Before openSUSE 11.0 GM get released next Thursday, we have the chance to meet Cornelius Schumacher - member of the incubation team, former Build Service developer, KDE vice president, and also the one who started writing down the openSUSE Guiding Principles.

When and why did you start using openSUSE/SUSE Linux?

I have a “November ‘95″ edition here on one of my shelves. I guess that’s the first one I used. On the cover it says, it comes with Kernel 1.2.13 and ELF is a new feature. Nice. I don’t really remember why I started to use SUSE. I certainly was curious about Linux and I always had a tendency to use promising technology

In what way do you participate in the openSUSE project?

As SUSE employee I of course get in touch with openSUSE as part of my daily work. When I think about it I realize that a focus of my work is infrastructure for the project. I was one of the architects which created the openSUSE Build Service and I wrote the first version of its frontend and web client. I also was deeply involved with writing down the openSUSE Guiding Principles, which is a non-technical but still very important infrastructure part of the project. There are also other things like being a mentor for the Google Summer of Code for openSUSE or contributing to upstream projects like KDE. One of the great things about openSUSE is that there are so many ways one can contribute.

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