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.
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.
Novel technology becomes optimized and ubiquitous and newer more complex technology is built on top of it. Then the same happens to that tech.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Oracle? I shudder to think of what would happen to all of Red Hat's IP under Oracle's control ....
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.
- Ansible for decentralized configuration management (not as popular as Chef, but still popular)
- OpenShift Enterprise for container orchestration (gaining a lot of traction)
- CodeEnvy, a cloud-based IDE
- JBoss, a legacy Java application server (used at every boring billion-dollar co you can think of)
- Innovation Lab: a somewhat expensive service for large corps to see how the latest IT trends are applied
Ansible is very very popular, but because it's agentless, it's difficult to monetize.
Also, from what I've read, companies like Puppet haven't been able to turn a profit.
When you look beyond marketing hype and focus on hard financial data, you can make fascinating discoveries :-)
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.
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.
You're bumming me out lol
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Keep fighting the good fight!
Thank you so much for making me look it up!
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 think you really do not know much about the history of PC operating systems.
IBM licensed Digital Research's real-time OS, FlexOS, for its point-of-sale machines.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FlexOS
FlexOS is related to DR's Concurrent DOS:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiuser_DOS
... 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.
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.
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.
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 used to be exclusively the only OS you could use (can't confirm if anymore).
The installation procedure makes OpenBSD's look decadently comfortable, but I admit once it runs, it seems to just keep working.
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.
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.
I used to maintain their US Linux infrastructure.
No. Why would they?
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.