I was mildly interested to see if Joe “Zonker” Brockmeier would continue to spread his special brand of so-close-to-a-lie-why-not-just-call-it-that distortions once he left Novell. Well, now we have an answer:
Yes.
And – brace yourself for a shock here – he is targeting the FSF. Again. This time around, though we are treated to simple poor reason instead of the previous gross misrepresentations of Monsieurs Stallman and Moglen.
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.
[...]
It will be interesting to see who lands in the now-open Community Manager spot at Novell. Those are going to be some big shoes to fill.
Comments
Needs Sunlight
2010-02-02 17:10:18
Once people go south, can they be turned around? In other words, what's wrong with Brockmeiers and can he straighten out?
your_friend
2010-02-03 05:07:16
your_friend
2010-02-03 05:25:10