Joe "Zonker" Brockmeier Dons a New Red Hat

Joe "Zonker" Brockmeier was a regular name in Linux not so long ago. He first appeared on my radar writing for the different websites I visited. It seemed like he wrote for them all, even the ones I eventually began writing for myself. Later, he really solidified his hero status in my book by actually becoming a full-time Novell employee as community manager for openSUSE. But now, after a bit of a sabbatical, he's traded in all his green t-shirts for red hats.

I almost lost track of Zonker after he left openSUSE. I did see some articles by him in the interim, but I finally heard what's he doing now. In a post on his personal blog, Brockmeier said, "Today, I'm going to have the privilege of joining [Red Hat] – and I'm really excited and optimistic about the possibilities." But that was it. I had to find out more. So, in an email interview Brockmeier said he actually started this past Monday. Monday and Tuesday were new-hire orientation in Raleigh, but he says he will be telecommuting from his current residence in St. Louis.

Brockmeier has joined Red Hat's Open Source and Standards team which another describes as "a group focused on helping all of Red Hat's upstream communities make their lives better." Brockmeier said, "New and growing communities need a lot of things - from help with governance to content creation to help with events - and I'll be working on a variety of things in that area.

Brockmeier concluded his comments to me with:

A lot of companies these days are doing some good work in open source, but Red Hat is untouched in its commitment to open source and the sheer magnitude of talent contributing to FOSS. It's hard to overstate how glad I am to have the opportunity to work with the company in general, and my team in particular.