Submitted by SUSE, the open source software company, has been sold to a Swedish private equity firm.
EQT Partners will acquire SUSE from current owners Micro Focus in a deal worth $2.5 billion USD and is expected to close in early 2019.
EQT is described as “a development-focused investor with extensive experience in the software industryâ€.
Chalk this up on the “I never thought this would happen” category, but ok. So does this mean that it was not doing good? It’s been a while since I have used it.
SUSE is doing well, the company that bought them before, Micro Focus, as part of Attachmate buyout, needed the money because they made a bad investment on HPE software division.
Also, the focus of Micro Focus (that’s funny!) is more like support for some bygone venerable tech, so, SUSE was a bit unaligned to their core business.
At least, that is what I have read.
Edited 2018-07-04 01:37 UTC
>> the focus of Micro Focus (that’s funny!) is more like support for some bygone venerable tech, so, SUSE was a bit unaligned to their core business
SUSE was acquired when they bought Novell, the fact that they are selling SUSE and not Novell (assuming there is still a separate Novell) would tie in with that. TBH I wasn’t aware Micro Focus still existed, I know them for Micro Focus COBOL
SuSE is doing extremely well, they were bought by Novell for $210 million back in 2004, now sold for $2.535 billion.
They currently employ around 1,400 people and they regularly contribute to the GNU/Linux and open-source community in a similar fashion to Red Hat.
SuSE can be seen as the European counterpart to Red Hat and played a major role in the formation of the exceptionally strong GNU/Linux and KDE communities in Germany.
Many people are making fun about SuSE’s individual approaches with YaST etc., which back in the nineties really did encourage and enable many novice users to run their own Linux system. Sure YaST has its shortcomings, but SuSE’s distributions as a whole were always quite reasonably put together. During all the time, SuSE was always a well-respected citizen in the community.
Edited 2018-07-04 13:54 UTC
I have been running openSUSE Tumbleweed on my desktop for the past ~15 months, and I have been quite happy.
I have no clue how their enterprise offerings are doing, but the community distro is very much alive.
… just another systemdOS clone, who cares
A part of me wants this company to pull a Darwin and create a world-class experience on top of the Linux kernel and userland, propietary or open-source. But it probably won’t happen. This needs to much money…
That time is now gone, it was the early 2000, when we still believed on the Linux desktop idea.
Now in a world where Android and ChromeOS couldn’t care one second what kernel they actually use, and we have GNU/Windows alongside N̶e̶X̶T̶S̶T̶E̶P̶ macOS, I don’t believe it will ever happen.
How did you do this crossed out NeXTSTEP?
Seems I can’t replicate it in notepad by trying to copy one of the “-“… it gets selected together with its letter.
Long time ago (around 2000), I set up a computer classroom for my high school pupils. Beeing a free software advocate, I went to an international event asking for promotion posters to decorate the classroom. The SuSE representatives were of the most generous donators. They even gave us a complete 6.2 box, including support, although I said the OS of choice were Debian.
Can you even think of a single unique reason to use the free openSUSE over other popular Linux distros?
Zypper and YaST.
I find it the best and easiest to use package management of any open-source OS, along with the RPM back-end of course. It’s very easy to vary the dependencies according to which version of the OS you are building for when writing an RPM spec (e.g. Qt 4 vs 5 in my case), which is not so simple when building DEB packages for Ubuntu.
Plus, when you install OpenSUSE, the entire library is available for you to choose from; you don’t have to install it from the command-line afterwards. And they’re hierarchically organised into categories — Development, then C++, Python, Ruby, Qt 4, Qt 5, GTK … not just “Development” as on Debian.
Edited 2018-07-04 16:50 UTC
Sshhh… You risk alienating the Debianfolk and their unsubstantiated claims of .deb being the “true” package manager of FOSSland, and you know how uppity the Debianfolk can get over inconsequential issues such as rivalries between compressed archive formats that can be losslessly converted from one to another.
Edited 2018-07-04 19:16 UTC
Haha! I’m a long-time Debian aficionado having used it or one of its offspring for the better part of 10 years. That being said, I have also used RPM based distribution (my favorite by far was PCLinuxOS which was my daily driver for a few years and had the unmitigated gall to use Synptic as the GUI frontend.) I don’t think any one package format is superior to another in this day and age of advanced GUI package managers.
Let’s clear some common errors up:
.deb is not a package manager.
.deb and .rpm files are packages.
The commands dpkg and rpm are package utilities for those packages.
apt/aptitude, yum and zypper are package managers.
fpm is god’s gift to system administrators (thank you Jordan Sissel!!).
>> The commands dpkg and rpm are package utilities for those packages.
>> apt/aptitude, yum and zypper are package managers.
I would have said it is the other way round dpkg and rpm are the package manager / package management system. Apt and yum are package management utilities or perhaps repository managers.
Most VC’s are nothing more that debt engines. By that I mean that they buy companies and then a couple of years later they sell and move on with most of the time, the company they leave behind is saddled with debt that is the residue from the asset stripping and cash leeching that the VC’s need to do do fund their lavish lifestyle and their next victim.
Good luck SUSE, you are going to need it.
I’m afraid I have to agree with you there.
Most VCs just buy-up, monetize and move on. That’s why their shareholders pay the CEOs etc., such unbelievable sums.
Fcuk the users, fcuk the developers, fcuk the coders.
Next please!
Mac
So there’s some hope.
Commodore flashback!