
Suse is once again an independent company - bsg75
https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/15/suse-is-once-again-an-independent-company/
======
gpresot
Being owned by a Private Equity fund can really not be described as being
"independent". Such funds have a typical investment horizon of 5-7 years, with
potential exits being an IPO, a strategic sale (to a bigger company) or a sale
to another PE fund, with the strategic sale probably more typical. In the mean
time the fund will impose strict growth targets and strong cost cuts.

~~~
maaaats
Im working for a company that was bought by a private equity in 2015 and taken
off the stock market. Then introduced to the market again about two years
later.

They left us mostly alone, and most things actually turned to the better.
Maybe not having to answer to thousands of shareholders gave management the
possibility to implement some needed changes. One example was a new
salary/bonus/retirement structure giving a huge boost to most of us. So YMMV.

~~~
ui-explorer12
good point - there is far less reporting and PE has a much longer time frame
than the 2 quarters everyone but Warren Buffet cares about

------
mythz
I can't be the only one surprised with the $2.5 billion acquisition?

Suse basically fell off my radar a decade ago, I thought the next announcement
I was going to hear about them was going bankrupt and being sold off for
parts. Guess they've been super quiet achievers and have managed to accrue an
Annual Revenue of 300M that I've somehow missed behind the
release/announcements of flashier distros, but here we are with news of a 2.5B
acquisition - congratz to the team.

~~~
jaabe
For some weird reason Suse sees a lot of use in European countries with less
English influence, but I haven’t seen any exact numbers in years.

In my country (Denmark), most enterprise runs Redhat, but my personal opinion
is that Suse would make more sense after the IBM purchase, especially for
public sector usage.

~~~
marmaduke
I haven’t used SuSe since version 4 or 5 I think.. do you see it as a viable
replacement for CentOS?

~~~
usr1106
First you need to distinguish paid vs. non-paid variants.

Suse has SLES and IBM has RHEL. I am not in the position to compare them.

The non-paid variants are OpenSUSE vs. CentOS. One big difference there is the
support life. CentOS 6 with an ancient 2.6.32 kernel and upstart came out 2011
and is still supported. OpenSUSE releases are supported ~ 1.5 years. There are
different opinions whether upgrading from one OpenSUSE release to the next one
should be done or not. I typically prefer new installations because they
result in cleaner systems. But I also upgraded once an it was painless.

~~~
mseidl
CentOS is RHEL, just without the branding. SLES and openSUSE share the same
core packages. So you get the stable, well tested enterprise stuff.

~~~
rmk2
Correct. I'd say openSUSE is more akin to Fedora in that context as both base
and development distribution for SLES, much like Fedora is for RHEL (which in
turn then "becomes" CentOS).

~~~
usr1106
There are 2 OpenSUSE variants, LEAP and Tumbleweed. Their release model has
changed maybe 3 years ago.

LEAP is exactly the same package versions as in the newest SLES I believe. I
would expect them often to be a bit older package versions than Fedora, but I
haven't compared recently.

Tumbleweed is a leading/bleeding edge rolling release distro. The closest
equivalent is Fedora Rawhide.

------
solarkraft
Original announcement: [https://www.suse.com/c/news/suse-partners-with-growth-
invest...](https://www.suse.com/c/news/suse-partners-with-growth-investor-eqt-
to-continue-momentum-strategy-execution-and-product-expansion/)

Congratulations, SuSe!

Edit: The title seems to be a little mischaracterizing, SUSE themselves call
it a "Sale to EQT". But I suppose there is no other possibility.

~~~
hyperpape
It’s now owned by a private equity company. So their expectation is that it
will grow and make money and they control the board, but the PE company itself
doesn’t have a technology business that will determine Suse’s path.

If it were a tech company buying them, the assumption would be that the buyer
would try to digest Suse and incorporate its components into the parent.

------
pi-victor
openSUSE is a really good and modern linux distro, people complaining about
here probably haven't used it in a long while. Whilst i worked in A&T we
handled a few thousand+ servers running SLES 11 SP2 and it was solid.

I think they're biggest handicap is they're not from the US and while i worked
there people acknowledge they have horrible marketing. Also being bought and
sold a few times doesn't help, and with the HPE acquisition a few years back,
a lot of employees (on HPE side) simply left.

The kubic project has developed the only viable alternative to CoreOS that's
being phased out. Unfortunately where MicroOS falls short is SUSE's
stubbornness for using BtrFS, which causes a lot of headaches and has been
dropped from all major distros at this point. People in the kubic project have
also been contributors to kubernetes, kubeadm, OCI, (they even contributed a
lot of code to podman, from Red Hat) and they've been a significant driving
force for rootless containers
[https://rootlesscontaine.rs/](https://rootlesscontaine.rs/). It's weird
they're not more often in the limelight with all the hard work they do, but
maybe they'll take this opportunity to fix their marketing and steer into a
better direction :).

~~~
privateSFacct
btfrs is such a weird choice for an enterprise focused system where people
mostly want reliability / set and forget, though maybe the bad rep is old now
(I haven't used btfrs in years).

~~~
mistrial9
an engineering "teacher of teachers" I spoke with was able to corrupt btrfs
with a few well-chosen strokes, as it was told. The implication was - not
ready. This was three or four years ago.

~~~
Twirrim
I'm still reluctant to trust it, but there has been a _lot_ of work on btrfs
in that time frame, particularly around reliability and durability.
[https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...](https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/log/?qt=grep&q=btrfs)

------
whalesalad
What a coincidence. Just the other day I was going to take a trip down memory
lane and fire up a few VMs of my first Linux distributions. Then I realized
Suse 7.3 (I had a physical box set) wasn’t freely available in ISO format
anywhere. Bummer.

Still going to hunt down an early Slackware ISO and might try the first
versions of Fedora and Ubuntu again.

~~~
pkaye
Anyone remember Yggdrasil Linux?

~~~
pjmlp
Yes, being sold via the Walnut Creek CD-ROMs.

~~~
rzzzt
Soft Landing Linux on a million floppy disks?

~~~
amanaplanacanal
Boy are you guys sending me down memory lane. I remember all of these.

------
mongol
I am personally quite happy for this, I found SUSE in 2002 as it was installed
on the computer I got at that workplace. I have never really left it since.
Zypper, yast and Open Build Service are strong points, and lately I have used
the Kiwi image creation tool. Solid too. I hope the best for this
distribution.

------
jrs95
This is good news. With IBMs acquisition of Red Hat it's valuable to have one
of their direct competitors be fully independent.

~~~
timClicks
Canonical is also fully independent..

~~~
VWWHFSfQ
Canonical will be acquired by Microsoft. It's only a matter of time

~~~
jpalomaki
The desktop side is problematic. Developing desktop Linux makes no sense for
Microsoft, but acquiring Canonical and killing that part would look bad.

~~~
the_why_of_y
There isn't much left to kill there, given the massive reorg/layoffs in 2017;
it's all outsourced to the community already.

------
tylerl
Still don't know how to pronounce it.

~~~
stochastic_monk
Can’t Stop the Seuss-uh [0] demonstrates the pronunciation. They’re a German
company.

[0]
[https://youtube.com/watch?v=A-Rn0iQEpc8](https://youtube.com/watch?v=A-Rn0iQEpc8)

~~~
cmroanirgo
That's a seriously well made parody.

~~~
ekianjo
How about that one? Not SUSE related.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYRlTISvjww](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYRlTISvjww)

~~~
Vogtinator
It's about SUSE kgraft, kernel live patching.

------
Annatar
SuSE Linux Enterprise Server is by far the most mature of all GNU/Linux
distributions. Their AutoYaST provisioning system with Kiwi imaging capability
is conceptually identical to Solaris' JumpStart™️ with compressed Flash™️
archives and is technologically superior to Docker images because it is much
more simpler, yet offers the same conceptual capability without the need for
cgroups.

Their technical support is wonderful and they truly deserve to be the most
deployed GNU/Linux distribution in the enterprise. I hope they succeed in
stamping out redhat because they have a superior product with far more
competent engineering and support.

------
snuxoll
Wonder how this is going to affect Micro Focus’ other products in the future,
they have a lot of software inherited from Novell that relies on SUSE (some of
which aren’t even distributed as RPM’s but SLES-based virtual appliances like
ZenWorks).

~~~
Conan_Kudo
It's probably not going to affect it very much. SUSE has a decent sized chunk
of appliance/embedded Linux business.

Aside from SAP, another user that most people wouldn't be too aware of was
VMware. Before they created Photon OS, they used SUSE Linux Enterprise for
their vCenter appliances. They've been long-time SUSE customers.

In addition to that, a large chunk of point-of-sale systems are built using
SUSE Linux Enterprise customized JeOS ("Just enough Operating System")
appliance systems.

I think this is likely to be just fine.

(Note, not a SUSE employee, this is just based on my spelunking and research..
;) )

~~~
currysausage
Also, if you work at a larger company and have a Siemens/Unify IP phone on
your desk, it's not unlikely that it's connected to OpenScape Voice running on
SUSE. (Even if it's not an IP phone, it might be connected to a smaller sub-
PBX which itself talks to an OpenScape Voice server.

------
redsavagefiero
Loved SuSE forever..well at least since 1998.

------
bsg75
I wonder if EQT's investment is interest in potential growth from Enterprise
customers that may seek alternatives to IBM if their RHEL relationships
change? Suse being the "other RPM distro".

~~~
boxedwine
EQT buying SUSE was announced before IBM buying Red Hat was announced. So it
can't have been a reason at the time. Though I suspect it's a happy
circumstance now for EQT/SUSE.

------
z3t4
Can someone explain the business model of suse and redhat ? Is it selling open
source software ? How can that be worth billions ? How do you do practically ?
Direct sales to enterprise !? Is there a lot of configuration and extra
feature implementation, or does most enterprise run "vanilla" ? How do you
brak into this market ?

~~~
marenkay
Business models of all big software companies are identical and have not
changed in decades:

You buy licenses, renew them yearly. With various levels of premium support to
select from.

~~~
dmacvicar
Subscriptions, not licenses.

Subscriptions give you access to different level of support, and access to
updates.

------
chb
"Few companies have changed hands as often as Suse and yet remained strong
players in their business."

"Strong players"? What quantitative evidence exists demonstrating that SuSE
has any more than a marginal and insignificant share of server or desktop
installs?

~~~
mongol
I found this interesting:

"Not that surprising, SLE POS is one of SUSE's best selling products

For example, in the states, 70% of Fortune 100 merchandisers, speciality
retailers, and food and drug stores use it

Including a few big names like Walmart"

[https://www.reddit.com/r/openSUSE/comments/b1cvdj/spotted_at...](https://www.reddit.com/r/openSUSE/comments/b1cvdj/spotted_at_my_supermarket/eiktvvw)

------
trpc
what does SUSE even do in the age of kubernetes?

~~~
Conan_Kudo
They work on the core container engine stuff. Aleksa Sarai (who posts in here
every once in a while as "cyphar") is the maintainer of runC, which is core to
most popular container runtimes (containerd/docker, podman, cri-o/kubernetes,
etc.).

They also work on building a platform for trivially deploying and scaling
Kubernetes within openSUSE as Kubic[1]. SUSE has a variant of this as the SUSE
CaaS platform[2] ("container as a service" platform) product. Kubic is
analogous to Fedora CoreOS[3], while CaaSP is similar to RHEL CoreOS that's
part of OpenShift[4].

[1]: [https://kubic.opensuse.org/](https://kubic.opensuse.org/)

[2]: [https://www.suse.com/products/caas-
platform/](https://www.suse.com/products/caas-platform/)

[3]: [https://coreos.fedoraproject.org/](https://coreos.fedoraproject.org/)

[4]: [https://blog.openshift.com/openshift-4-install-
experience/](https://blog.openshift.com/openshift-4-install-experience/)

~~~
cyphar
In addition to all of the container work we do, we also still maintain a
distribution and do a tonne of upstream work. While people seem to have
forgotten about the purpose of distributions with the whole container thing,
they still provide a few things:

* Continued upstream development of core system software.

* A host system that is stable and up-to-date (which you need to run your container manager).

* Container images which have up-to-date software, timely security patches, and reasonable security policies.

Distributions are the only members of the ecosystem which actually solve these
problems in any meaningful way. It's a shame that we seem to be boring (or
even vestigial) at this point despite all of this new software still requiring
our work in order to actually run.

------
caymanjim
I'm amazed that Suse has $2.5B to buy themselves. It's a horrible OS to work
with. Anything not based on Apt as a package manager is a nightmare. What does
Suse bring to the table other than pain? It's not as easy as Ubuntu, and not
as well-known or well-supported as RedHat (which is also a pain in the ass,
but at least a well-known pain in the ass). Who even uses Suse?

~~~
black-tea
You only think apt is good because you're used to it and probably haven't used
it very extensively. Portage is clearly a better package manager, have you
used that?

~~~
caymanjim
Apt was the first package manager for a widely-used distribution (Debian) that
handled dependencies well. I'm certainly biased, and haven't used everything
available, but I have to be realistic about Linux distros in a professional
environment. Your options at work are RPM-based distros (RedHat, CentOS, SuSE)
or Apt-based distros (Ubuntu, and to a lesser extent Debian).

I'd never heard of Portage. Google indicates that it's Gentoo's package
manager. It may be fantastic, but Gentoo is a hobby OS. Companies aren't going
to use Gentoo. I'm not going to use Gentoo, because any benefits it has are
going to be minimal, and it's never going to help my career.

There's a vast array of software out there that might be great for specific
purposes, but I'm not going to swim upstream. So, while Gentoo and Portage may
be fantastic, they're simply not on my radar, and certainly not on the radar
of anyone I may work for.

I'm not disagreeing with you; we're just talking about completely different
worlds at this point.

~~~
NullPrefix
>Google indicates that it's Gentoo's package manager. It may be fantastic, but
Gentoo is a hobby OS. Companies aren't going to use Gentoo. I'm not going to
use Gentoo, because any benefits it has are going to be minimal, and it's
never going to help my career.

>So, while Gentoo and Portage may be fantastic, they're simply not on my
radar, and certainly not on the radar of anyone I may work for.

Google's Chrome OS is a Gentoo fork.

