Hi, I’m benny. How can I help?
I like crocheting, reading (though it’s mostly audiobooks these days), card games, board games, baking, music, and wine. I’ve even successfully kept a Jade plant alive for more than a year (a personal record). I spent much of my early career in Windows desktop support and web hosting, moved to DevOps a couple years ago, and earlier today we announced that I’m taking on the leadership position on the Board of Directors for the AlmaLinux OS Foundation.
As we got closer to finalizing our membership structure Igor announced that he planned to step down from the board, making good on the promise he made at the very beginning to allow AlmaLinux to be community-owned. The board up to this point has functioned well as a group of people building a scaffolding around a fantastic idea. We’ve relied on each other’s expertise, and worked to build the structure on which the AlmaLinux community can be successful in all of our goals.
What’s Next?
As chair of the board for the AlmaLinux OS Foundation, I have two primary goals in the short term. First, I want to continue to build diversity into the core of the AlmaLinux community by introducing new people to the wonderful world of Linux through AlmaLinux. Second, I want to ensure that we’re continuing to meet the needs of folks who are reaching for an alternative to CentOS Linux.
If you’ve seen any of the numbers that are coming out recently (see this and this, for example) AlmaLinux adoption is growing exponentially. We’re helping new people every day, and expect that growth to continue as we near the end of the year, and the end of CentOS Linux 8’s support.
AlmaLinux as the replacement for CentOS Linux makes fantastic sense for many enterprise businesses. We take our role as a community-owned, community-driven, and community-built free enterprise operating system in the RHEL ecosystem very seriously. We want to be here to welcome new users to the RHEL community, and to support organizations as they move forward.
We are a community-owned non-profit, and AlmaLinux belongs to its members. In case you missed it, last week we opened up our membership applications. As soon as we have enough members to make it meaningful, the Board will initiate our first election. If you have helped AlmaLinux become what it is, I want to encourage you to submit your application! You deserve to have a voice in the future of AlmaLinux!
Want to chat?
To start, I’ll be at next week’s Open Office Hours. We’ll also be having an AMA with the whole board on October 21st on YouTube. You can always email me, message me on Mattermost, or find me on twitter. If you’d like an elbow-bump, next week I’ll even be at All Things Open. I’m excited to see where the community can take AlmaLinux, and to help in any way I can.
The future of AlmaLinux is bright. Let’s get to work.