but if you're on that side of the pond on October 20th through the 23rd, you should definitely mark it on your calendar. In the meantime, I suggest following @openSUSEConf to keep up with the conference preparation.

Ever heard of OBS, also known as the openSUSE Build Service? You may not recognize the acronym, but if you're using openSUSE you're certainly using software built by OBS. The build service provides an invaluable tool for developers to overcome some of the challenges caused by the slight fragmentation between the various Linux distributions.

The OBS provides developers of all your favorite apps with an easy to use tool for creating and distributing packages for openSUSE, Ubuntu and Fedora on a number of architectures. The idea of it all being that a developer can upload their code to the OBS and it will produce packages such as .rpm or .deb packages which are ready for openSUSE/Fedora and Ubuntu/Debian respectively.

Let's say for example, the devs for an app like Skrooge decide not to use the OBS. To support the various Linux distributions they have a couple options:

1. To not support other distributions
2. To enlist package maintainers on each distro
3. To build the packages themselves for each distro

This approach seems to be more and more common with applications developed targeting Ubuntu, such as Pino, which has taken route #2.

As I look around my office, a wasteland of machines I've collected over the years, I feel quite proud of how many of their lives have been extended thanks to open source operating systems. An iBook G4 running NetBSD serving up media, a partially disassembled Eee PC 701 with an Ubuntu Netbook Remix on it, a Soekris net4801 and a Thinkpad T43 running FreeBSD, a couple standard desktops and laptops running openSUSE and then...the Macs.

Years ago I was a Mac developer, I loved (and still do to some extent) the Mac platform for all its integrated goodness from a user's perspective but also from a developer's perspective. After the release of the iPhone, the writing on the wall was clear to me, this platform was doomed to be locked down, and I started migrating everything to open source operating systems.

Why do I still have machines running Mac OS X? Two words: net flix, okay, one word, Netflix.

I remember chiding friends who used Windows to "play games" for choosing to be locked into such a platform, and now I find myself in a similar boat. For them, their PC games were the biggest reason to stick to Windows, for me Netflix is the killer app.

Built on Silverlight, Netflix's streaming video solution is so close to being available for openSUSE users via the Moonlight project but Microsoft refuses to share Silverlight DRM framework with the Moonlight Team. Netflix alone has kept two Apple computers from succumbing to the ways of the Geeko, which leads me to the QOTD.

The question of the day is: What is the killer-app that prevents you from coming to Linux?