Wanted: Community Manager | ITworld

Wanted: Community Manager

Novell's Got Some Big Shoes to Fill

January 29, 2010, 02:39 PM — 

Today marks the end of the Era of Zonker at Novell, as Joe Brockmeier ends his tenure as Community Manager of openSUSE.

Brockmeier has done a pretty good job while at Novell, coordinating the community and marketing efforts around the popular openSUSE distro. It goes without saying that getting him on board lent a lot of legitimacy to Novell's business deal with Microsoft in 2006. Brockmeier has a lot of respect in the community, so when he calmly explained why Novell hadn't made a deal with the devil, people listened.

I personally did not like Novell's decision to partner with Microsoft--in particular the patent protection agreement that prompted a knee-jerk response from the free software community to change GPL v3 during its draft phase. At the time, I voiced the opinion that if Microsoft wanted to have integration so badly, it could do it without patent cooperation agreements.

I still believe that, and it's something on which Brockmeier and I disagree. But it doesn't change my respect for his work.

Read more...
http://www.itworld.com/open-source/94750/wanted-community-manager

Don