| OpenSUSE gets its first community manager |
Feb. 05, 2008
OpenSUSE, the community Linux supported by Novell, has announced the appointment of its first manager, Joe "Zonker" Brockmeier.
Andreas Jaeger, Novell's SUSE Linux project manager, announced Brockmeier's appointment and explained in an OpenSUSE blog that Brockmeier "will act as community advocate and ombudsman, thus relaying OpenSUSE community and users' needs back to Novell. He will also drive marketing programs around OpenSUSE to make the project more successful and attract more developers and users."
While Brockmeier will be the first with this title, Brockmeier explained in a Linux-Watch interview that OpenSUSE already has "an OpenSUSE evangelist, Martin Lasarsch, who has been with Novell for quite some time. I'll be working with Martin to improve and advocate OpenSUSE, and hope to learn a lot from Martin -- he already has a strong relationship with the OpenSUSE development community, and will be primarily involved in regional events (he's based in Germany) and will continue to be key in working with the developer community."
Brockmeier said he believes he was brought on board because, "Novell is serious about working with the community and OpenSUSE as a community project, and I think that Novell wanted to bring someone in to accelerate the growth of OpenSUSE as a project and adoption of OpenSUSE by making sure more people are aware of OpenSUSE and trying it."
Novell took its time finding someone for this position. It had been looking for the right person with an excellent Linux reputation since October. Brockmeier has been a Linux user since 1996 and has been involved in covering Linux and the open-source community as a technology journalist for almost as long. Most recently, he was editor-in-chief of Linux Magazine, a leading Linux publication. But, Brockmeier explained, "I wanted to be directly involved with open source for quite some time, so when I was approached by Novell for this position, I was happy to talk to them about it."
As the manager, Brockmeier sees his job "first and foremost [as] serving as a community advocate, almost as an ombudsman for the project, within Novell. That means I'll be talking to OpenSUSE contributors and the community at large and trying to make sure that they have the resources they need to develop OpenSUSE and have as much influence as possible in OpenSUSE's development and direction."
"I'll also be working to strengthen Novell's relationships with the open-source community in general," he continued. "Of course, I'm also going to be helping to coordinate efforts to put the word out about OpenSUSE and help the community -- users and contributors -- grow. I want to see more people using Linux, and a big part of my role will be advocating [for] Linux generally and OpenSUSE specifically."
Brockmeier, however, does not see growing OpenSUSE as a zero-sum game. "I do want to point out, I'm interested in bringing new users to Linux, and not so interested in trying to grow OpenSUSE market share by taking users from Ubuntu or Fedora or any other distro. If people are already happy using a Linux distro, I count that as a win already. There's a huge percentage of users who haven't switched to Linux, and those are the folks I really want to be trying OpenSUSE."
To make that happen, he said, he wants to help make OpenSUSE better. To do that, Brockmeier plans to expand "the community, help foster better communication between Novell and the community -- and by 'community' here I mean users, OpenSUSE contributors, upstream project developers and even developers who work on other distros. I want to see much more cooperation between distros [and] less duplication of effort between distros." He said he also hopes to do this by giving "developers and contributors the resources they need to get involved -- and by making it much easier for new contributors to get involved."
In this new job, Brockmeier will be reporting to Justin Steinman, Novell's director of product marketing for Linux, but, as Brockmeier said, "my job is primarily to be a community advocate and ombudsman, so in that respect I'm working for the users and developers of OpenSUSE."
-- Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
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