SUSE to go private
suse.com
suse.com
> Both SUSE’s Management and Supervisory Boards have expressed support for the strategic opportunity presented by this delisting. They believe that it will enable SUSE to concentrate on its operational priorities and the execution of its long-term strategy without the pressure of public markets.
Lets hope their incentives more strongly align with their customers, now. I am a huge SUSE fan, been using their products for 15 years. What they've been doing the last 5 or so has been almost unparalleled in the Linux space.
Anyone have counterexamples where that turned out well for customers?
The justification sounds good, but they'd say something like that even if the plan was "squeeze money out of the company at the expense of users and customers and reputation."
I can't speak of their server/enterprise business, however.
Honestly, it reminded me more of early-Amazon customer support, than anything more recent. E.g. support agent following up with a personalized email to me to make sure everything worked out okay with a warranty claim. Talking to humans was novel and pleasant.
That was on the consumer side though.
We also have a region where they have a 2 hour support SLA with part in hand. They will literally put your computer down to fix ours to avoid whatever punishment that gets meted out.
Back in the day a guy was collocated.
First year warranty is usually included in the product, so of course the replacement was free. I'd suggest renewing the warranties until EoL of your laptop as these service trips will likely become a bi-annual fixture.
Warranties don't usually cover damage on the part of the user/negligence.
> I'd suggest renewing the warranties until EoL of your laptop as these service trips will likely become a bi-annual fixture.
I've had it for about 2.5 years and haven't had any other issues (beyond Dell's idiotic choice to only support Modern Standby S-states).
Not private equity exactly, but he personally bought up 51% of the shares.
It's not like he improved their textile business. He took the name as a shell for his investment activities.
> Not private equity exactly, but he personally bought up 51% of the shares.
That's the opposite of the "without the pressure of public markets" situation though. He was doing quarterly reporting and answerable to shareholders (in some ways more answerable than a CEO who doesn't own the majority of shares - there are specific protections for minority shareholders).
If you bought in at any time between the IPO and May of this year, you'd be in for losses, so it's certainly not been an unprofitable move for them. But it's not the classical "foreign vulture PE comes in and destroys everything" situation here that people seem to be afraid of.
It’s not the only ways PE companies make money sometimes they do actually allow companies to thrive on the long term by letting them escape the short term thinking that some stock traders demand but those tend to fly under the radar as well it’s not as newsworthy as some beloved brand turning to dust over a 5 year time span.
EQT the company in question here bought SuSE from Novell for a song listed it on the stock market in 2021 for a pretty decent profit and is now buying back stock at about half what they sold it for in 2021, so is itself kind of an counterexample to the narrative that PE firms always destroy what they buy.
I can't name a single example.
We have far fewer issues in my lab since we replace CentOS with Leap (our experiments with Ubuntu were dreadful and we cannot babysit the computers so anything with complex maintenance is right out).
Going all rolling release was a step too far, too much of a culture shock, but we might switch to Tumbleweed in a couple of years if the stability remains as it is now.
My nostalgia for them will probably always be strong.
I started with SuSE 7 (purchased it!), then Mandrake, then Fedora, then Ubuntu, then Arch and now reluctantly back on Xubuntu because I can't get my laptop to sleep properly on Arch...
Do you remember why you switched from SuSE? I only have vague memories but I feel like the package manager might have been a bit clunky?
Maybe I should give openSUSE another go, I really dislike Ubuntu's 'ads' and snap.
The other half was that whenever I searched for an RPM for something I needed, it was almost always a Mandrake or RH package. RH was a pain with things like MP3s and proprietary drivers, so Mandrake seemed obvious. And yeah, SaX/YaST was a little clunkier than Drak.
I went to Fedora Core in their first version because the third party repositories became seamless enough and they were easily the best supported, especially for on-the-edge software.
Went through some Arch, Gentoo, Ubuntu, Pop_OS! etc days in-between there but have mostly settled on Fedora KDE, these days.
Leap is their stable distro, and shares binaries with SLES, their enterprise offering.
Both Leap and Tumbleweed have BTRFS by default, with Snapper for automated snapshots at upgrade and boot. Update messed something up? System won't boot? Just run an old snapshot until it's fixed. Zypper, the package manager, has state-of-the-art dependancy resolution, personally the best I've used.
They have a number of extremely interesting spinoff projects: MicroOS and MicroOS desktop (recently renamed, but the new names are escaping me) which use immutable root filesystems with automated updates and native Podman support. Snapper integration shines there, as well. If it fails to boot after update, it'll automatically roll back.
They're doing quite a bit, and it's all culminating in being very useable. Tumbleweed is the crown jewel, though.
I got burned by debian btrfs upgrades, so I'll stay with ext4 though.
(ok perhaps other package managers do it nowadays, but i installed openSUSE 2-3 years ago and i haven't really tried every package manager out there - mainly apt/apt-get and pacman as it comes with msys2)
that's a thing I haven't heard in a long time
For example, things like Gnome always come to Arch months after it has been released upstream. But it makes sense because Gnome team always break existing extensions and community can't really keep up so it takes a while until popular extensions gain support. And sadly Gnome without extensions is more or less useless. Maybe Fedora gets latest Gnome on day one, but it is unusable without community extensions on day one.
So kudos to maintainers of Arch!
Of course, whether or not the most important packages to you hit each distro first could be a totally different story.
Overall, openSUSE Tumbleweed is very up-to-date, though: ~76% by this measure— right up there with Fedora Rawhide and Gentoo.
> Open Build System and OpenQA, for automated building and testing of packages. This is what gets updates to their rolling release Tumbleweed faster than Arch, but with no instability ever.
Arch also has "no instability ever". And I don't think I've ever run into a problem where I've said, "damn, I wish the latest version was out right now", other than needing to run mainline on new machines for a few months that is.
But please don't take this comment the wrong way, I'm curious and will probably spin up a VM or two to take a look around.
Lolwat. I've tried it in earnest several times over the years on basic thinkpads (once on my only development machine, in which my only customizations were basically installing intellij ides and docker) and I would never ever, call it stable. I mean, if someone were to ask me for a picture of instability for a dictionary and they asked me to choose between Arch Linux and Windows Me logos... I'm not sure which I would choose.
To be fair though, I haven't tried it in 3 years since it last bit me. On the other hand I've had fedora running on one machine for like 7 years straight.
What instability did you face?
Between those snapshots you might have bleeding edge updates for all the packages, but even then I do encounter package conflicts way too often. Well, on the upside, at least they are detected.
So yes, it is stable, but it comes at a price.
Apart from that, the community support felt mediocre, at least a few years ago. The most visited platform was a bulletin board forum with very little interaction. When I had trouble installing KDE, it took a few days until someone suggested the correct diagnostic tools. This is bad for being the testbed of a commercial distribution. In the end, I just installed Arch, which packaged KDE better than Tumbleweed did.
But on the other hand, maybe only if you use a distro long enough, you get to see the downsides, and each one has them.
A) Snapshots come out far more regularly then once a month. Going from the mailing list we've actually had a snapshot released every day since the 4th. I'd say the average is one every three days but that's just from the top of my head.
B) they do not cover every package you have installed: They don't even know what packages you have installed, snapshots are cut on the repo side. It's true that packages get rebuilt a lot but that's because either the package updated or a dependency of the package updated that caused the package to be rebuilt.
There are quite a few things I've grown to dislike about Tumbleweed after using it for the past 7-8 years, but the upgrade experience is not one of them.
I'd like to know if the Gnome 4 in Leap was usable. If I do a search on software.opensuse.org on gnome-desktop it only turns out packages from tumbleweed and experimental packages from SLE-15-SP2 which looks quite ancient.
That's called a trade-off, a very fundamental concept in pretty much everything in life.
And no, snapshots don't come out every month. They come out ~5 times every week. The most number of packages I've had to update was maybe around ~3500 and that's after 6 month of not upgrading my system.
I agree for "true" rolling distro enthusiasts, Arch is still the top choice, but Tumbleweed is great for those seeking to use a rolling distro without sinking too much time into configuration.
Uh, I've been using Tumbleweed on two machines for about seven years now, and I've experienced multiple cases of MATE just not working after an upgrade. It's not that big a deal, though, as you point out, because of snapper.
That said, I'm still using Tumbleweed on both machines, and I'm very happy with it. Even the nVidia situation is acceptable now that they offer a repo with the official drivers.
After trying to repair it for a while I am about to ditch it and go with KDE Neon or Mint (their Debian edition sounds interesting).
I will look into this Snapper thing you mentioned, maybe that helps. Otherwise my trust in that distro is unfortunately gone.
Installation worked flawlessly. Hardware was detected on the spot. I could install NVidia's official driver through YaST. Installing Steam from the package manager.
Now I am sitting with a switch pro controller and playing Hogwarts Legacy.
All around a solid experience. Their biggest competitor in this space might be Ubuntu. For me Suse has a more solid feeling to it. Also supports KDE better.
—update, sheesh. It’s not even incubating.
Private equity is incompatible with "optimism" and "hope".
Even worse when it is the same company that got them listed in the first place, implying that going public was a mistake.
Citation: Read up on how Toys'R'Us was put through that wringer.
Edit: actually, here's a good write-up:
"Less attention was paid to the albatross that Bain, KKR, and Vornado had placed around the company’s neck. Toys “R” Us had a debt load of $1.86 billion before it was bought out. Immediately after the deal, it shouldered more than $5 billion in debt. And though sales had slumped before the deal, they held relatively steady after it, even when the Great Recession hit. The company generated $11.2 billion in sales in the 12 months before the deal; in the 12 months before November 2017, it generated $11.1 billion."
Archive link: https://archive.is/OH9QF
My recollection of Toys 'R' Us was actually that the owners deliberately tanked it. They may have originally wanted to save the company, but they spent years deliberately buying and selling pieces so that Toys 'R' Us would hold all the debt while the profitable pieces went elsewhere. That wasn't an accident.
"Private equity can stack the deck in other ways, too. Firms can direct businesses they own to buy other companies and then act as broker on the deals, reaping transaction fees. After its buyout, Toys “R” Us acquired a number of companies, including FAO Schwarz, eToys.com, and assets from KB Toys (itself a failed reclamation project of Bain’s). Consolidating brick-and-mortar and online toy businesses may have been a good-faith strategy. What’s certain is that the deals helped generate $128 million in transaction fees for the owners."
What the article misses is that FAO and KB were sold off before the bankruptcy, with Toys R Us keeping all the bad parts, specifically their debt.
Can you elaborate please?
They've been in SuSE since 2018 - so the IPO was their try at exiting, but since it didn't work out, they're probably going a different route (couple of more years of development, then selling to someone else).
Melissa Di Donato, the SuSe ex-CEO is wife of Darren Roos, CEO of IFS (huge Enterprise Software company) - who are also owned by EQT.
EQT tends to invest heavily in their development objects, so it's probably a good thing - but they are also very adamant on timely progress, so good luck to all SuSe oldtimers who are still with the company - it's going to be another roller coaster.
Let's see if the next try gets them somewhere.
if you plan long term strategic shifts, most shareholders will bail out earlier when the quarterly publications once doesn't look too good. which hurts the whole plan.
so if you need to invest long term, it's better to get rid of those short term investors, which can bring everything down. private you don't need to publish your results, that's why most German companies prefer to stay private. they think in 6 year plans, not 1/4th year plans
So they instead offer a large premium and hope/assume those parties will accept.
No clue if there are similar laws in Germany or other countries.
The valuation is decided during the arbitration process. From what I understand if there has been previous offer to buy it's quite likely that will be used at least as initial basis for the price.
There seems to be at least one English article about the process: https://insights.fondia.com/fi/en/articles/corporate-law/sha...
There's also requirement (with some exceptions) to make offer to buy publicly listed company's shares when the shareholder's control over the votes increases above 30% and 50%. Normally the price in that case would be the highest price that shareholder paid for the shares during previous 6 months.
This is supposed to protect small investors from finding themselves owning shares they can't sell on the market anymore.
The price is set by the equivalent of the SEC.
If that fails to buy all the shares, the company must sell enough stock so that the market is again liquid enough.
I _think_ many countries have similar rules, as cursory googling shows the London stock Exchange changed their minimum free float requirement some years ago.
If they are private person they can attempt to judgement via court and let enforcement authority liquidate their assets or garnish their wages.
I would guess that it’s part decorum part attempt to minimise the administrative burden. Many European PE’s operate on a “there is enough money to be made by being fair” sort of motto. This can be because they mean it, but it’s also because not being “evil” it a marketable product to many EU investors (this is likely true outside the EU as well, but I only know about EU markets). Then there is the part where private companies are still responsible for keeping track of ownership, as well as informing them. Even if they plan on letting investors trade on some internal platform it’s still a rather large administrative burden that becomes easier the fewer shareholders they have.
This is still just me guessing, but the way I read this it’s a simple message. Investors get a nice out and they’re going to be disappointed if they don’t take it.
I think we should thank everyone who bought shares at the IPO for their charitable contribution to open source software.
I've only worked at one other company that comparatively treated their Engineers as badly and overworked as R. I started at the company with 3 other people on my team. None of them were there 1 year later, including myself. IIRC I quit after 6 months on the spot with no backup plan.
We were expected to make how-to videos, how-to articles, make labs, run labs w/public questions, give hour long tailored demos, 2-5 meetings with clients a day (potential and current) while also doing the actual technical work to deploy clusters, technical work testing various things (like Longhorn performance), complex cluster troubleshooting, all while having to keep on top of knowing everything about k8s and infra daily. Probably much more I don't remember right now. I worked SO many nights and weekends to keep caught up as did others.
I was so excited to work there as a k8s contrib getting to actually be paid to work on k8s and it was .... that. Thrown into a meat grinder with no room to breath. Every single day and week.
While in many ways not comparable to what's happened with Redhat, with Suse turning to the dark side one wonders how much longer Canonical will last before doing something similar.
Make no doubt about it, private equity is all about short term shareholder returns. That's not a bad things in principle but if you don't want to wake up yet again with your distro having the rug pulled out from under it, switch to Debian.
I’ve seen many valid criticisms of Canonical, but huge doesn’t seem applicable to them and evil seems to go beyond what’s fair for their flaws. As for their owner, again, few would place Mark Shuttleworth in the same category as either IBM or private equity firms, other than probably having had a peak (though not current) net worth of over $1 billion.
Why do I say that? Simply, as per the linked announcement itself, this takeover offer is by the current majority shareholder who already owns 79% of the company. They can already win any shareholder vote they want to win. They already control SUSE.
Most of what this will do is two things: one, pay the current minority shareholders of SUSE 67% more than their shares are worth on the open market, and remove the quarterly earnings pressures of the German equivalent of Wall Street from SUSE management, at least unless and until any future IPO or a sale to another public company. Not obvious that this transaction makes anything worse than it already was.
There could be a less obvious difference: SUSE currently has a German corporate structure with very strong worker rights including participating alongside management on the supervisory board. If they get rid of the German entity and keep only a Luxembourg entity, that may no longer apply, though German labour law certainly still would for employers based in Germany. I’m not an expert on any differences between German and Luxembourg worker governance participation rights, and in this paragraph I’m more raising a question than asserting anything.
If that was the case, I’d bet 10$ that the german government would intervene and block that. Germany is all for free market until its their stuff in sale.
Has Germany done something similar before?
> Germany is all for free market until its their stuff in sale.
Isn't everyone?
For anyone who paid the IPO price of 30 EUR (and it went up to 40 in the months after the IPO), it would mean a realization of their losses. You'd be forced out of your position, down 46% compared to the IPO price. The PE firm probably gave a large chunk to banks at discount prices to facilitate the IPO, but still, this was a really good deal for them.
Even if they won't end up delisting, the jump of the stock price caused by their announcement will have done really good things to their balance sheets, and given that they will pay for the buy-out with a dividend, all it took was to move some money around from daughter company to parent company.
Usually fund strategy calls for an exit in 5y. If after 5 years they don’t see a good enough return, they need to change strategies. Delisting helps do major surgery in the shadows (labour), and broker a deal that either makes them money or allows them to save face…
My guess is as someone said, reduce costs, implement some income boosting measure, touch up the numbers and sell it privately. Expect a lot of this for half-IPOed PE tech acquisitions made the past 4 years as they realize they will be holding the candle forever, since they bought at peak prices.
If there was any turn "to the dark side", surely it must have happened 5 years ago, not today, right?
Edit: Apparently time flies faster when you're bad at math.
... because they are not going to be publically traded?? In that case Debian has been on the dark side forever.
> SUSE has committed to declare and pay an interim dividend to all shareholders [...] will be funded by SUSE through a combination of existing cash and additional borrowing [...] in the form of loans [...] to a maximum of EUR 500 million.
So EQT is asking SUSE to take its cash, borrow up to 500M EUR, pay a dividend (of which 79% goes to the PE fund). Then EQT will use (some of? All of?) that money to buy more shares. It doesn't sound like EQT is investing any new money into SUSE here.
Sounds like EQT will do well regardless of whether SUSE ends up going private. SUSE meanwhile will get another (up to) 500M of debt and lose a chunk of its cash from its balance sheet.
Hmmm... (opinions my own)
It's never true - if PE buys your company, run for the hills.
PE is basically a parasitic business, designed to suck money out of the purchased company until it collapses. You do this by borrowing a ton of money to purchase the company. Then for the privilege the company pays the buyer a special bonus that conveniently covers its costs (and often more) out of the cash it had on hand when bought. Then the buyer continues to get various payment streams, like guaranteed dividends or all sorts of other obligations, until the company collapses.
Sad to say I'm not exaggerating.
I say "basically" because there are a couple of exceptions. Dell was purchased in a special deal with the founder so that the company actually operates but the founder was enriched in the process.
VC is a branch of private equity (an almost invisible pimple on the PE business TBH) where they don't buy the whole company and hope to make money on the IPO. But it's a small business: there are numerous companies out there with an asset base larger than the entire VC industry.
I actually think this has the same potential of a “good” PE move as the Dell success.
Evil IBM(TM) threw in $50m to help the deal along and preserve SuSE for its hardware.
Also, it didn’t help that SUSE folks and Ximian folks were like oil and water. Novell tried a combo that made sense on paper but there was culture clash.
Basically you get rid of the quarterly reporting grind and it lets you focus on the business even if certain initiatives are going to depress shorter term results, but pay off over the long term.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/connieguglielmo/2013/10/30/you-...
That's the purpose of PE firms. They accept pre-investment in this sort of scheme, and do this with several companies at once over a 5-7 year total period, taking a slice of the revenue with no capital risk of their own, and the investors get a good 5-7 years of 12-18% ROI. The companies are trash at the end of the cycle but hey, that's capitalism.
Source: I was "lucky" enough to work for a tech startup through its IPO period after which it was acquired by PE, and exactly the above happened. We had the opportunity to "buy in" to the investment cycle with our own money, and so they had a pretty detailed presentation about exactly how this all works. I was somewhat surprised by how honest they were willing to be with the employees (although it did take a little bit of reading between the lines).
Since your company had IPOed the SEC required them to be honest with anyone interested in buying in.
Warren Buffet runs Berkshire Hathaway which is acts as a PE firm. Here's a list of everything they own and have owned for decades: https://finmasters.com/berkshire-hathaway-subsidiaries/#cons...
There are plenty of other examples.
PE is just "ownership not through the public stock markets" which is like...the default, actually.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/safeway-theranos-split-after-350...
Albertsons (including Safeway) was IPO’d in Jun 2020, and now is set to be bought by Kroger.
Think about it - you're having beers with a friend and he goes "so the company got bought out and then nothing changed". blank stares as everyone waits for the point / rest of story
You hear only of the dramatic ones. Bit like news is nearly entirely bad - bad news sells.
People forget that PE firms are buying equity. If the company prospers they get the upside. Contrary to popular hn belief destroying the thing you just paid a lot of money for is not standard game plan.
>Where success is the products are still made, quality and staffing is maintained
The world you describe is not the world we live in. Shareholder objectives - PE or otherwise - is to maximize value. It's not an artisanal hobby where highest possible quality product is the end goal.
By now i am suggesting Suse products to all my clients with the guarantee that even if i get hit with a bus and will not return, there will always(!) be someone to support their software. They are for instance the only ones actually doing this.
Cloud times are shifting again, especially with machine learning and i could not be happier about it.
The fact alone that with windows 11 a lot of orgs have a LOT of compute simply being thrown out makes for excellent dev environments and local clusters
And Red Hat isn't? What am I missing?
Furthermore, i think they have clearly demonstrated how they see things.
This is especially true on the edge and unless you are a megacorp, i don't see anyone forking over money for the license. The open source offering is not to be used for production and simply as a testing ground for features that make it upstream... OKD, could have been a closer match to k3s in terms of cost but not necessarily simplicity and we are not even talking about how ready rke2 is.
SUSE's offerings, provide a balance of simplicity and enterprise features, making them compelling for SMEs. Here in Europe there is not even a question about it. Kubernetes is free and in the end of the day simply a wrapper of apis, which should not require licensing.
From the viewpoint of the average IT worker, Suse is also the much better choice!
I really hope that this does not affect the future of Rancher.
What does this mean? Is their current status adding some significant overhead that would go away by going private?
Then I saw a couple of videos and realized its UI (of their control center) is stuck in the 90s and it has several rough edges (like when installing it, I wont show you a list of WiFi access points, but ask you to manually enter the name of your AP and the encryption method... in 2023).
I decided to keep Mint. So far it's been the best distros in terms of "not having to bother" so much. I use it as my daily dev environment.
I haven't tried tumbleweed, but I have tried Mint a few months ago and it didn't really striked me as having much more modern tool and I don't think I even used a configuration management tool.
[1] that many people would praise nowadays by the way. [2] which still works really well and is still a pretty good UX imho.
Secondly SuSE have an relatively good track record of delivering an stable and predictable distribution with SLES, and have been around longer then any other commercial Linux vendor, and despite several changes in ownership over the years it's never been felt as an user.
Compared to Ubuntu running SLES is breath of calmness with changes happening slow and well coordinated and while RHEL used to be the same that's changing after being taking over by IBM.
Honestly, all the distributions "just work" and are "stable" (i.e. they don't crash and corrupt your data). You could just pick up a random one. You will find some specific problems affecting you, sure... you will report (or even fix) them and, after a while, the distro will be perfect for you (it will still have some problems, but none affecting you because you have reported/fixed them).
The main thing about RHEL is that it's "stable" (i.e. it doesn't change) over a crazy long period of time. If you are selling software, the lack of change makes it easy to support. If you are buying software, it's a good platform to use because developers support it.
RHEL being historically the most popular "doesn't change" distro, I have never seen a big point in using other. Nowadays your vendor is probably also supporting Ubuntu, though. SUSE? A lot of them will support it, but not all. As long as the vendors you use support the distro you use it doesn't matter, I guess.
So, most of the tech megacorps in the US. Oh, the glory of fasc...ehem, capitalism.
But, apparently, making that much sense gets me downvotes.
I think you're getting a bit confused by the terms public and private. Most US tech megacorps are public companies e.g. publicly traded private enterprises. They're public companies because they're traded on the stock market, not because they receive "public funds" aka funding from the government; that's not what a company being public means. You seem to be mixing these two up. Insofar as they get money from the government, it's generally in exchange for providing services to the government (aka doing business) or as subsidies, but these aren't what make a company 'public'. Being traded on the stock exchange is what makes a company 'public'.
> Oh, the glory of fasc...ehem, capitalism.
You should probably pump the brakes on adopting any sort of ideology before you get a firm grasp on basic terminology.
Oh, I know basic terminology.
Faschism - when big private enterptise is in service to the government and having lucrative, beneficial and unfair deals with the government or it's agencies.
Most of big tech and MIC companies in the USA have beneficiary status (multi-billion deals, tax-exemption, etc..) with the government or at least one of the alphabet soup agencies. In other words, US government learned much from the Nazies.
Strange spellings, is your spellcheck off? If your intention was to communicate your familiarity with these terms, you're failing badly.
And no, US tech companies getting paid for fulfilling lucrative contracts for the government is not what fascism is, even if there is corrupt dealing. Corruption and fascism are not interchangeable concepts. And to reiterate the point, a company being publicly traded does not mean they are receiving public funds.
And FYI, SUSE is not even an American company so your rants are completely irrelevant anyway. They have little if any connection to the US MIC.
EQT IPO'ed SUSE by selling a minority stake at the peak back in 2021 for €30, now they're buying it back for a little over a half of that.
I guess they feel it's undervalued and might have another got at it when/if small-mid tech company valuations recover..
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6sYHytyKN2-X93TurF3JptW8...
What have they put into a contract to make sure that happens.
Companies will make many promises when they undergo changes in ownership. All those words and intentions are worth nothing unless they are specified as part of a binding legal contract.
If there's one thing that is expected of SUSE is a periodic restructuring.
https://www.eqt-marcel-offer.com/websites/3004_ma/English/10...
Ownership of EQT goes up to Investor and the Swedish Wallenberg family, they're the same people that among other things has held big stakes in Ericsson, Astra Zeneca (The British covid vaccine),etc over 90 years by now.
It's a garbage model out of a Dicken's novel and is a huge reason why a groundswell of anti-capitalistic sentiment keeps growing. It's a case study in "worst practices" of venality.
Individuals are just as capable of doing this, just look at Twitter and there are plenty of adequately run companies owned by PE. We just don't pay attention to them.
But yeah somehow severely limiting debt funded acquisitions (when the debt is offloaded to the company which is being acquired) would probably be a very good idea.
Yes, but fiduciaries aren't (and even VCs generally try not to).
" there are plenty of adequately run companies owned by PE
Define "adequate" and which ones are they? I've certainly experienced directly and indirectly enough to know I'm quite burned on them, and I have yet to meet a single person who enjoyed dealing with one, that wasn't one; anyone on the receiving end of endless cost cutting, sell leasebacks, forced vendor changes to more closely align with portfolio choices regardless of sense, etc.
No, the people who seem to love PEs are either Ayn Rand's fluffer contingent, adjacently or are making money off one already without having to be subjected to their profoundly absent graces.
Pass.
The trepidation is that PE firms are also a bit prone to asset stripping and discarding the remaining carcass of the organisation, in which case this marks the beginning of the end of SUSE.
I've no idea how to tell which path is more likely or even which is their current intent though.
1)Expedited vendor lock-in: Figure out who is locked into the software, make the software maximally shitty/maximally costly so that these people would still not switch and then make money off the cost savings/higher prices and hope to make up investment.
2)Off market prep for trade sale: SUSE could be interesting for someone to acquire but a competitor/strategic buyer can't afford to buy the company and do the reorgs needed itself as it would tank the share price too much. The PE firm buys it, does the reorg off market and then does a trade sale of a reorged company to the buyer, but only now SUSE is way better as an acquisition target.
As I grew more comfortable with Unix fundamentals and I learned more about the GNU/Linux desktop userland, I left openSUSE behind because I didn't care so much about the GUI configuration tools like YaST. I bounced between Gentoo, Ubuntu, Arch, and more obscure derivatives of each, experimenting and learning a lot about the 'bones' of a Linux distro: the init system, the display server, the initramfs tooling, the filesystem, etc. I became especially fascinated with the 'bones' that truly make a class of distros unique: the package manager and the developer tooling used by maintainers to build the distro.
At some point I revisited openSUSE and realized that underneath the more 'superficial' things— important things, but things that are visible from the get-go— I'd loved about the distro as a newcomer were some truly impressive 'bones'. I can back to find that zypper was the most powerful, ergonomic package manager (of its type) that I'd ever seen. I was blown away by the flexibility and diligence of the Open Build Service infrastructure and how easy it made it for me to maintain repositories for nearly any distro, and grateful for the generosity of the openSUSE org for letting basically anyone make an account and leverage that sophisticated build infrastructure for free. The fact that they even automated QA for pre-boot stuff using screen scrapers and QEMU left a lasting impression on me.
Some years after that reintroduction, I fell in love with NixOS, which is now my daily driver everywhere. But I still have a lot of respect and affection for openSUSE.
I hope this change helps drive openSUSE forward over the long term. openSUSE is a great operating system that I'd recommend to anyone looking for a traditional distro that's pleasant to use and easy to maintain. openSUSE seems extremely underrated, at least here in the US.
And everyone should check out the Open Build Service. You know how on GitHub, you can browse to any repo and click the 'Fork' button to get your own copy that you can hack on and publish? OBS gives you that for Linux packages. You can automatically put together a repo full of packages that track whatever upstream source you like, but build with your own custom patches, build for your CPU architecture, etc. You can even fork a package from a different distro (or different release of your own distro), have it build against whatever you're running, and then get dumped neatly into a repo for you. (All builds happen in clean slate VMs, so you are very unlikely to miss any dependencies.)
I give it 3-4 yrs before a chapter 11 bankruptcy is filed.
Start planning your migrations folks, as its all downhill from here.
Same (more than once)...in both cases there were a few positives and a cavalcade of negatives, with the latter category expanding like a famished amoeba.
I could fix the whole PE realm in one move: require PE firms to operate as fiduciaries, with severe penalties for failure to comply. The whole sector would collapse or stop sucking, and I don't care which happens.
SUSE becomes another risky choice.
Nothing companies control is out of limits for a bait and switch (a la Hashicorp).
Wake up folks.
I'm not sure if you're aware of this, but when something isn't directly in your line of sight, it still exists...
who is life is affected by suse
Yes there are many people from Suse, but not predominantly so, let alone "maintained by".