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IBM And Intel Help Rescue SuSE From Insolvency
mutantcamel writes: "A report on NetworkFusion states that SuSE has avoided insolvency thanks to a fresh round of investment that raised $45.5 million for the ailing company. IBM and Intel
are among the players that have announced their support for the company. The rescue package comes after quite a turbulent time at SuSE HQ, but the company seems optimistic about the future."
"The rescue package comes after quite a turbulent time at SuSE HQ, but the company seems optimistic about the future."
I'd be pretty optimistic too if someone raised 45.5 million for my company. But seriously, why SuSE?
Insolvency: The state of being unable to meet debts or discharge liabilities; bankrupt.
I'm glad Suse is getting this help. They are really well liked in Germany, and a GOOD Linux distro.
works for Intel. They use a lot of Linux there. ~%90 of his work is done on a Linux box. They really like the idea of not being tied to microsoft in the server room. I just really wish that we had an Exchange Killer then I could start converting my clients to pure Linux environments. That would be cool.
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
I'm just wondering if anybody else is hating the fact that they might have to start liking Intel because of this.
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Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
The rescue package comes after quite a turbulent time at SuSE HQ, but the company seems optimistic about the future."
Yeah, I would imagine two Fortune 500 tech giants writing you a check for a substantial amount of money would tend to make you optimistic under any circumstances.
If this had just been IBM, one would have thought this might be the beginning of an "official" IBM Linux. Even with Intel in there though, does this mean IBM is shopping for a distro to get behind with their recent Linux push?
Well, it's sure not to replace Windows on the desktop. Despite their embrace of "peace, love and Linux", IBM refuses to port its desktop apps to Linux.
$45 Million is a truely disturbing ammount. Now is the time on sprockets when we dance.
I figure they probably what to keep as much diversity as possible going. So IBM makes sense in a way.
But what about Intel? I'm not up to speed on their involvement.
- - -
Radio Free Nation
"If You have a Story, We have a Soap Box"
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Is there a good reason you don't mention debian? It is the choice of Taco et al. . .
i suspected that SuSE was in trouble, glad that the are saved.
...
i'm using SuSE for a very long time and i like the distribution.
the future of SuSE seems to be good:
look here
and here
SuSE has put much effort into supporting development of open source projects like, kde, alsa, reiserfs,
hopefully the future will be better for SuSE, if they go, it will be a lost for the open source community.
between SuSE and Mandrakesoft! In a similar situation, Mandrakesoft has been bought (20%) by its community of users and is now traded on a European market. SuSE is more and more locked by rather proprietary companies. I wish them good luck!!!
This is the perfect example of the sort of corporate altruism I think we can expect to see over the next few years. As some people have pointed out, SuSE is one of the most popular European Linux distributions. It is in IBM and Intel's best interest to ensure that there is are a few solid European based distributions around for them to build their business on. It avoids vendor lock to a particular distro (Red Hat anyone?). It maintains a company doing the tricky task of localizing the bulk of Linux. Plus, that shop may later be used to help localize IBM software at a later date.
All and all, it is in IBM and Intel's best interest to have a thriving SuSE (and Mandrake, for that matter), regardless of whether the company is actually profitable. This sort of enlightened self-interest could lead to a sort of patronage system for some of the major Linux distributors.
NWFusion.com tried to forcefeed me 32 cookies to read the article, I think I have indigestion.
Ethics II Axiom 2. "Man thinks." B. Spinoza
Hm...only 1 or 2 millions would do...IBM, please?
1. SuSE is big in Europe (posted above).
2. SuSE actually bundles Lotus Domino server (IBM owns Lotus), if you want it, for Linux. see http://www.suse.com/us/products/index.html
3. It also support DB2, and comes bundled (but RedHat does that, too).
4. Oh, and you can buy an S/390 version.
5. They contributed a lot to various Linux projects, especially Matrox video drivers (but that's my personal bias).
I tried RedHat in the beginning, and then I tried SuSE. I found SuSE to be better, smoother implimentation of Linux, and I found the YAST sysadmin tool to be great at reminding me where to find things (transitioning from OSF/1 and AIX). Plus my hardware was never fully supported in RedHat, but it was in SuSE (which never made sense to me).
Plus, I find it easier to rally behind the bad rendering of a cartoonish gecko than to rally behind a hat. (I mean, if we're talking kewl logos....)
Hate to say it, but it might have been better if they had gone under. It would have increased the chance of other companies like Mandrake and Red Hat making good profits. This new investment to keep Suse alive might just help cement a situation with no real moneymaking distro's.
...for all you longtime SUSE freeloaders to buy copies of their CDs. (Yes, I know it's free-as-in-beer to download, but do you want a new distro next year or not?)
Slackware never wanted to be a multi-million dollar commercial firm, so of course they're not. You measure success by the attainment of your goals, not by the attainment of someone else's goals.
(oh, and LinuxPPC and Turbolinux aren't dead either)
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
I still can't for the life of me understand why they put everything in a bsd-like /etc/rc.config, yet still have a SysV style init. Maintaining information 2 places (links in /etc/init.d/rcX.d and also in rc.config) is bad. very very bad.
if they wanted to build a bsd-like system around the linux kernel, then why go half-assed about it?
"We are not tolerant people. We prefer drastically effective solutions"
Well it's not a complete exchange killer, but Insight Server from Bynari isn't a bad replacement. It has had some big press lately. It doesn't use MAPI, only LDAP, POP3, IMAP, various standard protocols. Outlook works if you configure it correctly (very easy). It has a few drawbacks, such as the Outlook configuring, but overall it's a decent product. I've implemented it before and my clients were very pleased. It's $299 for 100 users, so it's not free but it's darn cheap compared to Exchange.
I hate to tell you this, but Microsoft makes a killing for support of their product. Technet, for an average Joe? 475/yr. Fixing aol on a out of warranty system (2 service calls) 35 dollars an incident. Professional support for NT/2000 255-1000. Enterprise support? 10-10000 to A cool million. You can't make money off support? Cisco charges millions of dollars for premium support for it's products. That's just the service agreement, not including the products. The ONLY way to make money off of software is service and support.
http://cincyboys.blogspot.com/ Everything Cincinnati. Including the word 'Finnih'
now. Too bad they copped out on America, because without America, they will not survive. And
the price of Euros keeps sinking lower and lower.
Hmmh, what does the currency exchange rate of Euro have to do with SuSE, esp. since they are not selling to US of A? If they did, it would be goog for them; same dollar price would get more euros etc., but...?
And as to USA being essential for survival; not necessarily so. With 5% of world population (although almost half of internet users AFAIR) it won't be the only player in linux-world for long. Poor countries have much more to benefit from the cheap OS than richer ones.
I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization -- Oliver Wendell Holmes
Run Lotus Domino on a SuSE Linux box. That's what I've been evaluating for the past month.... about to roll it into production for 250+ Lotus Notes client workstations.
How does a company like this have such a high cash burn rate when they are essentially just
enhancing free software?
Well SuSE has employees (not volunteers) that enhance, package, test, market and sell the complete end product; distribution consisting of (mostly) free software. In some cases employees also are the actual developers too. These people don't work for bananas (AFAIK), and you need a few of them. That's where the money goes. In addition SuSE has been sponsoring some outside development efforts, but most likely these are much smaller investments than the actual running costs of the company.
A quick calculation: let's say an average employee earns 50000$ a year. In Germany additional costs for employees (employee has to pay some soc. sec. costs, insurances etc) might bem say, 50%.
There are other indirect 'per employee' costs; PCs, facilities etc., so let's say each employee costs 100k$ a year (may be higher, but not much lower). So, for 1M$ you get 100 SuSE employees for one year. I'm not sure how many people SuSE employs; with 1000 employees 45 millions would be enough for 4 and 1/2 years. But that would be just for paying for people; there are other operational costs. So, even though it looks like buckets of money, it's not all that huge for medium-sized company?
I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization -- Oliver Wendell Holmes
Intel is investing in Linux, because Intel is trying to do something against Sun. Isn't that obvious?
The tactics is partly the same as Microsoft's: from desktop to the data center. Since Linux can be used (without most of the ease-of-use issues) on desktops by people who will be admins on the big systems, Intel is trying to bind them to Intel's technology. With the hope that they'll be completely ignorant about anything that doesn't run on Intel's processors.
Investing in SuSE makes further sense because SuSE is very much trying to create a distribution which does not look like Unix.
Hey that gives me an idea someone should pitch to TechTV, give Tux his own saturday morning cartoon, beating script kiddies and crackers with the power of open source, they could make John C. Dvorak the village idiot/comic relief, it would be good for a 10 share.
Read my plan to save the Bengals
Probably because of SuSE's dedication to s390.
Probably because SuSE resells IBM stuff pre-packaged and integrated.
Probably because SuSE tries to cover every little detail for major software like DB2 and Notes.
Probably because SuSE pushes big-iron solutions for banks and the like, which just happens to be IBM's focus as well.
Why SuSE, indeed.
The confusion probably comes from the fact that the chameleon's name is 'Geeko.'
Caldera is on its last legs and from checking out the CALD stock chart it looks like they'll soon be facing NASDAQ delistment. They've been trading below a dollar for a while and are under $35 million market capitalization.
One wonders which of the Linux companies will be left in a year that isn't IBM?
One of the points of splintering the rc scripts from bsd to sysv is so that apps won't step on other apps's toes when placing themselves in the startup sequence. No need to use sed, etc., to edit rc.local or rely on a sysadmin to put it in to get a daemon to run at startup.
By placing all the config information in rc.config, SuSE went back to the bad old days, requiring the hack of fillup(8) to allow apps to edit rc.config. Since 7.1 (at least), SuSE has realized their folly and now have splintered rc.config into a bunch of config files in /etc/rc.config.d/. For example, all the sendmail config information is now in /etc/rc.config.d/sendmail.cf.
However, there will always be a tension between putting config info in one big file and putting it in separate files. What if a setting is needed by more than one app? SuSE seems to be trying to get a good balance, at least.
Suse is the only distro that will support
1) IBM Products
2) Oracle Products
3) Commercial Software.
Suse knows linux is an operating system. Suse is very stable yet ahead of the game compared to US based distros.
If i use Suse linux i can replace expensive NT and Solaris servers running Oracle 9iAS and Databases. Redhat, many times over has told me to buy there 2,500.00 Redhat for Oracle (which is 6.0 based and pretty crappy) and do all sorts of hacks to get any recent rdbms working.
On the other hand, sude made sure that 7.0, 7.1 and 7.2 works with these commercials apps because that is where they get the demand for the OS.
Believe me, free software doesn't demand anything, but business requirments do. Redhat database doesn't cut it for anything other then a website and frankly, its very microsoft of Redhat to try and produce everything under the sun for there os.
So yeah, under suse you can run Domino, DB2, Oracle 9ias, Oracle 9i, Oracle8, oracle forms and reports, oracle forms developer and all the crap every other distro supports.
And usually people pay for OS support when business software relies on it.
It's interesting that you point out SuSE was "in trouble" for the CEO leaving - 2 days before this announcement was made. My brother manages a tech fund, and he has stated that a common thing he (and others managing such investments) expects is the ability to shake out management as a contigency to investing (also like requesting a board seat or three). My bet is the CEO's leaving was directly tied to SuSE getting $$$.
But then again, maybe not...
I am into Linux since 93, when I used Slackware. When I saw RH (4.0?) years later I adopted it almost immediately because of higher level administration and packaging system as well as the filesystem functionality.
I switched over to SuSE in early 2000 after a purchasing several distros (latest RH, SuSE and Mandrake). I am into Linux for business and quickly ruled out Mandrake for the same reason I would rule out Corel: serious systems perform serious tasks which always require training; ALWAYS emphasize on FUNCTION and not on second guessing unprepared users. SuSE prioritizes function.
I) Why SuSE?
1. It's configuration utility is fabulous (YaST). Compared to the mess I had to code for automatic RH installation in the old days SuSE is almost too easy. YaST2, while not as practical as YaST1 for some things is a well-thought, solid, extensible, presentation-agnostic architecture which earns my respect. It's integration with KDE is also meritorious.
2. LVM, Reiserfs and the best most stable kernels I know of. (Yes, I consider SuSE's kernels superior to RH's even though AC works for the latter.) These people KNOW the kernel. (WRT LVM and reiser: other distros probably use them now, but not before.)
3. Active participation in the gory technical projects. SuSE contributes actively to Reiser, XFS (yes, it's SGI's but SuSE helped for the Linux port), XFree, alien kernel ports and probably many others. Remember when you had to get your X server for Trident and SiS from SuSE? I want my distro provider to possess INTIMATE KNOWLEDGE of the science involved in the systems I use.
II) Why SuSE in real life?
I work for a small consulting firm in Paraguay (South America, for the geographically challenged) which is dedicated to Linux in production systems for financial institutions, ISPs, offices and the likes. I say "dedicated" for no religious fervor about the OS, since Linux would end in the trashcan the minute an alternative with a better blend of features comes up. (Of course, not all problems are solved by the same blend, but SuSE Linux impresses us with the applicable problem domain.)
Our firm has deployed several large Linux dominant networks. The most notorious is for a local bank which needed to switch from an *old* terminal based system to something new. You all know the conventional answer but these people chose wisely. Around 200 Linux workstations and 15 Linux servers drive the entire bank operation with databases, LDAP, image banks, CFS, SSL, rsync, KDE, etc. SuSE delivered in this scenario; it proved it is a valid choice in places where IT departments hesitate to put Linux: financial institutions and the end user desktop.
You can tell an IT departmente is doing well when managers start wondering why they need one or they are unaware of the details of their networks. This has happened.
SuSE facilitated that project enormously. YES, it could have been done just fine under RH, but even a marginal decrease in headaches is always desired.
Systems wise, SuSE Linux is rock solid. RH has given me a bitter experience in an unrelated scenario where a failure somewhere along the storage subsystem forced me to hack all the way into kernel tcp checksum routines to resync partitions associated to an MD device.
For the end users, SuSE is just a name under KDE except at the control panel. So besides congratulating SuSE for a well done integration, most of the merit belongs to KDE.
OFF TOPIC NOTE:
I don't believe Linux can compete with traditional alternatives for the home market. Emphasis and money allows traditional alternatives to provide more refined (often second guessing) interfaces to users. People outside of formal production chains can be happy with these.
In real commercial situations where production is formalized and application availability is not an issue, Linux is a top choice.
IMHO, efforts should prioritize function, subjugating presentation to the dictates of function. The marketplace will know the difference. The home user won't. Those who pay are those who produce.
So, what got them bankrupt? How many people do they employ? How big is their debt?
I don't know. SuSE is not publicly held, so their finances are not available.
Why is IBM dumping tons of money on Linux right now? (Trying to buy a competitor to MS is the obvious answer, but that might not be right.)
Why is Sun a somewhat grudging Linux supporter? Or Compaq? I think that the answer has a lot less to do with M$ and a lot more to do with UNIX. Linux is causing a meltdown in many (but not all) areas of the UNIX market because it is free. Note the free licensing of Solaris binaries, etc. The IDC also mentioned last February that Solaris was the only bright spot in the UNIX market, but that Linux's market share had grown substantially in both the server and workstation segments.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Regarding XFS - I'm sure that LinuxCare did the port and SuSE was participating after it started. I don't think it's the other way around....
Hetz
nah, no sig... move on..
$100k / $1M = -10- employees, not 100.
So, assuming your estimate of 1000 employees (which I think is high), that gives them enough cash to pay their employees for 5.4 months, not 4.5 years.
At the LWCE I picked up a LinuxPPC dated December 2000. So that's about 9 months since an official stable release.
From what I understand, LPPC does not have a current maintainer. BFD. That doesn't mean people aren't using it, or that it won't have a maintainter in the very near future.
Just what makes a distribution "dead"? The fact that they haven't released anything in over two weeks? Two months? Six months? I remember the days when everyone said Slackware was dead because they hadn't released anything in a year. Then boom! Then they said it was dead because Windriver laid them off, then boom!
The viability of a Free Software project is not predicated upon the sales figures, or the market share, or how many people are using it. I strongly suspect that Yggdrasil is dead, but if they came out with a new release tomorrow, it wouldn't surprise me.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
The most important thing is that it's the number 2 distribution, behind RedHat. They keep RedHat on their toes, and vice-versa. A little competition is a Good Thing. Besides, you've got to love a distribution that urges you to "Have a lot of fun..."
SuSE "aims at FHS conformity" and is actively participating in the LSB project.
So they are getting there...
bla
I have actually paid for three different copies myself (6.1, 6.3, 7.1) and felt like I got a good deal just due to the convenience of getting all the cdroms and books.
At this point, one possible scenario (which I'd quite like to see happen) is that they leave the hassle of packaging the base system software to the community, merging in a common base distro (I'd like to say Debian, but probably it will be rpm-based), with common packages for all base software.
Then, maybe not.
Ciao
----
FB
I installed and ran SuSE way back (5.x). It was cool because it was a big distro, and pioneered a few usability enhancements.
;-) Debian is the only non-commercial distributionn (arguably volunteers make the most dedicated workers).
Today though, I don't see what sets them out as unique. For example, Mandrake is different because they have LOTS of usability enhancements (like SuSE used to, but more so). Red Hat is, well, Red Hat.
But SuSE?
Of course, none of this matters if the Linux Standards Base gets adopted by ALL the distros (ahem.. RH.. cough)
-Scott
There are two Linux distros that run on IBM mainframes. One of them is SuSE the other is TurboLinux. Everything else is still in development and not officially sanctioned. IBM props up SuSE if no other reason, that one. For $45 million dollars they protect their investment in being able to run thousands of Linux images profitably in the CoLo business.
Well, SuSE is a german company... So I'd guess fluctuations of euro are irrelevant in their "home" market, and don't have much need to exchange those to dollars?
I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization -- Oliver Wendell Holmes
It's terrible to read such a shit. I don't have anything to respond to that but Mandrake is number 1 Linux distro in retail in the US. SuSE is number 3 or number 4.
The truth is very different than you think. Also you have a nationalistic vision of France/Germany while now you'll have to think "Europe".