As of now I'm an employee of Novell. That means a couple of things.
First of all: awesomeness, working with all of you!
Second the boring stuff: I'll have to update linked-in and some other sites. And put a disclaimer on this site - my previous employer (the Dutch government) wasn't exactly involved in what I did for KDE... And I'll have to go through the administrative stuff in the company. Boy, do I look forward to that ;-)
Third, I should get started. I'll be flying to the US of A tomorrow to meet people at the Novell offices. So if you want me to tell them anything in particular, let me know! Remember, for now, it's my FirstNameLastName on gmail if you want to mail me.
Besides that, I will of course start doing things within and for openSUSE. After all, my job will basically have three sides (at least that's how I currently see it):
- Help openSUSE archieve world domination (eg be a volunteer in openSUSE, evangalize to the outside world etc)
- Work on the relationship between Novell and openSUSE (eg corporate communication, organizing events & stuff)
- Spread and promote openSUSE within Novell
Now I might have this nice 'community manager' title, but as I said before, please note that that's just a Novell title. Nice towards the outside and for points 2 and 3, but within the community - don't expect me to change anything on my own... I'll just be another dude trying to help out. I'll take on things which I think are important (I'll obviously listen to suggestions) but I can't promise to solve every single problem there is. There are only 24 hours in a day and I need my beauty sleep!
But still, excitement is keeping me awake right now - I seriously look forward to this. There is interesting stuff going on, not the least of which are the strategy discussions going on. If you want to have a say in where openSUSE goes - get involved.
Rock on,
Jos
Good luck to You !
ReplyDeleteHere is something you'll have to know if you go to Novell in the US: most barely know openSUSE exists. And most don't even care. Just so you know ;)
ReplyDeleteI have written more than 300 bugreports for openSUSE and was one of the first users when openSUSE was founded. I have used S.u.S.E. since version 5.3.
ReplyDeleteBut to be honest I switched a year ago to Fedora. Most the people I knew at SUSE had to leave. The bugreport turnarround time was in the beginning a few days and it became either report upstream, or no answer.
Reading sites like lwn.net one gets the impression that not a lot of people care about SUSE anymore. All Ubuntu or Fedora articles get way more comments.
With the build service SUSE has such a great technology and could really take off.
I wish you good luck raising the awareness of openSUSE in the US and I think you should try to advertise the build service better.
All the best for you and all the possible success to SUSE.
openSUSE still holds its own in Germany, its country of origin...
ReplyDeleteHeel veel succes Jos, maak er wat van :-)
Alexandra
Congratulations, that sounds like a fun job. I've been an openSUSE user since 10.3; I've been very pleased by the progress and the productivity it provides.
ReplyDeleteWhat you should ask/discuss in the USA?
ReplyDelete- The sorry state of many of the Novell products on OpenSUSE
e.g iFolder, Novell Client, Groupwise Client, ...
When you have the chance to ask I would be curios about the answers to the following two questions:
ReplyDeleteLet's assume a fairy came tonight and magically turned the relationship and collaboration between Novell and the openSUSE community to just perfect (if it is not perfect yet).
1. How would this relationship look like?
2. How would an external person recognize that the relationship and collaboration is just perfect?