Summary: "OpenSUSE Boosters" now official; Another SUSE worker departs

PREVIOUS posts about the OpenSUSE Conference [1, 2, 3] covered the event as a whole, but it turns out that an "RPM Summit" took place there too. Here are the details:

I’m sure you all heard about the openSUSE Conference 2009 that took place in September in Nuremberg. Not so many know about the RPM Summit that was a part of the conference during its first two days. Idea to create something like this started at LinuxTag 2009 when Zonker invited Florian to Nuremberg.

Zonker returns from vacation and an older interview with him is published for non-subscribers to read.

The openSUSE Conference was held September 17 - 20, 2009 in Nürnberg, Germany. There was full schedule with talks, workshops, Birds of a Feather sessions, an RPM summit, and more. We talked with openSUSE community manager Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier about the conference.

Boosted by Novell's PR team, there is some other stuff going on around him. Zonker used to be Perlow's editor in Linux Magazine and now he's promoting his review, which was published here in Vimeo (as video) and at ZDNet (as text).

I haven’t used openSUSE as my main Linux desktop OS for a while — that honor, at least for the last few years, has gone to Ubuntu. But could openSUSE 11.2 and it’s sexy KDE 4.3 implementation bring me back? Perhaps, perhaps.

Zonker and Perlow are now colleagues at ZDNet (correction: Zonker stopped writing for ZDNet a few months ago). There are other intersecting interests that we learned about, e.g. at OStatic.

We've occasionally mentioned the term "Microsoft Boosters" and "Novell Boosters" in the past, e.g. [1, 2, 3]. At one point we also explained why Zonker was a "'Novell Booster' in the Linux News." Novell needed some publicity, so it hired a person who had contacts in the press.

The OpenSUSE project now announces the ‘OpenSUSE Boosters’ Team, whose picture can be found here (from Federico, who left the OpenSUSE Board).

Writing about "New Challenges", here is another man who has officially left SUSE.

Some of you might have already noticed it: I’m no longer working for SUSE.

"No Thanks Microsoft Puppet" was the title assigned to this new comment from BrentH, who explained:

Suse employs some questionable business tactics thanks to a money trail leading back to Redmond. I no long consider Suse as a trustworthy linux distro.

OpenSUSE is still a fine distribution from a technical point of view. It also has some loyal supporters who stick with it despite Novell and Microsoft. Ben Kevan, for example, is catering for OpenSUSE 11.2, OpenSUSE 11.1 and OpenSUSE 11.0 while some folks work on and maintain an OpenSUSE version which targets education.

Novell's Stephan Kulow wrote about some changes in packaging and WebYaST is coming along too.

That doesn’t solve the 11.1->11.2 update case, but after updating to 11.2, you can reselect the patterns you want and you can be sure they will stay from now on. And perhaps we do an online update for 11.0 and 11.1 that will add patterns packages to the most prominent use case: the desktops.

Sandy from Novell wrote about Tomboy 1.2 and Federico wrote about Zeitgeist, which was at one stage at risk of Mono [1, 2]. It turns out that he worked with the Ximian team at one point.

Some years ago, after I stopped working on Evolution, I worked for a brief period in the Ximian edition of OpenOffice.org. Before that, I had never worked on such a complex code base.

Last but not least, Sascha Manns still coordinates Weekly News posts, which continue coming. There is also an audio equivalent now. ⬆