Wanted: Community Manager
Novell's Got Some Big Shoes to Fill
Today marks the end of the Era of Zonker at Novell, as Joe Brockmeier ends his tenure as Community Manager of openSUSE.
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.
I still believe that, and it's something on which Brockmeier and I disagree. But it doesn't change my respect for his work.
Plus, history has thus far demonstrated that the sky hasn't fallen in now that Microsoft is playing in the open source sandbox. There has been some friction, but overall the corporate attitude towards open source in Redmond seems to be thawing. Microsoft's relationship with Novell and watching the success of Google using open source tech likely play a big part in that thaw.
Brockmeier hasn't publicly cited his reason for departure, save to indicate in his blog that "one of the most important responsibilities any employee has -- especially a community manager--is to know when to move on, and not remain in a role just for the sake of having a job."
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.
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good riddance
one of the most important responsibilities any employee has -- especially a community manager--is to know when to move on, and not remain in a role just for the sake of having a job."What a jackass!!
Millions of people without jobs, hundreds of thousands are losing homes and business, millions cant afford insurance and this moron treats a job like its a choice between croquet or lawn bowling.
You remain in a job when you have kids, a house, cars and all kinds of payments. Yep, if you can find your dream job, go for it.
You have a responsability to do you job well. Period.
I thought he was a douche for going to Novell when guys like Allison were going the other way.
But this quote confirms he's a douche with a high opinion of himself.
As for Redmond, show me ONE person in charge from Steverino, Hector, Brad and such who have changed their tunes. You wont.
You can trot out the low level managers they bring out to charm the bloggers, the Bill Milfs of the world so you can say, "See, theyre not that bad". Meanwhile, the ones at top have not said one thing.
Answer me a question: when you want to know the direction a company is going in (take Apple or any Fortune 500), do you take your cue from a Steve Jobs or do you say "No. Bob the West Coast assistant manager in charge of networking and paper clips say the company is going in this direction."
But that's whats happening here. No one at the top of MS has even hinted that things are different than 18-24months ago when Steve claimed that I and other users have to pay MS for using Red Hat because it steals from them (and reminding us that Novell has paid up the extortion) but since they sent a few stooges to some conventions, things are supposed to be different.
I was already skeptical a few years ago but after reading many of the documents Groklaw has linked to in the Comes vs Microsoft case and read how Microsoft does business (I always thought the case against them was a bit on the heavy handed side but after reading those documents and emails, its seems they were just as bad as we thought if not much worse).
'Show me' is popular in my state and not because of spring break.So until I hear/read any repudiation of the past 2-3 years of attacks on Linux from THE HEADS at Microsoft, I have absolutely nothing to base this 'things are different' vibe you are peddling.
And considering that the whole TomTom lawsuit by MS over three patents that relate to TomTom's implementation of the Linux kernel wasnt even one year ago, it seems your idea of thaw is pretty strange.
As a “Non-Compensated Individual Hobbyist Developer”, Novell and their apologist Zonker were defending threats to my livelyhood.
For that they can both go to hell.
Preach on, mah brotha!
Couldn't agree more.re: good riddance
Agree 100%