
Melissa Di Donato Appointed CEO of SUSE - vedses
https://www.suse.com/c/news/melissa-di-donato-appointed-ceo-of-suse/
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drfuchs
There's a lot of misunderstanding here about what "Independent Company" means.
In the business world, it's understood as "not having shares that are traded
on the stock market". So, SUSE is "independent" since it has never IPO'd;
while RedHat isn't "independent" as you and I can buy shares in it.

See
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_business](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_business)
for confirmation: "An independent business is a business that is free from
outside control. It usually means a privately owned establishment, as opposed
to a public limited company, the latter of which is owned by investment shares
traded in the stock market."

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craigsmansion
From the end of the press release:

``About SUSE

SUSE, the world’s _largest independent_ open source company''

"Wait, isn't RedHat the lar... oooh, someone at SuSE marketing is on the
ball."

~~~
buster
It's right in the beginning of the press release and i find this marketing BS
so unbearable that i didn't read any further. It's the typical BS i come to
expect from venture capital owned companies (i've heard that all the time when
i was working for one).

And how is Suse "independent" when it's owned by some swedish private equity
group? See
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EQT_Partners](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EQT_Partners)
And, interestingly, see the german wikipedia entry for much more companies
owned by EQT.
[https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/EQT_(Unternehmen)](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/EQT_\(Unternehmen\))

How is Suse independent, again?

~~~
houseofzeus
My interpretation is that they and Red Hat are just as "independent" as each
other. That is they can do whatever they want as long as they keep making
money...but if they don't then they can and will be course corrected by their
respective owners.

~~~
buster
So, how is that independent? And i guess, that if both are equally
"independent" then RedHat would be larger one, wouldn't it?

And what does "largest open source" mean, anyway? More employees? More
customers? More revenue? More contributions to open source?

~~~
mugsie
Biggest in terms of market cap afaik.

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ggm
I came late to linux in heavy use, being a BSD person of old. Commercialized
BSD exists but the foundation(s) behind the major flavours are clearly NFP
models.

So as a late linux adopter, in Debian, I am wondering why people see value in
SUSE and RedHat since all my experience has been the SLA value is .. dreck. No
problem we had with a RH kernel or OS behaviour was fixed inside our $SLA$ in
the EL release we had. All problems were either WONTFIX or re-install later
EL.

Debian update/upgrade appears to work. Fixes get applied. What am I missing?
If they want to own SAP-ON-LINUX or ORACLE-ON-LINUX why should I worry?

I am more concerned about GPL and ZFS these days, than commercial backing: I
dont think it actually adds value to me. (20+ nodes in a research cluster,
cloud)

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alxlaz
I can't comment on the value of SLAs, as I was never directly involved (but
what I heard is pretty much what you mention). What I can tell you, however,
is that there are companies where higher-ups won't agree to an IT proposal if
it doesn't include commercial support, whether useful or not. Company policy
mandates it so it gets done.

~~~
ggm
Yea. Probably thats how we wound up there. We bought off risk, by spending
money that it turned out didn't resolve the risk when it hit, but because we
TRIED we got to shift blame, by not owning "you broke it you fix it" to the
management view.

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mitchty
I know people that work at SuSE, in a nutshell, they are like Redhat in that
they don't really provide linux only, they provide ways of integrating it into
your business.

That is where Debian just isn't going to compete. And that is why SuSE exists,
they're selling much more than linux.

~~~
ggm
That integration can be super-useful. If you "get" SAP or "get" salesforce or
whatever, having a vendor who can talk vertically integrated helps.

But right now, I think we're all staring at alpine in kubernetes asking if the
old giant unix model is the one we want.

~~~
alxlaz
> But right now, I think we're all staring at alpine in kubernetes asking if
> the old giant unix model is the one we want.

I think "all" is a bit of an exaggeration though :). Besides, _something_ is
hosting all those Alpine containers, and while I'm pretty far removed from
this field, I hear it's not Alpine most of the time.

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mugsie
It will be interesting to see how things change now - both SUSE and RedHat
have gone from engineering leadership to business based leadership.

While there was a lot inside of SUSE that could have used more business focus,
the ethos of the company is what made it so successful.

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rurban
I don't believe that it will be interesting. It will be a catastrophe. For
SUSE much worse than for RedHat. Hopefully this UK lead will be over soon.

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W-Stool
Who are SUSE's main customers these days? Self hosted SAP shops?

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robmusial
Anecdotally, you're correct SAP shops and I have seen a lot of Linux on z
Systems running SLES.

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codegeek
My first introduction to self installable Linux OS was with SUSE Linux. I
still remember my summer break of 2001 when I spent most of the time
installing and configuring SUSE Linux on my laptop. At the time, finding
certain drives/applications to run few things were really hard compared to
Windows but man that was fun. I remember being able to install sound driver
and do some cool things. Nowadays, everything is pre-packaged and no fun :)

