Last fall, the openSUSE Project achieved an important milestone: the first-ever openSUSE Board election. Two new members joined the two victorious incumbents and the Novell-appointed chairman to form the project's first elected board. Now the composition is changing once again, as one of the board's original members takes a step back.

Federico Mena-Quintero — known in the Open Source community for being one of the original founders of the GNOME Project, with Miguel de Icaza and Elliot Lee — was appointed to the original openSUSE Board in November 2007, and won re-election in October. He holds one of the two elected seats for those associated with Novell, and works full time for the company on GTK+ and other aspects of GNOME. In an email sent to the openSUSE project email last on Thursday, Mena-Quintero announced that because "work and other duties have kept me too busy to be a useful part of the Board," he is stepping down, effective immediately. His message stressed that he is not stepping away from openSUSE, and will continue to work with the openSUSE-GNOME team.

Michael Löffler, chairman of the openSUSE Board, announced later in the day that longtime contributor Stephen Shaw, runner up in last year's election, will take over the remainder of Mena-Quintero's term, which will come up for election in November. Shaw is likewise employed by Novell, on the SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop team — he was previously a QA intern with the XEN virtualization team. Shaw joins veteran contributors Pascal Bleser, Henne Vogelsang, Bryen Yunashko, and chairman Michael Loeffer to make up openSUSE Board 2.1.