A picture of Gerald

Dr. Gerald Pfeifer

Keep me away from the wisdom
which does not cry,
the philosophy
which does not laugh,
and the greatness
which does not bow before children.
[Khalil Gibran]

The World is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.
[Aurelius Augustinus]

In my professional life I am a Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at SUSE, the world's largest independent Open Source company, and serve as chair of the openSUSE Board.

Before that I served as Vice President of Products & Technology Programs • creating and progressing SUSE's broad portfolio of infrastructure and application delivery Open Source enterprise software, including the SUSE Linux Enterprise family (incl. SAP offerings, High Availability, HPC,...), Ceph-based SUSE Enterprise Storage, SUSE OpenStack Cloud, and management products (SUSE Manager, Customer Center,...), Kubernetes-based CaaS Platform, and Cloud Foundry based Cloud Application Platform with hundreds of millions of revenue • driving pricing strategy • leading teams of product managers, technical account managers, and certification, ISV, and CSP engineers, spread globally • working with a development team of ~700.

Leading up to that I ran product management for the SUSE portfolio at Novell and was project lead for Enterprise Linux, coordinating dozens of teams in an engineering organization matrixed all over the world. In addition I was responsible for specific aspects of the SUSE Linux platform such as the Itanium version, RAS and scalability, bootstrapped the Software Development Kit, and served as release manager.

Most of 2003, I was on a research contract at C.I.E.S./University of Calabria, working on the DLV system. Before that, I spent several years in academia, mostly as assistant professor at the Database and Artificial Intelligence Group at Vienna University of Technology. Apart from research in databases and artificial intelligence (deductive databases, non-monotonic reasoning, knowledge representation & reasoning) and teaching, I supervised theses and projects and managed the sysadmin team.

Outside of work I contribute to GCC, where I maintain the web presence and documentation, do the occasional hack and serve on the Steering Committee, openSUSE, and FreeBSD, where I am a ports committer (ramping down recently after maintaining the GCC and Wine ports for two decades).

I practice and teach Yoga, enjoy scuba diving as a certified divemaster, and love seeing places and connecting with other humans.

My doctorate in technical sciences (Dr.techn.) is from Vienna University of Technology.

Further Projects and Affiliations

Past Projects and Affiliations

  • Member of the editorial board of Linux Technical Review, 2009-2011.
  • GCC Summit program committee member 2004-2010.
  • VIBE!AT (Verein für Internet-Benutzer Österreichs), founding member, member of the board 1999-2006.
  • An Introduction to GCC, technical editor.
  • Newsservertest, where we assessed the quality of different Usenet servers.
  • Austrian Volunteer Votetaker for the Usenet hierarchy at.* and moderator of the Newsgroup at.usenet.cancel-reports.
  • In charge of the business computing and prepress environments at Druckerei Peter Pfeifer from 1987 and 1992, resp., to the late 1990s.
  • German translator for Refs, a reference database and bibliography software package.
  • Tutor for Systems Programming, Algorithms and Data Structures 1 and 2, Software Engineering 1 and 2, and Übersetzerbau (compiler construction) at TU Wien.

Scientific Conferences


Gerald Pfeifer (gerald@pfeifer.com)
Last modified Tue Apr 9 07:51:44 2024.