A friend of mine sent me a note about Jeff Shantz’s post on his initial impression of the openSUSE Project thanks to a couple of helpful responses:

it certainly struck me that these replies that I received were illustrative of a working, functional open source community — the end goal is to improve the product, and if one person doesn’t have time to continue working on a particular piece, then maybe someone else can. No territorial markings or egotism. Just one common goal to get it done.

So thanks to both Daniel and Jan (and my mentor, Marek Stopka, of course!) for a good initial experience in the openSUSE community! I look forward to making many future contributions.

Of course, for every person who is willing to put their neck out and blog about a good (or bad) experience, there are hundreds or thousands who don’t bother.

But please keep this in mind when interacting on the mailing lists. A positive, helpful response can make all the difference. We need to be doing our best to help new users and contributors, rather than spraying (as Karsten Wade often says) “community repellent” on potential contributors and users.

So, as Jeff says – thanks to Jan Weber and J. Daniel Schmidt. Glad to see this sort of attention being focused on openSUSE contributors.

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