The openSUSE board has been setup to lead the overall project. The board will: act as a central point of contact, help resolve conflicts, communicate community interests to Novell, facilitate communication with all areas of the community, and facilitate decision making processes where needed.
The board should provide guidance and support existing governance structures, but shouldn’t direct or control development, since community mechanisms exist to accomplish the goals of the project. The board should document decisions and policies.
The initial board has been appointed by Novell — in the future, the board members will be elected by the community and the chair person appointed by Novell. One of the missions of the board is to define a process to elect the next board.
The chosen members are as follows:
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Pascal Bleser lives in Belgium and works as a software architect and developer at a large European ISV in Germany. He contributes most of his time building packages for openSUSE in the Packman and openSUSE Build Service repositories. He is also a member of the team that organizes FOSDEM, one of the largest and most appreciated opensource developer conferences in Europe. |
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Francis Giannaros is a Mathematics and Philosophy undergraduate studying at King’s College London. He is working on pulling together, along with many others, the openSUSE Community; a big part of this is demonstrated through openSUSE-Community.org. Other involvements include wiki handling, openSUSE News editing and further coordination tasks. |
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Andreas Jaeger works for Novell now as director openSUSE and platform where he’s responsible for the openSUSE project. He’s been involved with the openSUSE project from the beginning and helped to launch it. Previously he was project manager for the openSUSE and SUSE Linux distribution. He has driven the port of Linux to x86-64 and ported the GNU C Library to the x86-64 architecture. Andreas has been appointed as chair person for the initial openSUSE board. |
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Stephan Kulow works for Novell as project manager of the openSUSE distribution. Part of his duties there is the release management. Before changing into the project manager role, he worked as lead of the KDE and Usability teams. He is also widely known for having served as release manager for the KDE project for many years. |
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Federico Mena-Quintero is one of the founders of the GNOME Project. Before that, he worked as maintainer of the GIMP. In the early days of GNOME he was responsible for some of the original code and documentation for the GNOME libraries, games, and applications. He also worked on Evolution, the GTK+ toolkit, the GNOME platform libraries, and the Nautilus file manager. Federico started the GNOME Performance project during the 2005 GNOME Summit in Boston. He currently works for Novell, Inc. |
You can reach the board directly via email board@opensuse.org. The board invites everybody to start general discussions on the opensuse-project (subscribe) mailing list.
I’m glad to announce this board and thank the members for taking on this duty. I wish the board and the community all the best for a constructive collaboration in making openSUSE even better.
Michael Löffler
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Ahem, Fedora Project already has a board on it’s second year and the second term has members elected by the Fedora community. Novell is yet again mimicking Fedora. Good luck.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Board
What’s your point? There shouldn’t be a board because another earlier founded project has something similar?
so? Novell isn’t mimicking anyone. If you want to go by that idea, then Fedora are mimicking all the business around the world, charities, foundations that all have boards. Grow up and take you rubbish else where.
When talking about distributions, Novell is copying the Red Hat model out and out and still lagging behind. There is no way for anyone outside of Novell to maintain packages in the main software repository yet AFAIK. If you are going to copy, better leapfrog ahead rather than continously stay behind the curve.
I can certainly think of areas like YaST or the build service where openSUSE is ahead of Red Hat.
YAST? Don’t even mention it. Zero focus on having it like a proper open source project and zero adoption from other distributions. Bloated and overwrites your custom settings ever so often. Atleast the nice modular tools like system-config-printer from Fedora is also used by Ubuntu by default. Have you seen it in action?
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/8/ReleaseSummary
http://cyberelk.net/tim/2007/05/24/new-printer-notification-mock-ups/
http://cyberelk.net/tim/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/system-config-printer-werewolf.ogg
No you convinced me that you only want to troll: YaST is an open source project, with complete new module in 10.3 by external contributor. About zero adoption, why doesn’t Oracle Enterprise Linux count for you?
Yes,we are cloning the way that most organizations work, using a concept invented around year 1900.. troll :P
Nothing is more in the spirit of FLOSS than copying the things that work well…
Good news!
Congratulations to the members :-)
Just keep on doing it.
May the good work continue
Great improvement. This will lead the OpenSUSE community to another step ahead. I’m glad to know the chosen person in OpenSUSE board.
Good luck !
Congratulations Guys!
I welcome the new openSUSE Board and am glad that all of the current members are well known community addicts (instead of just being Business Men, what I first expected).
I am looking forward to see the upcoming election process as this must be the next logical step.
Best Regards
Marcus Moeller