Warning: this may not make sense, thinking out-loud...
One thing that has occupied my thoughts a lot since starting usr local bin, and more so as time has gone on, more and more people have started using the applications hosted there, and especially using ULB GNOME has been, to coin a phrase of the moment, "What's my exit strategy?". That's not to say that I want out, or I plan to quit running it any time soon, but the simple fact is that if my plan comes off, and this summer I get selected to train for ordination, I'm simply not going to have the time to be so directly active in the community anymore. Oh, I'll still be running Linux (SuSE of course), reading lists and helping folk when I can, but package building, testing, configuring and releasing is simply not going to be on the cards. The flow of ideas, code and patches across Novell between Ximian and SuSE potentially provides me with a way to feel less bad about this. I think that when 9.1 comes out (Disclaimer: I am on the SuSE beta program, but as yet have not looked at a 9.1 beta, only just managed to download the ISOs), we're going to see a GNOME install that, well, sucks less than before. Not only that, but I wouldn't be surprised if we get sane GNOME updates inbetween distro releases. Wouldn't that be neat? If that proves to be the case, then if I wrap ULB up this autumn, I can do so dafe in the knowlege that the GNOME living SuSE guys will be well looked after. Of course, it's a moot point if I don't get selected.

ULB is something that in a way I wish I didn't have to do, I wish GNOME in SuSE had always sucked less, interesting how something born of neccesity has become so well loved in the community.

• Added Luis, Dave and joe from Ximian to p.SuSE. Will switch it's location to planetsuse.org real soon.
• Offer of help from Luis on the GST/SuSE integration work, it's been on a serious backburner recently, but I finally got round to taking a hard copy of my b0rked GST::Users code so I can read it more easily and try to debug it.

Finally, YaST is going to be GPL. Some of us have wanted this for a long time, and it used to be an occasional topic of hot discussion when I was at SuSE, but it was never seriously on the cards back then. It's terrific news that this is happening. I don't believe that the fears of a thousand SuSE clones appearing like Red Hat clones will come true, but actually, it will benefit in the same way that other GPL software does, more people will use it, hack on it and test it seriously. YaST is already a great config tool (although, obviously GST with a decent SuSE backend will also rock), it will only get better now.