Hello Sarah, I am excited to read that you will be able to contribute more to openSUSE on Z.  You along with many others in the openSUSE community have done a lot! Best of luck in your new job. Mike On 4/17/21 9:25 AM, Sarah Julia Kriesch wrote:

Hi friends,

we have achieved some advancements in the last have year. But a lot would not have been possible without many of you. openSUSE Leap 15.3 Beta would not have been possible without Sergio as an example, because I was not allowed to contribute to special Github repositories. Last month I have learned about the reason about that. No IBMer of the Z department is allowed to contribute to openSUSE in such a role, as long as nobody exists for Fedora. That was the case!

My decision was to leave IBM, because I was not allowed to do my job. I will keep up my friendly contacts to receive support and improvements. But I have chosen to do Linux on Z Consulting now in combination with my openSUSE contributions as a volunteer. My new employer is supporting that. I have received the necessary approval after 2 days in comparison to 1 month at IBM. Additionally, I am allowed to contribute upstream now, too.

It should be clear, that it was my suggestion to support openSUSE without IBM as an employer for the next year. It was hard for me to have this role as an IBMer, but not to achieve anything because of missing approvals.

There are enough options with companies supporting that for open-source contributors. I'm looking forward to be able to contribute more to openSUSE for s390x in the future.

Best regards, Sarah