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.
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.
Yeah, I'm not sure how anyone can call private equity "independent". Our whole last year had selling the company as our top priority. Not something I'd choose in a truly independent position.
Being independent doesn't mean "without owners". That the owner is PE is actually quite a good position to be in, as others have already commented. So yes, "independent" is the right word here.
I think it really depends on a couple of important variables, including cash flows and company management. Our private equity overlords care mostly about the macro goals that are generally well defined in advance (sales targets, M&A budgets, bonus pool) and our CEO has done this a few times so he has a track record of predictable returns, which is primarily what a PE fund wants, vs the hockey stick growth of VC money.
In this economic climate and especially outside of the US, PE gives you a lot of the benefits of going public without the extra scrutiny and reporting. I've seen several established companies in my industry forgo going public and unlock liquidity via private equity or sovereign wealth funds.
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.
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.
It’s not weird, they just have a decent sales muscle in their original markets. It’s actually weird how the US media insisted ignoring it even after the Novell acquisition.
SuSE originally was a German company, so it's not surprising that it got a foothold in German-speaking countries, being able to provide support and contracts in German etc. Years ago (late 90s or so), you could even buy boxed SuSE Linux in electronics stores in Germany, next to the Windows CDs.
In my experience IBM is one of the worst companies to do business with in Denmark, if your requirements and needs end up being different from what was specified in the original contract.
That’s not what I meant though, IBM is an American company, that holds inherent problems for the European public sector. Basically I think we should bet on our own, because recent years have shown us that we may not always have a great political relationship with the US. I think it’s highly unlikely that we’ll have a bad relationship with the US, but it’s a risk assessment we need to think about when we enter into multi-million or billion dollar decade long contracts.
> recent years have shown us that we may not always have a great political relationship with the US
IBM happily helped Hitler plan the Holocaust during World War II. Not even war could stop them from making a buck, so I doubt Trump's shenanigans would.
It is, or rather it would be, if more cloud providers etc. bothered to provide images.
Indeed, I think that RedHat & SuSe are very similar in their ideas and in their usage patterns. Both contribute quite a bit to upstream projects (there is a lot of work being done on CNCF-stuff in both places, both are RPM-based and both offer a number of different "tracks" depending on your needs). openSUSE also has been very good at keeping up with things that are in development.
On the desktop-side, I think openSUSE is actually nicer, since they officially support a myriad of DEs (notably both Gnome and KDE).
For what it's worth, I use (and have been) using openSUSE both on my work laptop and my private laptop as my daily driver, and I use openSUSE on various private projects as a server OS, though I'm using CentOS 7 at work for all our servers because some of the software we use only supports Ubuntu LTS and CentOS (because the vendor is incapable of building non-idiotic RPMs/DEBs...).
For years, Suse was the de-facto reference implementation of KDE, where it was the primary desktop. I believe this changed after the Novell acquisition (but it’s been so long, I might misremember), and KDE had to find other ways to get an equivalent “showcase” distro.
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.
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).
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.
A couple of years ago (last time I worked with it) the SAP developer server images for consultants (iirc. it was preconfigured ISOs, it was a bit odd) ran on SUSE so there's a tight connection between the two. Since both have German origins it's not surprising.
Indeed, SAP wants you to run their products primarily on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, with RHEL being an "also ran" (despite enjoying full support from SAP).
This despite SLES' controversial and never-working-quite-right "vm.pagecache_limit_mb" kernel parameter (which they're finally ditching in SLES15, I hear).
Don't get me wrong, SLES these days is a mature, high-quality distro (I'm working with hundreds of installations running SAP products), but sometimes they do weird things, like bumping kernel version from 2.6 to 3.0 within one service pack (sometimes back in SLES10 or SLES11 days, iirc).
>As already mentioned several times, there are no special landmark features or incompatibilities related to the version number change, it's simply a way to drop an inconvenient numbering system in honor of twenty years of Linux.
Yes, SAP seems to be the main selling point ... "SUSE Linux Enterprise Server was the first OS for SAP HANA and SUSE continues to be a co-innovation partner for solutions such as SAP S/4HANA, SAP Cloud Platform, SAP Data Hub and many more. ... "
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.
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/.
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 :).
The problem with kubic was the unknown space it was in - was it an appliance, or a generic distro with kubernetes packages. The btrfs stuff could have been quite good if they shipped btrfs snapshots as the update mechanism (like coreOS), but there was the pressure from the SLES/openSUSE side to let deployers install random software as needed, which meant you were left with the mess of "zyyper dup" + snapshot + reboot, and not having a known version for doing config updates.
The team behind is really smart, and doing good work - it just needed a forceful vision imposed on it for it to go somewhere.
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).
It is used for the root filesystem, which gives you nice functionality, like the package manager or YaST automatically taking snapshots in between system changes, which means you can then audit changes and rollback.
It even allows you to boot the system into one of these previous snapshots.
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.
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.
Yes, SUSE indeed started as a modified version of Slackware. For a long time, SUSE's package categories names were based on Slackware's disk sets names (even after rebasing away from Slackware). Later, SUSE hired the author of the Jurix distribution and rebased on top of that. SUSE and Jurix were both from Germany.
In Norway as well, at least in academia - I remember seeing SUSE boxes in the bookstores at both the Norwegian University of Technology and Science and the University of Bergen - this would have been in 1996-1998 or so.
Yast was never good. I still have nightmares of it happily overwriting and destroying my configuration on several occasions. No warnings shown or questions asked.
openSUSE still "uses" YaST, as in, if you choose to change something via YaST, it will happily do so. You can also simply install/uninstall various components. It also happily integrates with changes made elsewhere (e.g. the "Firewall"-module wraps around firewalld nowadays, which you can influence either via YaST or firewall-cmd etc.).
I sometimes use the Package Management part of it, since searching for something is sometimes quite nice in it. That said, I don't use it for installing software or doing updates etc., so you can absolutely use e.g. zypper & YaST side-by-side.
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.
Personally I've been on Ubuntu for over a decade. But the Telecom industry that I work in is entirely dependent on RHEL and SLES. A few large players (Like my employer) maintain their own distros based on CentOS but I am yet to see anyone use Ubuntu. From what I've heard, it's the same with the Enterprisey industries. So, I'm not sure if considering Canonical a direct competetior to Red Hat is accurate.
Just because it doesn't have market share doesn't mean it's not a direct competitor. It's like saying Apple isn't a competitor to Window since it only has 10% market share.
"entirely dependent" is much too strong. Many of the company's largest clients are in the telecom industry (source: on staff). Canonical is very much a competitor to Red Hat.
I don't understand why Microsoft would acquire Canonical. Microsoft already has an operating systems business in Windows. I don't see any obvious synergies with other lines of business except Azure.
Azure officially supports a number of distributions. The risk of alienating the existing partners who package these distributions for Azure likely outweighs the small benefit Microsoft would get from acquiring Canonical. A deep partnership already exists (e.g. Ubuntu Advantage integration throughout Azure). They don't need to own Canonical for that.
> Microsoft already has an operating systems business in Windows.
Windows the OS is gonna die sooner or later, it's a question of time. Windows the legacy application API layer is probably gonna stick around forever.
Linux kernel + proprietary Windows application compatibility secret sauce seems like a killer combination. (Think Wine, except easy to use and actually working, and commercial.)
I think the only thing stopping Microsoft from following this plan is legacy devs and managers having a vested interest to keep their jobs around.
The Windows API may be old and rotting, but NT is a very modern kernel compared to Linux. It would make as much sense for them to support Linux binaries on Windows. Oh wait, they do ;). I think Microsoft would make quite a splash if they open source the NT kernel. They could even follow Apple's model, where they open up most of the kernel and keep win32 et al. proprietary.
I don't think Windows will die anytime soon. Yes, the traditional Windows desktop will die eventually. This is why Microsoft probably makes such a strong play with Azure and Office 365. But Microsoft can just continue to sell Windows + Blink-based Edge as a modern desktop for web apps that also has support for legacy win32 applications for those companies and individuals that need it.
Building a compat layer on top of Linux seems to make little sense. It will be a huge time investment and while desktop Linux is great for developers, the whole ecosystem is to volatile for most end users. Plus the Linux graphics stack is still not where it needs to be.
Whether they'll acquire a Linux distributor is a completely separate question for me. I think it makes sense to acquire know-how and some influence for Linux on Azure. On the other hand, maybe they don't want to upset other Linux vendors. Oracle, Red Hat, and SUSE are typically used on expensive SAP/Oracle deployments. In fact, they were even SUSE resellers one day ;) [1].
If you're going to keep the Windows API then why would you replace the NT kernel from under it when it is, in many ways, better than the Linux kernel? What's more likely is that Microsoft buys Canonical so they can initiate the extend part of the EEE strategy with Subsystem for Linux.
Canonical would be a target mainly because of most - if not all cloud products - primarily run on Ubuntu.
Cloud Native products literally do not care for RHEL/SuSE and the like for a rather large portion but just give you Ubuntu. Also, paid support is given in combo with Ubuntu. Paid support: big business.
There's no source for such a comment, it's speculation. The whole "MS will acquire Canonical" rumour has been floating around for at least the past 5 years.
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.
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).
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.. ;) )
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.
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".
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.
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 ?
Expensive support contracts, and in case of SUSE, some add-on software channels that come with the contracts (SLES for SAP, High Availability, Containers, etc.) being locked away behind paywall.
"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?
Its journalistic verbiage, what do you want them say? Ultimately its been bought for $2.5billion, if it were a startup it would be a unicorn, it seems to be moving forward, what more do you want.
There are probably many companies that have changed hands that many times also.
The market SuSE is in is not "server or desktop installs", it is "support contracts/subscriptions for server or desktop installs", and they have to have a non-negligible share of that market, given that Wikipedia claims they have 1400 employees, which is more than 10% of Red Hat's number.
Interestingly it claims 750 employees for SuSE in 2016; perhaps the business entity sold today includes some departments that were elsewhere in the org-chart in 2016?
While I'm not particularly a fan, it's important to make clear the company SUSE (that is, SUSE Linux GmbH) has two distributions. It funds the community-maintained openSUSE distribution, but also has SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES).
openSUSE has a regular ~2 year support window and is probably mostly used by enthusiasts. The commercial SLES product has a 10 year support window (with paid extension for another 3 years).
It's a paid product, but 10+ years of software updates for a stable Linux platform is something that's pretty rare to find, and certainty a great option for certain products. Hopefully I'm corrected on this, but RedHat tends to be the only other vendor supporting Linux distributions for such a long period of time?
Suse has been pushing btrfs, zypper and other neat tools forward for years. IBM/Toshiba's 4690 POS (used in all the Kroger stores, Fred Meyers, etc), Walmart's in house POS, OfficeMax/OfficeDepot and numerous others use Suse as a base for their point of sale system, deli scales, and other edge applications.
IBM stopped development of 4690 OS in 2005, porting all their software to Suse. Toshiba bought the point of sale business from IBM in 2012, but any 4690 based installs are a legacy from the early 2000s, as SuperPOS ACE is what IBM (now Toshiba) has been pushing for the past decade.
Yup. We use it as well. Quite reliable, easy to upgrade without issues (unlike Ubuntu), easy to configure with yast. I was missing some packages we use for deployment and backup and openSuSE build service came in handy for creating a custom repo. The only issues we had were with old HP hardware. LEAP 15 even has a system that lets you rollback updates but it only works with btrfs (uses fs snapshots) which we don't use out of caution.
Was my first distro too and yes, it was a nightmare. my personal favorite was the gui application to configure X11 and the graphics driver, every failure whould put you back into console sifting through xml configs.
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].
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.
Sorry but your comment reveals more about the filter bubble you (or maybe we all actually) are in than reality.
While I haven't used Suse for a while in personal projects, Suse is basically the only alternative to Red Hat enterprises have for running Linux with support for 10 years or more from a company deeply involved in kernel development. A pen testing study recently (can't find the link atm) reported that only RHEL and SLES had properly setup ASLR, selinux/AppArmor and other security features.
When Red Hat is fully absorbed into IBM, there might be many customers not willing to make deals with IBM, so I'm guessing the investor sees serious growth for Suse's enterprise support business.
Now if only they shipped a distro without systemd and more POSIXly ...
You do realize that "cloud" doesn't mean the services are running in water vapour up in the sky, right? There are real computers with real operating systems running beneath all those trendy virtualization concepts.
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?
I get the impression that people using Debian and their derivatives seem to live under a rock regarding other distributions.
I would trust zypper dup hundred times over apt-get dist-upgrade. This gets amplified by the fact that openSUSE Tumbleweed (rolling distro), is much better auto-tested before being published every week, than my experience with sid was (tested by their end-users).
Today's Redhat dnf package manager is based on SUSE's dependency solver (https://github.com/openSUSE/libsolv), and both package managers provide a very nice user experience.
People seem to be still confused about SUSE "using YaST". YaST is just a front-end powered by libzypp (https://github.com/openSUSE/libzypp), like zypper is.
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?
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.
>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.
> Anything not based on Apt as a package manager is a nightmare.
In my experience pacman, APK, OpenBSD's ports and packages, and Slackware's pkgtools are all as good as or better than apt in various ways, with the caveat that Slackware doesn't do dependency resolution, which most Slackware users actually see as an advantage.
To put it another way, there is no perfect package manager, there is only the tool that works best for you. The above tools are what I feel to be the superior package management schemes in no particular order; apt has left me hanging way too many times to be comfortable with it on a production machine. For others (like you) the opposite may be true. Regardless, your statement only applies to you and shouldn't be presented as the gospel truth.
