OpenSUSE Considers Governance Options

lwn.net

56 points·l2dy··6 comments

This is just tangential, but related. I work as an engineer in the reseller (VAR) space.

SUSE (the spun out from MicroFocus commercial company) has been hiring lots of enterprise sales reps in US metros, and it seems like every enterprise account is under "review" (aka Audit) at this time.

For those who don't know, if you get Enterprise Linux from either SUSE or RedHat, it comes via a support subscription. You are "in compliance" only if ALL PRODUCTION NODES HAVE A SUBSCRIPTION. That doesn't mean your unicorn/tier 0/1 app servers...its anything that's not TEST/DEV/QA. If you are not in compliance, you can't get support.

I suspect this is a bit of a money grab under EQT...boost the top line...prior to spinning out to public markets. Curious what others have observed.

I imagine that will be a short lived boost, followed by aggressive customer plans to move off.

Sounds about right, either public offering or up for sale to a big tech co or Softbank. If IBM starts to muck about with Red Hat the value of SUSE could go up as well for an IPO.

The problem with SUSE is that they always come last in phoronix linux distro benchmarks. They have no clear unique feature that would make anyone switch distro. This is from a consumer point of view, maybe enterprise finds value where I don't.

How about moving it under the Linux Foundation instead?

> The potential for some form of organization to be run under the auspices of the Linux Foundation is also among the options.

That's one of the potential outcomes discussed in the article...

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