this is my first public message to openSUSE project, and that means first I'd like to introduce myself: My name is Roland Haidl aka rhaidl, and I started to work in SUSE nearly ten years ago. In that time I managed the SUSE documentation, usability, design etc. After Novell having bought SUSE I took over several other management task.
Now, while Novell/OPS engineering adopted to a new strategy regarding openSUSE, we decided that the people, who Novell dedicated to work in the openSUSE project, come under my responsibility.
For me that is awesome and something new - as it is in general. Why, since we already had Novell people working for openSUSE in the past? Well, the new thing that with this step Novell decided to intensify its openSUSE sponsorship. Now we have a group of people that is exclusively dedicated to the openSUSE project.
It is not longer the "when time is left, please work in the openSUSE project" thing we often had before, we now have the singular situation to have a team of more than 10 experts in Novell to only work on openSUSE community topics. This is the Novell "openSUSE Team", and it is there to be a part of the community and make it easier for people to join in, enjoy and contribute.
We (speaking as part of the Novell management) learned to trust the community, and, as a result of this, want to support the project even more. For proof let's see how the team will work.
Of course the team also has reponsibilities, that is basically the openSUSE distribution and the healthy growth of the project. Both challenges will and can only be done in a strong community with YOU and I hope you appreciate the existance of the new team as much as I do.
The people working in the team are all well known since they already worked a lot in the community. I leave it up to the team to introduce itself. As the lead of the team we nominated Klaas Freitag, who is an experienced manager on the one hand and a community guy on the other. Henne Vogelsang takes over the role as project manager openSUSE, and Stephan Kulow will continue to be the release manager for the next openSUSE distribution.
