Today was my last day actually working for/at SuSE. In fact I spent part of the day putting up kitchen cupboards and a wardrobe at home (courtesy of IKEA, and Ariana and Kamran (and Azar) who helped us bring the stuff home last weekend). See photos.

We made arrangements for all the incoming mail to such addresses as info@suse.co.uk (most of which were read first by me) to go to a queue in Germany to be handled by the STTS (SuSE trouble ticket system) which will be read by the rest of the UK team.

I still haven't got round to telling everyone that needs to be told that I'm leaving - there's time as I'm still officially employed until the end of March (but on holiday).

I'm just installing beta2 of 9.1 - my feeling is that James is basically right about the need for ULB going away as a result of SuSE/Ximian/Novell. I'm also very pleased about the YaST GPL announcement which seems to have been leaked ahead of time. It was a bore as well as sometimes embarrassing having to defend the YaST licence. Although I personally thought there were good reasons for it at the time (mainly to avoid the emergence of SuSE clones in the way that RedHat clones used to be everywhere), it's cleaner and simpler now that the issue has gone away.

The distance that Linux has come in the four and a quarter years that I've been at SuSE is extraordinary. The Novell takeover confirms that, and it's a confirmation of what I believed in late 1999 when I first applied for a job at SuSE. It's been a privilege to work for the company, and I will always be grateful to Jasmin and Rüdiger for taking me on in 1999. I'll miss my colleagues, but I'm looking forward to the new job in April very much.