SUSE to be acquired by EQT Partners

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.

[0] In Swedish, page 106: http://www.konkurrensverket.se/globalassets/publikationer/ra...

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.

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.

I agree with you in regards to most RH derived releases. Systems tinkering RH/Fedora may end you up in almost as much pain as if you tried it on OSX.

But SuSE has always been approachable in that regard (20 year user).

Thank you so much for making me look it up!

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.

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.

See also: Sun Microsystems

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.

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.