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Comment by pcthrowaway | Hacker News Reader

Can you elaborate why a market cap of 2.2 billion makes SUSE not a viable alternative? If anything, this makes me feel like they're undervalued, especially now that they're the only company shipping an enterprise linux with an open source and privacy respecting (looking at you Canonical) base distro.

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> Can you elaborate why a market cap of 2.2 billion makes SUSE not a viable alternative?

I'd always assumed the MicroFocus acquisition of SuSE had something to do with OpenStack, and when OpenStack stopped being The Big New Thing, that impacted SuSE.

Basically:

* I was on the HP OpenStack team

* HP burned through over a billion on that, and sold the product off to SuSE

* Somewhere in the mix there, MicroFocus was divested from HP. Even working there, it was hard to follow, because HP also split into HP and HPE

* As various vendors lost interest in OpenStack (Cisco, EMC, VMWare, etc), SuSE replaced their CEO who was behind the acquisition in the first place

I talked to some SuSE folks about OpenStack at one of the VMWare conferences, and they seemed confident in it's future, and then just weeks later I read that they'd discontinued the product in it's current state

The entire thing is incredibly confusing because HPE also had two versions of OpenStack. "Helion Open Stack" and "Carrier Grade OpenStack" and they were two different teams.

I didn't think they really had to pay for the openstack assets, I didn't think they did anything with those. IIRC they had their own managed openstack contracts with their SLES customers before the acquisition, and were working on getting kube/paas offerings on top of that which they then scrapped for Rancher.

So I know they burned a bunch of money too, but I don't think it was on the HPC or other openstack assets (HPC was the public cloud openstack offering that I think got shutdown sometime around the HPE split)

What I meant is what would prevent IBM or other large corporation from acquiring them as well?

They already have been, multiple times, nowadays they belong to Micro Focus.

In July 2018, Micro Focus International, SUSE's parent company since 2014, announced its plan to sell the business unit to a subsidiary of EQT Partners in the first quarter of calendar year 2019.[7][8] This acquisition was completed on 15 March 2019, making SUSE a standalone business. Under new ownership, their legal name is SUSE Software Solutions Germany GmbH.

I stand corrected, it is still owned by them in 75% though.

SuSE is owned by MicroFocus.

SUSE was sold to EQT in 2019 and went public in 2021.

I stand corrected, it is still owned by them in 75% though, and apparently they are an investment fund.

Sometimes I feel that a lot of tech companies are virtually behaving as hedge funds

Do you have a source for that? I was under the impression SUSE no longer had any ties to Micro Focus

Wikipedia?

Are you confusing EQT and Micro Focus?

    SuSE is owned by MicroFocus.
    ...
    I stand corrected, it is still owned by them in 75% though

As per the Wikipedia article, EQT still owns 75% of SUSE, not Micro Focus. Micro Focus is no longer involved with SUSE

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