According to LinkedIn Dirk-Peter started at Suse 3 months ago as CEO and worked for Red Hat for 18 years and was a Senior VP at Red Hat.
I think this move of Suse could be a credible threat to IBM / Red Hat's RHEL.
This can be 2nd most important Linux distro announcement for the good of the community by a company after Canonical's announcement of Ubuntu back in 2004, but time will tell if this going to take-off by spinning a new generic enterprise Linux distro based on RHEL.
Interestingly the last Red Hat for community (most popular at the time) is Red Hat 9 before it gone fully enterprise by launching Fedora back in 2004. Coincidentally Ubuntu was launched around the same time (now most popular Linux distro). Probably the last Red Hat Enterprise is RHEL 9 as we know it.
Also, if CIQ follows them and SUSE bases this on CentOS Stream (at least for RHEL9; CentOS Stream 8 is admittedly a bit messy), this is exactly what Red Hat was hoping to achieve.
I prefer something that is kept reasonably up to date so that I don't have to fight ancient long-fixed issues or missing features. But I really don't care, if it pays the bills I'll use it.
RHEL is increasingly seen as threatening its own place in the market, and enterprises want to be sure their multi million dollar investments will be stable over the long term. Paying SuSE for support makes sense if you believe they will support you better over the long term than RHEL will. Time will tell who provides more value, but SuSE does appear to be out-IBMing IBM.
For the average enterprise switching from SLES to SUSE RHEL means that update will happen in 5-7 years
I've been migrating to Ubuntu or retiring systems for the last two years and still not done. Hoping to be rid of RHEL 7 before updates stop.
I dislike windows and the M$ ecosystem but as far as server management for undocumented servers it's much easier to deal with them than for Linux stuff. For an undocumented Windows server, you send out an email, wait 2 weeks, shut it down and listen for the screams.
For an undocumented Linux server, you send out an email, wait 2 weeks, prep the fire extinguishers, batten the hatches, and wait for the mob of angry villagers to storm the DC with pitchforks because thanks to you their print server for their paper checks is now printing in Klingon and it can't be fixed without resurrecting the guy that wrote the software 6 days before he died of terminal terminal disease.
With Linux systems, sure, you can check chron and top and find what is running and where it is but it's a bit more unwieldy than the windows GUI, plus you don't always have a full list of the file and folder permissions and getting a full list of those requirements for whichever softwares are accessing them.
RHEL, either officially paid for, or via CentOS / Oracle Linux, is everywhere though, gub'mnt, private, academia.
It is a good move. They siphon off customers from the competition to a free option and dramatically raise awareness of their paid service.
If it turns out that they still cannot make headway in North America with SLES, they can create paid support options for Liberty. Just like Red Hat, they will have the credibility of being the distro maintainer.
Given the staffing and infrastructure they already have to maintain for SLES, maintaining a RHEL-a-like may not even be that much work.
Really smart.
If there is a left over of Red Hat branding, you'd have a hard time proving any kind of purposeful infringement.
Both Red Hat and SUSE distributions make it easy because internally both companies need to do the trademark swap in their own engineering pipelines.
If you want to create a derivative of any Fedora/CentOS distribution, that's not hard. But if you're trying to recreate, that's a different story. You have to care about things like build sequencing, NVRs, etc.
For example, if I'm creating Kudo Linux as a RHEL-compatible distribution by deriving from CentOS Stream, I only need to swap the branding packages and call it a day. The rest of my engineering effort can be spent in Fedora or CentOS Stream as appropriate. But if I'm creating Kudo Linux as a distribution that re-creates RHEL, then I need all the source packages to build, figure out build orders, and swap out branding. I also have to do my own lifecycling and validation. I am also now responsible for the maintenance of all the software and ensuring people get updates.
One is easy. The other isn't.
If Suse thinks they are going to make money in this space via support contracts rather than licensing, it's sort of a "commoditize your complements" thing...commoditizing the paid license subscription part. That's a guess though. It's not clear to me how they plan to make money with this move.
- damage and embarrass Red Hat, their direct competitor - enhance their own brand, brand awareness, and reputation with customers of their competitor. Sell more of their own existing enterprise offerings as a result. - create an alternative distribution that they can monetize if it turns out to be more popular than their own offerings ( even if only in one geography )
$ ssh me@myol7.myplace.com cat /etc/oracle-release /etc/redhat-release
Oracle Linux Server release 7.9
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 7.9 (Maipo)
$ ssh me@myol8.myplace.com cat /etc/oracle-release /etc/redhat-release
Oracle Linux Server release 8.8
Red Hat Enterprise Linux release 8.8 (Ootpa)
$ ssh me@myol9.myplace.com cat /etc/oracle-release /etc/redhat-release
Oracle Linux Server release 9.2
Red Hat Enterprise Linux release 9.2 (Plow)
$ cat /etc/redhat-release
CentOS Linux release 7.5.1804 (Core)If IBM sues SUSE, Oracle might try to intervene, on the grounds that a ruling against SUSE could negatively impact them as well.
I'm not sure if IBM vs Oracle is a lawsuit either would want to have. Both have very deep pockets, and substantial corporate experience with litigation. So, that factor may help protect SUSE