Alan Clark new openSUSE Board Chairman

[caption id=”attachment_5918” align=”alignright” width=”252” caption=”Alan Clark. Chairman of the openSUSE Board”][/caption]

As you know, Michael Loeffler has left the openSUSE Board to pursue new opportunities, we are sad to see him go and wish him well. With his departure and with the upcoming Board elections, we have a desire to see a new Chairperson selected. The election rules state that the Chairperson be appointed by Novell and yesterday Markus Rex, General Manager of Novells Open Platform Solutions, presented Alan Clark to us as the new Chairperson.

As you may be aware, we have focused a significant amount of our time on the creation of an openSUSE Foundation to be independent and to be able to collect and spread funds. And Novell has been very supportive with our desire to see this come to fruition. Markus told us that one of the reasons he selected Alan is that he has a lot of expertise in setting up foundations. Alan helped to form the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) and the Linux Foundation, as well as several other open source projects and organisations. We, along with Markus, believe that Alan’s experience and expertise will be an asset of immense value to the Board, and we welcome that as we, and Novell, partner together in forging ahead on an exciting and promising future for the openSUSE Project.

Alan has already been working with us on the foundation work, but most of you probably don’t know him, so we asked Alan to introduce himself:

Having the opportunity to work closely with the openSUSE community is an exciting endeavour. My work assignments over the past few years have enabled me to work directly with members of the community. By attending the recent openSUSE conference I was able to make many more friends and acquaintances. As always it was a great experience. One of my personal goals from this role will be to get to know and to work with as many members of the community as possible. A bit about me: Though my engineering roles have varied throughout the years, I am a software developer at heart. I began my career writing Unix based network protocols. Anybody remember LAT? My past projects have helped me develop a broad technical base across the spectrum of software development, from device drivers, to file systems, to network protocols, to identity and security, to developer SDKs and across multiple operating systems. I remember that the first day I was able to do my work on Linux was a great day. I am extremely optimistic for the future of openSUSE, the potential growth of the community, delivery of the openSUSE strategy and the advancement of Linux in general. Our community has a great future! My goal is to help facilitate the many ambitions of the openSUSE community members and advance the openSUSE Guiding Principles.

Please join us in welcoming Alan to his new role! Alan will begin his position at the next openSUSE Board meeting tomorrow at 19:00 UTC in the #opensuse-project channel on the Freenode network. All of our meetings are open to the public and we welcome you to our meeting to meet Alan.

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