Joe “Zonker” Brockmeier, has been the community manager for OpenSUSE for a number of months now. We thought we’d see how the job was coming along. Zonker courteously agreed to be interviewed by us.

SCALE: Was there one thing that convinced you to take the OpenSUSE Community Manager job?

Joe: Yes - the opportunity to work directly with a FOSS project and help encourage Linux adoption.

SCALE: How have you been received by the community? Any surprises so far?

Joe: I think very well. I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how enthusiastic the openSUSE community is (I expected some enthusiasm, just not so much…) and how much fun it’s been to be working with the openSUSE community.

SCALE: What issues has the OpenSUSE community raised? How would you see those concerns addressed?

Joe: That’s a pretty large question, given that I’ve talked to hundreds of openSUSE community members and contributors… Some of the issues we’re working on right now include finding better processes for contributions, and electing a board for the first time (our first board is appointed).

SCALE: How do OpenSUSE and the commercial SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop differ? Do they share a common code base? Does one benefit from the other?

Joe: A couple of ways - one, SLED moves more slowly than openSUSE, with releases about every two years. Novell bases SUSE Linux Enterprise off of openSUSE releases. Specifically, SLED 10 was based on openSUSE 10.1 and SLED 11 will be based on openSUSE 11.1. So they do share common code, because openSUSE is the foundation for SUSE Linux Enterprise.

Both benefit from this — Novell engineers contribute to openSUSE as part of the work towards SUSE Linux Enterprise (and often on their own time as well) and obviously SUSE Linux Enterprise benefits from additional testing and contributions to openSUSE.

SCALE: As the community manager for OpenSUSE, do you interact with community managers from other projects such as Red Hat and Ubuntu?

Joe: Yeah, absolutely. I speak with them frequently at shows and try to maintain contact and find ways we (the projects) can work together, and also just commiserate about the community manager job and compare experiences. I suppose there’s a temptation to imagine that the various distros are all in opposition of one another, but in my experience, most people in the Linux community are more focused on improving and promoting Linux than competing directly with other distros.

The great thing about this industry is that you can collaborate with the competition, so to speak — though I really look to Microsoft and Apple as competitors to openSUSE rather than Fedora or Ubuntu (or other Linux distros). The mission for openSUSE is to increase the use of Linux everywhere. Inclusive to that is the need to work with other projects and improve Linux and drive its adoption in general, as well as trying to specifically drive adoption of openSUSE.

SCALE: Where do you see OpenSUSE going in the future? What are the biggest challenges you see?

Joe: I think OpenSUSE will continue to improve, expand its audience, and help drive Linux adoption. Our next release is expected in December. It will have the KDE 4.1 release (actually 4.1.1 or later) and GNOME 2.24, and many other improvements. We have a number of challenges, maintaining the technical excellence that SUSE has always been known for, helping expand the contributor base for openSUSE and continuing to help the project mature.

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