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Community, Incorporated

Joe Brockmeier reports on the intersection of commercial interests and communities, and offers information and advice about bridging the gap between companies and communities.

Joe Brockmeier

Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier is the community manager for openSUSE, a community Linux distro sponsored by Novell. Prior to joining Novell, Brockmeier worked as a technology journalist primarily covering the Linux and FOSS beat, and wrote for a number of publications, such as Linux Magazine, Linux.com, Sys Admin, UnixReview.com, IBM developerWorks, Linux Weekly News, Enterprise Linux Magazine, and ZDNet.

Latest Posts

Quick thoughts on the (possible) demise of OpenSolaris

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols writes that the "writing is on the wall.

July 13, 2009 by Joe Brockmeier in Linux

Microsoft sneaks in Firefox extension via Update

The good news is that Microsoft is writing extensions for Firefox. The bad news is, the Redmond giant is slipping the extension onto systems without notifying users and making it difficult to get rid of the extension.

May 31, 2009 by Joe Brockmeier in Windows

What do you want for free? Do users have to pay up to complain?

Matt Asay excorates the whining masses that are taking Twitter to task for its ill-considered removal of the @replies feature. Asay says "pay money so that you actually have the right to voice your displeasure as a customer rather than as a user.

May 13, 2009 by Joe Brockmeier in Enterprise Software

Using selfishness to put crowds to work for you

How do you enable "the wisdom of crowds"? Part of the power of community is that a group of people can solve problems much more easily than individuals, but only if you can provide tools that make it possible for them to do so and appeal to their own interests.

May 7, 2009 by Joe Brockmeier in Finance

Miro puts code up for adoption

I've heard of "orphaned" code, but this is a new one. The Miro project is trying a new approach to funding: asking enthusiasts to "adopt" lines of code.

April 29, 2009 by Joe Brockmeier in Developer

Oprah comes, Oprah goes: Who cares?

As a tool, Twitter has its advantages and disadvantages, but does it really matter if Oprah Winfrey decides to keep up with her account or not? Apparently the Silicon Alley Insider finds it fascinating, even tracking the number of people following her and the rate of new followers compared to other popular folks on Twitter.

April 29, 2009 by Joe Brockmeier in Social Media

The argument for free fonts

Bring up free fonts around typeface designers, and you'll probably get an earful about the relative quality of free and open source designs against the professionally designed fonts. Mark Pilgrim, over on Dive into Mark gives an earful back.

April 23, 2009 by Joe Brockmeier in Enterprise Software

What does Oracle mean for Sun's open source efforts?

So much for a big blue Sun. Instead, the company is being gobbled up Oracle for about $7.

April 20, 2009 by Joe Brockmeier in Open Source

Prioritizing bugs to boost Linux adoption

What are the problems that need to be solved to boost Linux adoption? And in what order?

April 17, 2009 by Joe Brockmeier in Enterprise Software

Yet another "Mac vs. PC" article that misses the point

BusinessWeek has yet another article on the relative costs of Macs vs. PCs, and author Arik Hesseldahl comes down on the Mac side:PC makers in the Windows camp have done everything possible to make their products progressively worse by cutting corners to save pennies per unit and boost sales volume.

April 16, 2009 by Joe Brockmeier in Processors

Google releases source for Google Update

Word came down from the Google-plex last Friday that the company has decided to release the source code for Google Update. Codenamed Omaha, Update is a software installer that automatically updates Google Earth, Chrome, and other Google-produced apps designed to run on Windows.

April 15, 2009 by Joe Brockmeier in Google

Savory hacks the Kindle for ePub and PDF support

Jesse Vincent is doing Amazon's work for it. Vincent has put together an app called Savory that runs natively on the Kindle to convert ePub and PDFs dropped into the Kindle 2 document folder.

April 10, 2009 by Joe Brockmeier in Amazon

Quality improves for Google Summer of Code

The Google Summer of Code student application period wrapped up last week, and the overall number of applications is down from 2008. However, this is shaping up to be a good thing.

April 6, 2009 by Joe Brockmeier in Google

Perfectionists need not apply

If you're a perfectionist, or prefer to solve problems alone, you're going to have some problems working with community projects. Individual contributors and companies need to get used to working in the open, and be willing to work towards perfection rather than trying to nail it the first time.

April 6, 2009 by Joe Brockmeier in Open Source

How to make technology conferences suck less

There's a dirty little secret to technology conferences: Most of them suck to some degree. It's about time someone started thinking about how to make conference time more valuable and less stale, especially now that companies are cutting back on travel to shows.

April 2, 2009 by Joe Brockmeier in CXO