Are EQT Partners the kind of private equity firm that tries to profit by running profitable companies?
Or are they the kind of private equity firm that loads up its companies with debt, pays itself massive dividends, and then lets the companies struggle and die under unsustainable debt loads?
For what it’s worth, I have worked for an EQT portfolio company in the U.S. — completely unrelated to this purchase, but they are not the Toys R Us PE guys.
Were not familiar with them but as a Swede I thought to check their board to see if I can recognise some names. And indeeds, it contain well known industrialists. Such as:
Finn Rausing of Rausing family, who made a fortune on founding Tetrapak
Peter Wallenberg Jr. Wallenberg family is the most established "capitalist" family in Sweden with historical ties far back and still significant stake in companies such as Ericsson
Leif Östling, former CEO of Scania, now on the board of Volkswagen
Wallenberg is behind EQT and they aren't so much industrialists as crony capitalists and oligarchs. They are the driving force behind, as well as one of the main profiteers of, privatization in Sweden in recent years. Thomas von Koch, the head of EQT, has said on national TV that he thinks Sweden should be more like Singapore. Leif Östling most recently had to resign as head of the main employers organization after revelations of tax planning and the Rausing family isn't really a role model for anyone. So they are all pretty much crooks.
I guess EQT mostly does what it says on the tin, restructure and sell companies. If you ever wondered why so many people only have relatively expensive cable internet in Sweden instead of being connected directly to widely available fiber networks that is to a large extent because of EQT.
> If you ever wondered why so many people only have relatively expensive cable internet in Sweden instead of being connected directly to widely available fiber networks that is to a large extent because of EQT.
Care to expand on this? Among OECD countries Sweden is near the top in "Percentage of fibre connections in total broadband subscriptions" [0], with 61.8% (for reference the OECD average is 23.3%, with US at 12.6% and e.g. Germany being woefully poor at 2.3%).
I am guessing they are counting cable as fiber. The Swedish competition authority is saying 1 300 000 fiber, 670 000 cable and 960 000 dsl [0].
The things is that the telephone network itself is still essentially owned by the government and multiple companies compete to provide service. And fiber is to large extent operated under a similar model. (950 000 of the 1 300 000 are municipal broadband).
The cable monopoly, including exclusivity contracts, was instead sold to EQT (which later sold to someone else) and of course instead of opening up to competition they kept the monopoly in place.
It isn't that EQT was doing something awful (their schools with inflated grades are probably worse in that regard). Internet connectivity in Sweden is still rather good. It is just that PE firms generally do whatever makes them money, not necessarily what is good for consumers or anyone else.
> I am guessing they are counting cable as fiber. The Swedish competition authority is saying 1 300 000 fiber, 670 000 cable and 960 000 dsl
The numbers in the report you linked are from 2014 and 2016 and are based on statistics from PTS. PTS' most recent report [0] says that in 2017 there were 2.4 million fiber subscriptions, or 62% of all fixed broadband subscriptions, with a big increase over the last few years.
I do agree that Com Hem was a terrible thing, convincing way too many people (or apartment building associations) to sign up for very-long-term contracts. Well, they're still a terrible thing, but plenty of people have seen the light now :)
I don't think you are totally fair - the Wallenbergs started as bankers, caught a chance during the Krüger crash and became quite pivotal industrialists and have a large part in the exceptional growth in Sweden during the 20th century.
But sure, they are capitalist, and the last 20-30 years they have run out of their industrialist steam, as everyone else in Sweden (or should I say the west) . Maybe especially so since Peter Wallenberg passed away - he publicly stated that he was not especially keen on starting EQT but also saw that "everyone else" were running similar operations.
I don't think EQT are crooks - they probably come out rather good in comparison, but if you dislike the privatization in the healthcare and education sectors, I think you should blame the politicians not the businessmen.
Essentially every rich family in Sweden, including the king, keeps a low profile. Doesn't mean they don't have more power than anyone ever should.
When the Swedish government wants to cancel an illegal weapons deal with Saudi Arabia, which was initiated by a delegation headed by the crown princess, they reconsider after pressure from Marcus Wallenberg (which later blows up in everyone's faces). When Obama visits Sweden, the first order of business is to honor Raoul Wallenberg. When the prime ministers wife, responsible for health care in Stockholm, quits politics she joins the Wallenberg health care business her own party have been essentially selling hospitals to. It is Marcus Wallenberg who invites Swedish politicians and lobbyists to the Bilderberg meetings. Fredrik Reinfeldt went on their private jet before he was prime minister. Jacob Wallenberg is on the board of Svenskt Näringsliv, the main lobby for privatization, which was until recently headed by Leif Östling who of course is also on the board of EQT.
It is not a conspiracy, at least not a very exciting one. They are just very influential and they use that influence to enrich themselves. Hence the allegation of being crony capitalists.
> When Obama visits Sweden, the first order of business is to honor Raoul Wallenberg
Honoring Raoul Wallenberg isn't about capitalism. Working in Hungary during WWII, he saved tens of thousands of Jewish people from the Nazis and fascists, until he was arrested and never was seen again. Later, evidence emerged that he died at the hands of the KGB.
Obama doesn't just show up to honor people around the world. It was suggested by prime minister Fredrik Reinfeldt [0]. Yes, that is the same prime minister who was traveling to the Bilderberg meeting in Wallenberg's private jet [1], whose government caved in the weapons deal [2], wife ended up working for their health care company [3] and son has been working at Svenskt Näringslivs think-tank Timbro [4].
Apparently the person who was pushing for the arms deal to be reinstated was foreign minster, party colleague and former prime minister Carl Bildt. Another frequent visitor to the Bilderberg meetings and infamously chairman of the board at Lundin Petroleum. The Lundin brothers are cousins of Marcus Wallenberg [5]. Carl Bildt is also senior advisor to Wallenberg Foundations [6].
Wallenbergs dominance in Sweden isn't really a secret [9]. So between "it a coincidence" and "they all know each other", I am going with the second one. Sweden has a number of other people to honor whose family's jet the prime minster hasn't borrowed like Folk Bernadotte [7] (who was related to the king) or Birgitta Karlström Dorph [8].
How does something like this work when there are parts of the code that is community driven. Do the volunteers get any share of the pie?
That being said, is there still a lot of people that use SUSE? I remember a lot of people used to rave (particularly academic) about it due to it's stability. I remember playing with their distro builder a couple of years ago and you can choose the specific packages and settings to install which was super neat.
Your question is from a long-gone era, when it was all about the "Linux distribution" as such (a time when I myself still worked for one of those big Linux companies). These days that's just a necessary but in the end secondary item. Instead the business is all about "enterprise stuff": clusters, storage, cloud, SAP, devops, HPC - i.e. "solutions". The Linux distribution merely is the vehicle and the basis, the actual business is well on top of it though, on another level. Check out what redhat.com and suse.com present on their respective homepages (no need to go deep, just the headlines - the SuSE pages show it a bit better I think, open the "Products & Solutions" menu on suse.com for an overview). I follow a few people I knew at SuSE and whenever they post something on social media it's cluster these, high availability stuff that, distributed storage here, containers there. It's never about the "boring" Linux OS level any more, always about software and solutions on top of it.
By the way, I just checked the job listings (https://www.suse.com/company/careers/) to see what they are up to, and there are 320 open positions? Really? Did they grow that much? When I left the Linux world almost 15 years ago that was about the total size of that company, that was just a few years after Novell had acquired it. It confirms the impression I had from loosely following some SuSE engineer's social media posts, getting handed over to new owners again and again does not seemed to have hindered them from growing quite a bit. Wikipedia says they have a thousand employees now.
> The Linux distribution merely is the vehicle and the basis, the actual business is well on top of it though, on another level. Check out what redhat.com and suse.com present on their respective homepages
Those homepages are a picture of where Red Hat and Suse want their business to go - not where it actually is.
In practice both companies have struggled to diversify into broader “enterprise solutions”. After 20+ years, the vast majority of Red Hat’s revenue still comes from the good old RHEL subscription. Everything else - storage, java, openstack, containers, IDEs - is still far behind. They seem to be betting everything on Kubernetes being the new Linux, but we tend to forget just how huge Linux was in the late 90s... And how huge Red Hat was in the Linux world. This time they’re a medium-sized fish in a medium-sized pond. Kubernetes is cool, but is it cool enough to get Red Hat from $3B to $10B in revenue, with hundreds of vendors pushing their own Kubernetes service? Personally I don’t see it. As a point of comparison, Vmware is nearing $8B and has successfully diversified into storage and networking.
It’s a testament to the incredible momentum of Linux adoption on the server, that even Suse (a distant second in the business of commercial Linux) has survived this long without any meaningful diversification.
Personally I think we’ll see Red Hat getting acquired in the next 5 years, while they can still a good multiple on the “cloud native” hype. If they wait too late, the reality will set in that Openshift revenue can’t grow fast enough to offset a shrinking RHEL business. If they wait too long, they will end up like Suse.
>Personally I think we’ll see Red Hat getting acquired in the next 5 years,
It would be interesting to see what would happen with linux after that, as they are one of the biggest (if not the biggest) donors to Linux, and while you'll still find Enterprise Linux for the Server (whether it's them or some successor), they are also responsible for things like Linux on the Desktop and FOSS in general, so projects which don't directly make money like Cygwin, gtk, gnome, gcc, and PulseAudio may be in danger.
Meh. Linux itself doesn’t need Red Hat anymore. Upstream got good enough that you just don’t need to stay on proprietary backports for years and years just to keep your service reliable and secure. These days most of Red Hat’s value add on Linux is to keep deprecated features alive for their large slow-moving customers. Sure they also contribute cool bleeding edge work, but nothing that couldn’t be picked up in a heartbeat by a team at Oracle, Google, Alibaba, or a hundred other systems companies.
As for those satellite projects you mention, in my experience the dependency on Red Hat is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Their employees tend to close ranks and crowd out other contributors in the projects they sponsor. If RH disappeared tomorrow, for many of those projects the result would be more diverse contributors, with a healthier mix of ideas and priorities. It might help shock the Linux community out of the cultural rut it’s been stuck in.
It seems you're ignoring the vast amount of work Red Hat contributes as free software. See e.g. the amount of work put into the kernel: https://lwn.net/Articles/742672/. They've been increasing the amount of contributors while they've been expanding. Currently it's a pretty big company, so quite a huge amount of contributions. Further, any company they buy they tend to make the software free software.
You're being dismissive without any substance IMO.
I’m not dismissing the volume of quality of their contributions. I just don’t think they are so critically needed that Linux and its satellite projects couldn’t quickly recover if they stopped contributing (which was the GP’s question).
I'd agree with you that RH is creating a closed ecosystem and many of the ideas in RH land are not in the best tradition of open source software and not good for a
healthy community.
But...
Slow moving can be another way to say 'proven' and who is out there deciding what should be deprecated if it isn't the big companies like RH? Is that the cultural 'rut' you refer to? That things don't move fast enough? If that is it I disagree. Most of the 'innovation' I've seen in software is wrapping old ideas for a new generation.
I completely agree that sometimes slowing down the pace of upgrades is the responsible thing to do, especially on mission-critical systems. But Red Hat is not the most authoritative or trustworthy source of information on that topic, because 1) they don’t actually build and operate enterprise systems themselves, their customers do; 2) they have an incentive to make their slow-moving proprietary forks look more useful than they actually are, 3) they have a track record of trying to make upstream less reliable and secure than it actually is, again with the goal of making their offering seem more needed.
My comment on “cultural rut” was unrelated. I was referring to the lack of diversity in the open-source community, and the difficulty in moving past the myths and closed-club mentality of 1960s US academia. Open-source is still primarily the playground of privileged, insecure, passive-agressive white males cargo-culting the behavior of their predecessors, but it could be so much more.
Sounds good to me. I've love to see Gnome and Gtk die off or at least become much less popular. There's much better technologies out there which are getting passed over because of RH's dominance here.
> Linux on the Desktop and FOSS in general, so projects which don't directly make money like Cygwin, gtk, gnome, gcc, and PulseAudio may be in danger.
People really should talk about this a lot more: Red Hat fund so much of the development of the basic components that the actual desktop environments rely on, as well as their support of GNOME: they have people working on everything from Wi-Fi and Bluetooth to power management to graphics (Noveau driver, Wayland, Pipewire etc.) and audio. No other company seems to have the desire or the resources to fund these essentials at the level that Red Hat has done for many years.
Of those satellite projects, the only ones about which I'd be worried are GTK and GNOME. GCC is already supported by the FSF (and if the FSF can't do it, then I guess that's one more reason to start migrating toward LLVM/clang), Cygwin isn't as big a deal anymore (MSYS2 can pick up the torch, and Windows Subsystem for Linux helps, too), and PulseAudio - while certainly better than it was a few years ago - is not the end-all-be-all of sound systems (sndio, for example, is way more pleasant IMO, and is now available for non-OpenBSD systems - Linux included).
Wait, what? Is it not the GNU Compiler Collection? It's part of GNU, which is a FSF project. Not sure about actual developers, but Richard Stallman himself is still on GCC's steering committee last I checked (among various other individuals, including multiple from Red Hat). The donation link on GCC's homepage also points to the FSF's general GNU donation page, which strongly implies the FSF is the one controlling the project's finances, too.
Regardless, that's even less reason to be worried about Red Hat totally collapsing, then. Plenty of other companies - large and small - to pick up the slack (and I highly suspect the various Red Hat contributors would probably continue to contribute anyway).
> In practice both companies have struggled to diversify into broader “enterprise solutions”
I don't call growing to a thousand people from the low few hundred that I knew "struggling".
RedHat is well over ten thousand employees. If the Linux distribution really was the center they would only have a few hundred both, which they had when the Linux distribution was not just at the center, it WAS the center of the business. So clearly this is no longer the case.
That makes no sense. They had a few hundred employees because their Linux business was small. Now their Linux business is huge, so they can afford to hire more people. Some of those people are sustaining and growing the core Linux business, and others are working to develop new businesses like storage, openstack, middleware, configuration management, containers etc. None of those new businesses are anywhere near self-sufficiency. They are all funded primarily by the core Linux business.
If you look at their 2017Q4 results, it’s very telling: out of $772M of revenue, the combination of Openshift, Openstack, Ansible, Java middleware, IDEs and every other product in the “application development and emerging technologies” group added up to $173M. That’s 22.4% of their revenue coming from their entire “next-generation” portfolio combined. Everything else is basically RHEL.
Hopefully this gives you a better picture of how they pay for their 10,000+ employees.
To me your reply is what makes no sense. I worked for one of those Linux companies. A few hundred people is all it takes to have a Linux distribution business. More people than that is what makes no sense. So if they now have sooo many more people it means that most of them do things not related to the Linux distribution business itself.
Yes, the Linux still is at the core, but I don't count people supporting computing center operations as doing work for the Linux distribution - that is an entirely new layer well above it.
Your accounting seems to be based on the idea that just because it's all centered around the Linux distribution it means you can call it all "Linux distribution business". I vehemently disagree, as I said, I consider that well above the level of merely selling Linux distributions. I saw how that business looked like from the inside, and what they do now does not remotely look like they do the same thing. Well, of course they still do, what I mean is the share of the overall activity of the company.
The amount of people needed to build and maintain the Linux distribution has not changed significantly. They don't need more package maintainers or significantly more kernel hackers. The people they hired don't work on the Linux distribution but on things made on top of it, whether that's other software products or services.
I could see Microsoft acquiring Red Hat. Nearly every company that I've worked for purchases MSFT licenses and RedHat licenses. If MSFT acquired them, it would allow them to offer either option in the enterprise.
Also, Microsoft's cash cow isn't Windows, it's Office and Outlook. So an acquisition of Red Hat might give them an opportunity to make inroads into Linux with those products.
Last but not least, there's plenty of Linux running on Azure, a RedHat acquisition could play into that strategy.
I said they’re struggling to diversify. RHEL is certainly in every F500 business, and remains a large and profitable operation. But there’s no growth left in RHEL, so they need to diversify. They’ve been trying for years, and don’t have much to show for it.
As I said in another comment, all of the products you listed, plus their Openstack offering which you didn’t mention, add up to 22.4% of their revenue as of their last quarterly report. So using very naive math, that’s an average of 5% of total revenue per product across 5 diversified products. That’s... underwhelming. Especially since, as you say, a product like Jboss has been on the market forever...
When you look beyond marketing hype and focus on hard financial data, you can make fascinating discoveries :-)
Yea, I mentioned Novell in my essay and how its revenue declined quickly after they moved away from NetWare, including that both NetWare and Windows used Client Access Licenses that Linux lacked.
Novell is still around. HPE sold off a bunch of their software assets to their parent company. Their specialty seems to be nurturing software that's been around for quite a while, that a lot of people take for granted, but is still a big part of many many enterprises. Micro Focus also owns Attachmate, a company that was big in the 90s.
Since I don't want to tinker every weekend with my distro anymore I need something stable. openSUSE Leap, based on SLE, offers this. Additionally KDE is a first-class citizen and just works as intended.
There's also a rolling release version, Tumbleweed, but I didn't try it yet.
FWIW, I run Tumbleweed on my private desktop, and it works pretty well for the most part. The only major annoyance is that I have to reinstall the nVidia driver every time a new kernel comes around, but other than that, it is very nice.
The last time I checked, the only thing I could find were instruction on how to install the nVidia driver manually. Turns out nVidia has a repository for Tumbleweed! =D
Just to be clear, things do break a little sometimes. But on the plus-side, openSUSE uses btrfs snapshots - every time updates are installed, the system creates two snapshots, one before and one after installing the updates. So if something breaks, one can always roll back to a known good state and wait for a couple of days before giving updates another try.
Worth noting that GNOME and Xfce are also first-class citizens in those respective versions of openSUSE. openSUSE is the reason why I don't hate GNOME3 with a burning passion, and the Xfce version is what I tend to install on desktops by default.
> Since I don't want to tinker every weekend with my distro anymore
Do many people actually do this, though? A few years ago, I used Arch as my main distro, and, besides the initial setup, almost never tinkered with it. I would imagine that more approachable distros would be more tinker-free too.
It really depends on what you qualify as tinkering. I switched to Debian stable as I found the constant upgrade cycle of rolling distros to require to much tinkering.
It's true that the most approachable distros (SUSE, Fedora, Ubuntu and its derivatives like Elementary OS) are more or less "tinker free" these days.
For those of us who still like to tinker while maintaining a stable base, there are distros like Debian, Slackware, Void, and so on. And finally, for those who consider Linux a hobby or pastime (or who are comfortable living on the bleeding edge) there are projects like Arch, Neon, and Gentoo.
No, because Arch is a rolling release whereas you have to run Unstable and -current respectively in Debian and Slackware to be closer to the bleeding edge. But having said that, I should actually have put Void in with Arch and Gentoo.
It doesn't have to be "build everything from source", they have installs based on different stages. You can even do a binary only install if you wish. And it is rolling, so it does fit in with Arch and Void in that sense.
Well, I'm not saying you can't tinker with those, just that you don't have to in order to get a working desktop out of the box. I have yet to run across a Linux based OS that outright discourages getting under the hood, except perhaps Android.
I guess what I was trying to say is that instead of dealing with the default parental guidance features of RH and Fedora
(which usually ends up with impatient users disabling SElinux and then disabling the stock packet filter) and having to suffer the eccentricities of RH/Fedora systemd and 'socket' activation of an interfering frankenservice you could more profitably spend your time tinkering elsewhere.
Gotcha. Yep my goto hacking/tinkering/learning distros are Slackware, Alpine, and (on the BSD side) OpenBSD. I also consider all of those suitable as server/container OSes for varying reasons.
I run Elementary OS as my daily driver these days; no fuss, no muss, just log in and get to work. About the only thing I do on a fresh install beyond changing the background is setting up my tools. Surprisingly git isn't installed from the outset, but it's just a sudo apt install away. Likewise, I enable ppa support, add the ppas for Waterfox and Oracle Java, and install the ubuntu-restricted-extras package for better media support. Beyond that, the built in apps and programs suit my needs almost perfectly, and the OS fades into the background unlike Windows 10 or other flashy "LOOK at ME not your WORK!!" type OSes/DEs.
OpenBSD is very nice but it used to be a bit painful for a desktop. Funny, I ran linux on the desktop from 2000-2016
and then went back to windows because I'm getting old. :)
I lumped it in with the more bleeding edge distros because its goal is to showcase the latest and greatest that KDE Plasma has to offer. In that sense, it's a bit unstable on the user-facing front. Also, KDE itself is a pretty wild beast that takes a ton of tinkering to get it to any one person's liking. I'm not saying it's unusable out of the box, but it definitely is a tweaker's wet dream; its options have their own options in nearly every configuration panel.
SUSE works well in enterprise environments. It's one of the only distros I know of that are easily configurable to work with corporate proxies without a bunch of application wrappers and hacks.
Slightly related, many fast-food restaurants are also ran on Linux (back-end server in the restaurant, the registers that connect to them, etc.).
Taco Bell's system runs on "Taco Bell Linux" (or did, anyways, 10 years or so ago). I have a copy of their CD installation discs somewhere, I meant to look into it to see what distro they were building on top of but I never got around to it.
Just watch the screens of anything the companies use when you're in there. Look at the model numbers and Google them. You'll find a lot given most aren't that creative: they do a customized version of the default, enterprise offering.
For instance, a restarting computer at the local Kroger where I shop said IBM SurePOS. Looking it up, it turns out some group tried to make a concurrent version of DOS that IBM modified into a specialized OS for POS's. Recently, they upgraded to touchscreens running Linux on Fujitsu boxes. The GUI is ugly, slow, and has the tell-tell coffee mug in corner of dialogs. Appears Kroger, always slow as can be, got on Java desktop bandwagon just as everyone else chasing fads were leaving it for stuff like web apps or Electron.
The self-checkouts have a Windows loading screen. Probably was WinXP Embedded given they're old. The handhelds use mainframe-era, terminal apps. Their computers at customer service are thin clients from HP at this location. I think one said "Iceweasel" one time. The checkout predictor thing with the three balls on monitor showed something Linux-related one time. If you ask employees, you'll get SCO OpenServer, AS/400, mainframe, and a pile of random apps with web interfaces. I don't know what they run. One employee told me email and web browsers load in what must be VM's that take 5-10 min to load on the thin clients. It must be unbearable.
So, Kroger certainly uses plenty of Linux with mission-critical services being on it. Their choices for inventory and desktop GUI's also hint they're pretty backwards in their practices. I'm not sure about the others since I mostly shop at Kroger.
... which was the descendant of Concurrent CP/M, which was the offspring of CP/M-86, one of the 3 original OSes at launch for the IBM PC in 1981 (along with PC DOS and the UCSD p-System).
CP/M was the original industry-standard OS for 8080 micros. It is what MS-DOS is a knock-off version of -- MS-DOS was licensed from SCP, whose QDOS was a copy of CP/M.
"Some group tried," indeed. This is the original OS company, successfully trading and dominating the industry when Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded Micro-Soft.
"I think you really do not know much about the history of PC operating systems."
Well, that's a big assumption and rude at the same time. I post a lot here about the history of operating systems. I'm well aware of DOS and CP/M. I know little to nothing about Concurrent DOS or FlexOS because of no need. So, let's look at your link:
"IBM licensed Digital Research's real-time OS, FlexOS, for its point-of-sale machines."
...the article you link says "IBM originally chose DR Concurrent DOS 286 as the basis of their IBM 4680 computer for IBM Plant System products and Point-of-Sale terminals..." The original source I read those terminals said they were based on Concurrent DOS. So does my comment and this link. Clearly, I did some research. Kroger's POS's also said IBM 4680.
Let's see where FlexOS comes in: "IBM announced the adoption of FlexOS... as the basis of their IBM 4690 OS..." Ok, FlexOS was used for a different one I didn't look up because Kroger didn't use it.
So, you're saying I'm ignorant about OS's because I didn't study a proprietary OS (FlexOS) I've never seen, the local store didn't use, and that was likely inferior to most RTOS's I know of? I'm not sure what your aim was.
I wasn't asking about Linux. I was asking for a source that they use SLES / SUSE Linux. Any company not using Linux for their business at this point at the size of Kroger is likely doing something wrong IMO.
Toshiba did. The part of Toshiba that does point-of-sale and such bought the part of IBM that does same things. Made the Fujitsu machines replacing IBM's a bit more confusing but it's Linux-based now. Should run on about anything. Maybe they just really wanted Fujitsu hardware for some reason. Maybe they got a lot in an auction or something. (shrugs)
Anecdotal, but I remember ~4 years ago working at Walmart as a summer job. The handheld scanners (telzon/gemini) you see employees with would boot to SUSE. A lot of back office software like employee schedules and permissions with those handhelds were still managed with what looked like curses based stuff.
We have around 30k machines running sles in production (stores) around the world. Deployed around 4000 more a couple of weeks ago, so yes, it exists for sure. Not in the US tho.
If someone wrote code (as a volunteer, not for hire) and licensed it as GPL, SUSE doesn't own that code, and the new owners of SUSE won't own it either, so everything is the same as it was before.
It is my personal choice for a KDE distribution. It is hard to find a combo of "solid and reliable" and "runs KDE" within the Red Hat and Debian distro families.
Can confirm. I work at SAP's internal cloud department, and SLES is a popular base for SAP system installations (alongside Windows Server). There's also quite some RHEL, mostly because teams chose it before their companies got acquired by SAP.
When I first got to know GNU/Linux, SuSE was the go-to distro in Germany, because it came with German documentation, and - most important to me - ISDN worked out of the box. Also, Yast made it very newbie-friendly.
I think I see Arch somewhere in my future, but I have not come around, yet. ;-) I run Arch in a VM on my home server, but I don't really do anything with it.
The installation procedure makes OpenBSD's look decadently comfortable, but I admit once it runs, it seems to just keep working.
I used Suse during that window after Redhat discontinued desktop support, and before debian had an installer. I remember thinking YAST was wonderful, and being very upset about their deal with Microsoft after Novell bought them.
And how did you expect that to go?
Netware was bug central, I used it from 3.x - 6.
Linux killed them...and it was time for Netware to
go. I remember the first time I compared Border Manager
with OpenSuSE (2.2 kernel -w-w ipchains) & squid
as proxy. Eye opening. No more midnight reboots.
No more opaque interfaces and $$ for nothing.
I use openSUSE routinely (it's my go-to both for enterprise-grade stuff and for home users switching from Windows). I've yet to use SUSE itself, but given what I've seen from openSUSE, I have little reason to believe it to be any less excellent of a distro (and probably better suited to enterprise use, if only because of the available support contracts).
I've worked for a few small businesses that used suse as an alternative to RHEL. I've never worked for a large company that has. I also know a few individuals who use it for personal projects. But that's about it.
i worked in BigEnterprise and they changed to Suse from RHEL because the price was significant lower, and the company had internal admins and other support contracts for managing the server support. The rule was that every software had to have a support contract behind it, even if we never used it.
I've encountered it in large enterprises (esp. public sector) that were running NetWare, eDirectory, GroupWise, Zenworks, etc., and went to SUSE (more specifically OES) as the natural follow-on from NetWare. One large organisation I'm aware of, they used to have both SUSE and Oracle Linux, and SUSE was managed by the former NetWare team, and Oracle Linux was managed by the Unix admin team and used for Oracle RDBMS and Oracle middleware.
But, in my experience, most eDirectory/GroupWise shops ended up migrating to AD/Exchange, and SUSE often went away in that process, especially if the organisation already has RHEL or Oracle Linux as well.
Don't SUSE tout that they can do in-place kernel upgrades? So if you want to keep your iron running all the time, no interrupted experiments, no reboots; SUSE is the distro to go for.
You're providing a stub for interesting debate here but you did it without any expectation that YC would pay you for it. You did it for the betterment of the internet, or the karma, or something in the middle, but either way, YC owes you nothing for it and you [happily] entered into that arrangement without thinking about it.
The people contributing to SUSE —through bug reports, bug fixes, maintaining the community, the tens of thousands of upstream projects that it uses via open licenses, etc, etc, etc— aren't doing so with an expectation that somebody will pay them down the line.
But indirectly, SUSE users (some of whom will contribute) and customers get a distribution with a new lease of life. They get continued use of its infrastructure and packagers and developers.
I used to have SUSE before, but nowadays its either RHEL or Ubuntu/debian. Its such a shame that, there is barely any new players in the server os market.
I think it boils down to the fact that not that many innovations are coming from the distribution itself. It used to be true, especially when it came to recognizing hardware or simplifying install, but nowadays most hardware is recognized and most distro's install is simple (except Arch, but I like arch, so go figure).
I suppose the biggest innovation in the past few years have been in terms of virtualization, and they were barely dependent on the distribution as most of the work was done upstream on the linux Kernel.
So it's hard to be a newcomer and have strong selling points. Maybe the next generation of kernel programmed in type safe, memory safe languages would be interesting?
I had thought about trying to implement some sort of bindings around the kernel to allow devs to use Go or Rust. Kotlin might not be bad either.
When I was learning via LFS I felt like there is still a lot of innovation that can be done. I remember back in 2000 I attended a Linux World Expo and it was amazing. It felt great to see all these companies dedicating resources to making Linux better. Now, I don't feel like it is quite the same anymore. There were companies inventing all sort of solutions from large scale server management to desktop apps to, to, to. Companies gave out stuffed toys. I still have a SUSE branded lizard, a Fedora and 5-6 more.
Out of curiosity, are there any readers of this site that rune SUSE in prod? My understanding is it is more of a force in the EU, I've known some desktop users of it (good KDE integration), but I've never encountered it in my work or job interviews etc in the US.
edit: ah there are a few anecdotes nested in this comments already.
I've run it. Still run it for NFS4 cots NAS for HPC clusters
and web services. Will be moving back to it next year for HPC nodes...or maybe FreeBSD depending on this acquisition.
fedora was way ahead in performance for years. That was the only reason to go RH-alike but Fedora is _so_ flaky and systemd upstream + attendant cruft like firewalld and the default selinux policies are nightmares. Every Fedora distribution is another set of bugs and workarounds that push you towards RH enterprise..as if you hadn't been doing this for 20 years and needed RH to show you the way.
Fedora is nice if you are doing hypervsiors with QEMU/KVM. Very close to prod out the box.
I run openSUSE for my mail server, but that's in the process of being migrated to OpenBSD.
When I worked at the University of Cincinnati in 2012, we had a lot of stuff running on SLES, mostly because we were running Novel's Identity Management system.
That was a while back though and I'm not sure if they're still down that route since Novell turned into Micro Focus and, I guess now, EQT.
Or are they the kind of private equity firm that loads up its companies with debt, pays itself massive dividends, and then lets the companies struggle and die under unsustainable debt loads?
(See: Toys 'R Us, etc)