Thanks to the openSUSE Travel Support Program, I was lucky enough to attend the first North American openSUSE Summit in Orlando, Florida

Before flying out, I had a lot of doubts and questions about whether or not the Summit would be a success, especially if compared against the excellent openSUSE conference in Nuremberg last year.

Would the Summit suffer being paired up with the corporate/marketing centric SUSEcon run by openSUSE's great sponsors, SUSE?

Would people attending both events be tired out by the time the Summit came around?

As the registrations poured in at a record rate, I worried about whether or not the diverse audience would 'mesh' together, and whether or not the talks and discussions would be of benefit to everyone there.

After being back home for a few days now, thinking back to the the Summit, I can categorically say that my fears were unfounded and that the openSUSE summit was an exceptional success.

Instead of diluting or confusing the situation, I think having SUSEcon before the Summit worked surprisingly well.

I heard great things about SUSEcon, and was especially pleased to hear the message from executive members of SUSE, during keynotes and in conversations around the venue, of the importance to them of open source in General and openSUSE in particular.

While I think SUSE's actions have always proven that they 'get' how open source works and they work well with 'the community', this message had a habit of being absent during SUSE's big marketing events (eg. Brainshare).

I think it's great to see that corrected and open source/openSUSE's importance taking centre stage in the marketing message alongside SUSE's commercial offerings, just as it holds a great importance on the engineering side of things.

It was great that a big chunk of SUSEcon's attendees stayed for our openSUSE summit. Between them, the GNOME UX Hackfest, the Florida LUG, and a record number of registrations (including people just turning up who hadn't registered) the Summit had a huge attendance that was well above expectations, and everyone seemed to get along really well, with some great ideas bouncing around both inside the sessions and out.

It was particularly nice to see so many members of the TTP at the Summit. The TTP is a huge academic user group, formerly centric on Novell products but over time has evolved to encompass SUSE and NetIQ's offerings also.

Historically, the TTP has been a huge source of invaluable, real world feedback from some of the most complex IT environments, and I'm really excited at the idea of openSUSE getting more help from this great group (Full disclosure: I'm a member of the TTP's Advisory Board)

It was nice to see the GNOME UX Hackfest at the Summit, though I was a little disappointed that none of them attended my talk on YaST, as I was hoping to suggest that their distributions could benefit from offering YaST (source is HERE), especially as we have it so nicely integrated in openSUSE's GNOME 3.

Seeing the Florida LUG at the Summit was great. It was my first experience with a US-based Linux User Group, and it was a lot of fun being able to sit down, sharing our experiences, and installing openSUSE 12.2 on as many of their laptops as we were able.

Oh and I nearly forgot to mention, the announcement at the Summit that Vincent Untz is the new openSUSE board chairman was a wonderful surprise.
No one has helped me more in the openSUSE project than Vincent, he's a great guy, with great technical knowledge and a brilliant understanding of how everything in the project slots together, so I think that he's a great choice.
[joke]And, yes, he's French, but nobody is perfect..[/joke]

And this post is getting way longer than I expected, so to wrap up

Venue was great, crowd was great, sessions were great, Summit was great - If you didn't come this year, go next year, and help make it better!