Novell Taps Zonker to Manage openSUSE Project

Published: February 5, 2008

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Commercial Linux distributor Novell has wanted the best of both software worlds since it acquired SUSE Linux back in November 2003. The company wants to be a powerhouse in the open source software community, which is a 180-degree departure from its historical proprietary software development, and it also wants to make money off open source products just like it does on its proprietary products. Making the transitions from closed to open products and from in-house to community development is not easy.

That is why Novell has taken measured steps toward openness. In August 2005, the company created the openSUSE project, which shifted the SUSE Linux Professional desktop and development release from an internally developed software package (with all the future features that end up in the commercialized and future SUSE Linux Enterprise Server edition) toward a community developed package. Yesterday, Novell announced that it had hired Zonker--not the one from the Doonesbury cartoon that spends far too much time surfing and tanning, but rather Joe Brockmeier, the editorial director for SourceForge's Linux.com--to be the openSUSE community manager.

Brockmeier got his first taste of Linux when he got his hands on Slackware Linux back in 1996, and he has been working as a journalist covering Linux for a variety of publications since 1999. He has also contributed to a number of books on Linux and other open source topics in addition to his editorial duties at various publications.

Being the community manager for the openSUSE project is not, strictly speaking, a technical job, although up until now, techies have certainly held such positions at the big open source operating system projects. Max Spevack, the leader of the Fedora Linux development project that was created by Red Hat a few years back as an independent development community for the code that eventually became Red Hat Enterprise Linux, is the obvious parallel to the position that Brockmeier has taken over. So is the job that Ian Murdock is doing as chief operating platforms officer at Sun Microsystems, where he is taking his Linux experience and applying it to OpenSolaris. (Murdock is one of the founders of the Debian distribution of Linux, and was chief technology officer at the Free Standards Group in his spare time and was named CTO at the Linux Foundation when it was created in March 2007.)

"It's very different being on this side of the interview," says Brockmeier, and he concedes that his title might give people the wrong impression about what his job actually will be within the openSUSE community. It is more of a secretary of state position than an executive position, acting as a liaison between a Novell and an openSUSE community that is comprised of both insiders who get their paychecks from Novell and those who work on upstream projects to make a living or do it just for the fun and responsibility of participating.

"My main priority will be to serve as the openSUSE community's advocate with Novell and make sure that it has what it needs to make openSUSE the best distro available," Brockmeier said in a statement posted on the openSUSE site. "I think Max Spevack from Red Hat has done a great job along these lines, helping to transition Fedora into a much more community driven project than it was when it was originally split off from Red Hat Linux, and I'd like to take some cues from his work and apply them to openSUSE. I've had the opportunity to speak to many of Novell's executive team, Ron Hovsepian, John Dragoon, Roger Levy, and Jeff Jaffe, and I think that Novell is seriously committed to making openSUSE a more independent and community driven project."

That's the key, of course, and that is why bringing in an outsider for the job is important for both Novell and the openSUSE community. Brockmeier says that his first priority will be to get more people contributing to the openSUSE project, which now boasts nearly 4,000 members. (A lot of them come from Novell and upstream projects that eventually end up in the SUSE Linux distributions, but there are an increasing number of independent contributors who are pitching in with not only testing of code, but also writing code.) Brockmeier is also charged with making sure that the openSUSE project is more responsive to the upstream projects, and is also playing the role of chief evangelist for the openSUSE Build Service and the openSUSE Linux distribution. He is also, obviously, very keen on getting openSUSE on as many machines as possible.

"It is easy to set up a scenario where you pit Fedora or Ubuntu against openSUSE," explains Brockmeier. "But I have no interest in converting a Linux distribution, because that doesn't help the Linux community. I want to go after the other 90 percent of the market. I want to reach the folks, for instance, who have tried Windows Vista and have given up on it, and who are looking for a different kind of experience."

The openSUSE project is now two and a half years old, and has recently modified its build service so it can crank out RPMs for RHEL and CentOS Linux distributions. It could already crank out packages for Debian-derived Linuxes, such as Ubuntu.

Brockmeier's appointment as openSUSE community manager follows six months in the wake of Markus Rex's move from Novell to the Linux Foundation as its chief technology officer. The Linux Foundation asked to borrow Rex, who is Novell's chief technology officer for its Open Platforms Solutions Group (meaning Linux and related products) and one of the key techies from the original SUSE Linux. It was Murdock's departure from the Linux Foundation for the job at Sun that left a technical vacuum at the Linux Foundation, which Novell allowed Rex to fill, that has caused Novell to need to go out and find a community manager for the openSUSE project. While Novell has plenty of techies that could do the community manager role, it is probably wise to choose a technically oriented communicator for the role and leave the bit twiddling to those techies who are best suited for it.

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