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Comment by jvalencia | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious if anyone knows why SUSE is going IPO?

Perhaps because they’re owned by an investment company who now want their money back.

The timing seems right, Redhat is now owned by IBM, so setting SuSE free to compete with Ubuntu and Redhat might be a smart move. Ubuntu is doing their own thing in many respects, and IBM pretty much removed RedHat from the stockmarket, and pissed of some people with CentOS. Those CentOS users need to look for a new distro.

If someone is moving off on CentOS Linux and doesn't want to start paying for RHEL, why would they want to pay either SUSE or Canonical instead? Certainly they could move to openSUSE but that makes them SUSE users, not customers. And users who have demonstrated they're willing to go through a migration to avoid paying.

We pay SUSE and RedHat because enterprise customers demand support contracts with vendors. For everything else we just use CentOS.

Also, both SUSE and RedHat have additional features locked behind the enterprise subscription. It might be open source but requires a license.

This makes me wonder. What Linux does Google run? I'm guessing Debian.

I believe their Linux desktops are Debian-based but my understanding is their servers run a highly customized version of Linux that really isn't based on and doesn't look like a conventional distro.

They used to use their own Ubuntu variant for desktops, but switched to their own Debian variant.

And ChromeOS is based on Gentoo IIRC.

I'm looking forward to https://rockylinux.org/

By the same author of CentOS and promises to be 100% bug-for-bug compatible with Red Hat Enterprise.

> IBM pretty much removed RedHat from the market

Could you please elaborate on this?

If you wanted to invest in a Linux company, RedHat was the go to company. Now that means buy IBM stock.

I should have written: Removed RedHat from the stockmarket.

That makes more sense. I thought it meant that IBM is sunsetting RedHat Linux distro.

my guess is: Investors want to make a good exit and then try to sell it to SAP.

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