Matthias Hopf, a SUSE developer working on the X11 stack for the past seven years and one of the original xf86-video-radeonhd driver developers, has left the company.
This long-time X developer is leaving two years after
SUSE lost another one of its RadeonHD developers, Luc Verhaegen. Luc was laid off with several other developers at the German office in 2009 when Novell was attempting to cut its costs during the global economic crisis. Matthias is leaving SUSE to become a professor of Applied Computer Science at Georg-Simon-Ohm University. Ohm is a university of applied sciences in Nürnberg where he currently resides.
While he may be parting ways with SUSE, he will hopefully remain involved with X.Org. He's still serving on the board of directors for the X.Org Foundation and is a very experienced computer graphics developer. With a bit of luck, hopefully he can manage to recruit some new developers to work on the Linux graphics stack.
For those wondering if this departure from SUSE is a result of
the Attachmate acquisition of Novell or any restructuring like
Attachmate getting rid of the Mono developers and
handing off the control, this is not the case. I first heard of Hopf's plans to depart from SUSE several months ago (circa May), but only yesterday did he finally leave SUSE for his new profession and
publicly blogged about his change in occupation. He was interested in going back into the academic world and received a compelling offer to be a professor at Georg-Simon-Ohm University

Matthias Hopf will be at
XDC2011 Chicago in just over one week. Along with Hopf there will be his former colleagues Egbert Eich and Luc Verhaegen of the defunct RadeonHD project for the X.Org Developers' Conference. Alex Deucher and John Bridgman, their former contacts at AMD from the RadeonHD project, will also be at the event with other developers.
Best of luck to Matthias Hopf and his new work. Matthias, there will be a Hefeweizen ready when you get to Chicago, to celebrate your years of work on SUSE.