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SUSE Will Soon Be the Largest Independent Linux Company (qz.com)

At SUSECon in Nashville, Tennessee, European Linux power SUSE CEO Nils Brauckmann said his company would soon be the largest independent Linux company. "That's because, of course, IBM is acquiring Red Hat," reports ZDNet. "But, simultaneously, SUSE has continued to grow for seven-straight years." From the report: Brauckmann said, "We believe that makes our status as a truly independent open source company more important than ever. Our genuinely open-source solutions, flexible business practices, lack of enforced vendor lock-in, and exceptional service are more critical to customer and partner organizations, and our independence coincides with our single-minded focus on delivering what is best for them." Practically speaking, SUSE has been growing by focusing on delivering high-quality Linux and open-source programs and services to enterprise customers. Looking ahead Brauckmann said, "SUSE is better positioned to bring more innovation to customers and partners faster through both organic growth and acquisitions, keeping us on track to provide them with the open solutions that keep them ahead with their own customers in their own markets. We continue to adapt so our customers and partners can succeed."

Last year SUSE's revenue grew by 15 percent in fiscal year 2018, and the business is about to surpass the $400 million revenue mark for the first time. SUSE, which sees not quite half of its business in Europe, is also seeing revenue growth around the world. North America, for example, now accounts for almost 40 percent of SUSE's revenues. The company is also expanding. SUSE added more than 300 employees in the last 12 months. For the most part this has been in engineering followed by sales and services. SUSE staff is now approaching 1,750 globally and its plans on continuing to hire aggressively.

57 comments

  1. The best thing to do was move SUSE out of Novell.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    and then out of Micro Focus, this helps keep the company strong and not as susceptible to terrible management.

  2. System D? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    or not?

    1. Re:System D? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yes. And the best KDE distro around. So it's all good.

    2. Re:System D? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Maybe, but I was using it for a few months, and it didn't seem that appealing to me. And I'm a KDE fanboy from the 3.x glory days. Unfortunately none of the distributions have really worked to solve major usability annoyances on the desktop. While it's been usable on the desktop since 2000- not much has improved since then. Everybody is just trying to reinvent the wheel rather than improving app integration and making things more seamless. It's pathetic that all but one major GNU/Linux vendor gets it. I shouldn't be fucking with proprietary software updates or having to ask "It says Linux on the box, but will it really work when I get it home, or continue to work after the next upgrade?" And I have little confidence in the tech users either as most are ignorant of the problems or outright fanboys. I'm a fan, but I'm not stupid. I don't tell people go buy HP printers because I know it's only select HP printers that are properly supported. I don't tell people to go buy Apple or Lenovo because I know both utilize digital restrictions and undermine support for GNU/Linux. Sure. Some systems work good enough for a while. But that shouldn't be the standard. That sucks and non-fanboys aren't going to put up with that shit. There shouldn't be a single company that I have to point people to because everybody else that "does Linux" does a shitty job and has no problem selling hardware that sucks and can't be properly supported by the development community.

    3. Re: System D? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I wish you had been a bit more specific about distros/hardware that dont work. I have used various combinations of redhat, fedora, ubuntu, mont, arch, dell, mac, clevo , lenovo, hp over the last few years. All worked. The only ones thar didnt work completely were some versions of mac (eg media keys). Hell my current printer at home is a brother.

      Many of those combinations worked completely out of the box without doing enything other than my normal installs . Most of the rest were just an extra package or two from the repo. The hardest thing was flashing a seagate nas with arch.

  3. Friends don't let Friends use IBM by Teckla · · Score: 1, Funny

    IBM's competence in software development has been going down every year for the last 20 years.

    IBM acquiring RedHat is a disaster (for RedHat). Companies would be wise to start their plans to transition to another Linux distribution now.

    1. Re:Friends don't let Friends use IBM by rtb61 · · Score: 0, Troll

      IBM had no choice but to buy Redhat, the decision forced on it by a corrupt and incompetent US government and security letters and companies like M$ and Google all to happy to hack other countries citizens, for a cash reward of course, especially their politicians so they can be blackmailed by US intelligence services at the behest of entirely corrupt US corporations.

      The only safe choice forced upon the rest of the globe, whilst trying to retain interoperability, is Linux and other major open source projects. The can strip control of the US government over their infrastructure and get rid of the backdoors, at least on the software side by using open source software, maintained on their servers inside their countries and supervised by their intelligence services. The hardware side, does require a much greater spend, a government manufacturer of electronic communication products, regardless of the cost of doing so, this cost reduce by open source chip designs.

      US corporations either make a big investment in open source software or be destroyed competitively in the rest of the world, due to the incompetent corrupt shenanigans of US government agencies and the loss in trust in anything coming out of the US related to anything technological.

      The US practically announced back doors in all their stuff, when they attacked Turkey for buying S400 which will shoot down US jets, versus any US anti-air systems which have all been back doored not to shoot down US jets. Now they don't get F35s, well, no loss there because US missiles that don't shoot down US jets, means US jets sold to other nations with back doors as well, fall right out of the sky on command and if the enemy gets that command, well, thanks US, all your allies jets supplied by the US just fell out of the sky (they are really, well and truly stupid enough to build that in, control freaks, it is inevitable, it's their idiotic nature, they think everyone is as corrupt as they are).

      The US is slowly but surely killing US tech companies in foreign environments because everyone knows neither can be trusted. IBM is making a smart move, because it will still be able to install and manage open source in other countries via IBM subsidiaries based in those countries answerable only to those governments. M$ is becoming nothing but an unwanted shite stain and Google is pretty much already there.

      --
      Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
    2. Re: Friends don't let Friends use IBM by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      lol what a joke. IBM has been a open source supporter since the very beginning and they have many pionner and brilliant software engineers (many of them leaders in their comunities). That has nothing to do with their other parts of the business they have. Red Hat and IBM will continue the tradition of leading the open source ecosystem. Management or self-ineterest can not do anything on a strong software community leaded by open/technical discussions.

    3. Re: Friends don't let Friends use IBM by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      They also have a reputation for destroying innovating companies with their management/corporate/outsourcing BS. I mean for fuck's sake, when we were bought they literally took away the fucking coffee pots. Who takes away *coffee* from software people???

    4. Re: Friends don't let Friends use IBM by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      They practically invented DRM and were the first and longest company to be restricting what PCI cards you could utilize on your computer. They toyed with Linux on the desktop and fucked us long ago. Though it's not like Dell and others are doing it for any reason other that public relation stunts. We know they don't try to push it on non-technical users and hide it away in the back. It's why I'll never buy from these shitty companies. At least not there laptops or desktops. Fuck them. I despise those who would promote them or hack on shit to "get it working". It's one thing if you do that for a smaller company that is at least putting energy into improving support under GNU/Linux and another if you do it for a company that is actively working against it outside of its own interests. Microsoft might be worse, but I'm not going to let that be the standard. Fuck no. I won't use Facebook, Dell, Microsoft, Google, or any of the other shitty companies or products to the degree that I reasonably can. I didn't sell out after college either. Instead of going to work at my dream job-on a GNU/Linux distribution- after being offered a handsome salary I turned it down. No. I decided that wasn't the best use of my time. I worked hard and started a company that would enable me to be in control of my own life and enable me to make all of the right decisions because I answered to no one. Not even my government because I changed that out 5 years later when I had enough of the BS. I wound down one company and moved another's central office. You have choices in life. It's up to you to think about where life will take you and then make the decisions that will ensure your not in a shitty position unable to make the rright ones.

    5. Re:Friends don't let Friends use IBM by Antique+Geekmeister · · Score: 3, Interesting

      For security reasons, "free software" is better than "open source". One of the ongoing dangers of open source is that it can contain proprietary, non-published components with unknown behavior. It's critical to the business model of many vendors, but it represents an ongoing security problem. Linux, the kernel has been _very_ good about avoiding these. Installing them for video drivers or proprietary DRM makes the kernel "tainted".

      Red Hat has been very, very good about making their software "free software" and publishing nearly all of their open source work. SuSE has, historically at least, not been as cautious about that.

    6. Re:Friends don't let Friends use IBM by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Will IBM give Red Hat the AIX?

      The other day /. referenced Robert Cringley's prediction that Amazon and Microsoft will dominate the cloud. Seeing how that's where IT is going, IBM must be worried. Buying RH makes sense.

      IBM’s core cloud technology and development stack has been seriously lagging the others, so Red Hat fills a huge void in IBM’s portfolio...The deal should move IBM sales from its long obsession with profit or loss on gross revenues to a concentration on net new sales, killing the old Country Club sales force in the process. https://www.cringely.com/2018/10/29/red-hat-takes-over-ibm/

      Like Cringley, I too hope that RH takes over IBM.

    7. Re:Friends don't let Friends use IBM by houghi · · Score: 4, Interesting

      The moment Novell bought SUSE (Remember that), they started openSUSE. They have open sourced a LOT of stuff from that moment on. All that they where able to do, was open sourced.

      In the past they where less open, but that was when they where still SuSE (and S.u.S.E. before that) and that is now several years in the past. They even made it super easy to make your own openSUSE based distro. They went out of their way to do so.

      And yes, there is a difference bewteen SUSE and openSUSE, but not as big as you might think.

      --
      Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
    8. Re:Friends don't let Friends use IBM by Eravnrekaree · · Score: 1

      Suse has done a very good job of making its software open source. SUSE has gotten much better. YaST is now fully open source, it was not before. We've really actually seen only good things beginning since the Novell days, such as a workable and faster package management system with zypp. SUSE Contributes to open source projects like btrfs and apparmor as well.

  4. No use to me. by jondeanmack · · Score: 0

    SUSE is no use to me. It is only a matter of myself waiting til everyone takes back the items I have purchased because you are all bad, an example being the Chinese taking back the Chinese Geely brand car I purchased.

  5. Re:The best thing to do was move SUSE out of Novel by postbigbang · · Score: 1

    This is all part of the PR avalanche that follows any conference. It goes like this:

    1. Chest-thumping We Are The Greatest __________
    2. Lob volleys of crap at competition.
    3. Parade the business partners, all with canned quotes.
    4. Steal the future, declare financial prowess, mention growth.
    5. Parade the business partners again.
    6. Love fest at 6pm, free beer and maybe finger food.
    7. Sign up those devs, see #6.
    8. Schmooze Schmooze Schmooze
    9. Joint press releases + show floor + geek games
    10. Pack it up for next time. Rinse, repeat.

    MicroFoscus is trying to make money from SUSE's departure. Can a vastly diffuse organization where parts are in the UK, US, and EU actually make it? Maybe. There's good quality software, but they have all the pinache of a dead sponge. They need some Elon Dust (tm) or at least a heartbeat.

    --
    ---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
  6. Linux Mint bought by Microsoft by AndrewFlagg · · Score: 0

    when will Linux Mint be bought by Microsoft - oh, I forgot, that is already in the works. ;-) spoiler alert. no?

    1. Re:Linux Mint bought by Microsoft by youngone · · Score: 0

      Why would Microsoft buy a distro that is downstream of Ubuntu, which is downstream of Debian?
      It makes no sense at all, (so they probably will).

    2. Re:Linux Mint bought by Microsoft by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      > when will Linux Mint be bought by Microsoft

      If they do there due diligence, they would learn that
      Mint = Ubuntu + "apt-get install cinnamon".

      They would be fools to do that.

  7. No the best thing from Suse is by goombah99 · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    their illustrated books for children. I like

    C Enums: One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish,

    Operating systems: The Linax

    Artificial Intelligence: Hunches In Bunches

    Bash ; the cat in the hat

    Green Eggs And Spam email

    Boolean logic: O, The Thinks You Can Think!

    Stacks and Queues: Hop on Pop

    --
    Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
  8. Correct me if I'm wrong by Hognoxious · · Score: 1

    I'd be happy to be wrong about this, but there's no free (as in beer) version of their enterprise offerings. IOW no equivalent of Dead Rat's CentOS.

    --
    Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
    1. Re:Correct me if I'm wrong by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I'd be happy to be wrong about this, but there's no free (as in beer) version of their enterprise offerings. IOW no equivalent of Dead Rat's CentOS.

      You ARE slightly wrong.
      It's called openSUSE, and as of Leap 42 it's basically the same as the SLES version.
      Maybe not in a CentOS way but at least in a Fedora way

    2. Re:Correct me if I'm wrong by CronoCloud · · Score: 1

      OpenSUSE?

    3. Re:Correct me if I'm wrong by Hognoxious · · Score: 1

      If it's compatible in a Fedora way it's not compatible enough. Fedora's not enterprise - RHEL is.

      This matters if you want to run something that (officially) only runs on RHEL.

      --
      Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
    4. Re:Correct me if I'm wrong by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Since version 15, openSUSE can be upgraded to SUSE Enterprise 15

    5. Re:Correct me if I'm wrong by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      OpenSuse Leap is much closer to SLES than Fedora is to RHEL and apparently, it's set to be even more so in the future.

      Seemingly the plan is that you should be able to run your business on Leap, and the moment you think commercial support is warranted, it should be trivial to switch over to SLES.

    6. Re:Correct me if I'm wrong by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      If it's compatible in a Fedora way it's not compatible enough. Fedora's not enterprise - RHEL is.

      This matters if you want to run something that (officially) only runs on RHEL.

      There are several OSes that are more than "enterprise" enough to run a company. I haven't paid attention to the Linux Distro nightmare since I noticed it's people were getting morning wood over purple and orange color themes.

    7. Re:Correct me if I'm wrong by husker_man · · Score: 1
      This is the correct answer - but there are two flavors to OpenSuSE - Tumbleweed and Leap.

      Tumbleweed is the rolling version of OpenSuSE, where it gets the latest (not necessarily best or best tested) packages,

      Leap is a more stable version of Tumbleweed, where it's more extensively tested but there are some things needing to be polished.

    8. Re:Correct me if I'm wrong by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You make it sound as if Tumbleweed is some kind of unstable crap and Leap still have serious issues. That's just wrong.

      While opensuse isn't always the fastest or leanest distribution out there, TW hasn't been any less stable over the last few years than any than any other distribution you could name. IME it's usually rather the other way around. Also, Leap has been a frigging steamroller, a far better choice than moldy Debian stable and the antique CentOS, IMO.

    9. Re:Correct me if I'm wrong by pnutjam · · Score: 1

      OpenSuse LEAP had SLES components rolled in on version 42.1, which was superseded by version 15.

      LEAP has support for 36 months (major versions) and 18 months (minor releases). It's a different upgrade cycle then CentOS or RH. In RH, if you just pull from the repos, you will automatically roll from minor to minor release. This is not the case with OpenSuse. For example, 15.0 repos are distinct and separate from 15.1. In RH, both versions would be in the same repo and Yum finds the most current.

      This gives you a bit more control, you have 6 months to upgrade between minor version as they are generally release every 12 months and supported for 18. You have to run a different command to upgrade the version zypper dup vs zypper up. In RH your version will increment without you noticing if your not paying attention.

      IMHO, the biggest differentiator is the the Kernel Version.
      RedHat's is pretty old, the newest kernel the ship is 3.10.0-957.
      The SLE kernel (note the change from SLES 12 to SLE 15 - to track OpenSUSE better) is 4.12.14-23.1.

      You have to go all the way back to 2014 to get a 3.12 kernel on SuSe.
      I'm a big fan of SUSE, I use OpenSUSE at home and have managed some HPC systems that use SLES 11/12, but most systems I manage us RH at work.

    10. Re:Correct me if I'm wrong by pnutjam · · Score: 1

      Replying to myself, but I've never had issues with minor or major version upgrades using zypper.
      Well, I have on Tumbleweed, but that's to be expected.

  9. suse isn't exactly 'independent'.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    it's owned by a 50 BILLION EURO private equity group, and ITS holders have 100+ BILLION EUROS in annual revenue..

    in other words, suse's parents have *higher revenues* than redhat's parent, ibm.

    compare to canonical, which is itself and itself only.

  10. That's disgusting... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    That's truly disgusting, because SuSE is SO F'ING LAME!

  11. Larger than Canonical? by Tough+Love · · Score: 2

    Is Suse larger than Canonical? Surprised if so.

    --
    When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
    1. Re: Larger than Canonical? by bavarian · · Score: 2

      Significantly larger.

    2. Re:Larger than Canonical? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The power of marketing and noisy fanboys.

    3. Re:Larger than Canonical? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      They've got huge enterprise services, POS systems, etc. Canonical does not.

    4. Re:Larger than Canonical? by pnutjam · · Score: 2

      Yes, I used to use Ubuntu occasionally because packages weren't as available on OpenSUSE. However, that's really changed over the last decade. With OBS (open build services), you can find most packages in a repo.

      Three reasons I really prefer OpenSUSE:
      1 - Hardware support is unsurpassed, better then any other linux distro I've tried.
      2 - OBS ecosystem
      3 - Community help appears to be higher caliber then Ubuntu and professional pages are more open then RH (no paywall). If I look up a howto, at least half the time the Ubuntu directions will use some GUI tool I don't have on the cli, or include something suspicious like chmod 777. The directions you find on OpenSUSE usually don't have this problem, and YAST on GUI is the same as YAST on cli.

    5. Re: Larger than Canonical? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Look up the definition of then.

    6. Re:Larger than Canonical? by Tough+Love · · Score: 1

      On the minus side, Suse uses RPM. That's a deal killer for me.

      --
      When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
    7. Re:Larger than Canonical? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      On the flip side, should something happen to the rpm database, it's really good at fixing itself. I can't say the same for Debian's equivalent, where systems going down have resulted in the package database getting FUBAR quite a few times.

    8. Re:Larger than Canonical? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Funny, that's on the plus side for me. RPMs are way easier to write than DEB packages.

    9. Re:Larger than Canonical? by Tough+Love · · Score: 1

      Give me a break, you have obviously not experienced the horrors of rpmbuild.

      --
      When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
    10. Re:Larger than Canonical? by Tough+Love · · Score: 1

      Citation needed.

      --
      When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
    11. Re: Larger than Canonical? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You shud sine inn with ur reel name.

      That way wee all no too run the other direction if wee meat u in reel life.

  12. Intel by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    In the early eighties, a colleague of mine at a large corporation recommended that we buy Intel. Upper management said it wasn't a good fit. I've always imagined how many years of computing progress would have been erased if that acquisition had happened.

  13. Re:The best thing to do was move SUSE out of Novel by Eravnrekaree · · Score: 1

    Novell days were actually pretty good and saw major improvements to SUSE Linux. SUSE became more useable then with a fast and functional package manager whereas before package management was a big mess. zypp was developed under the Novell period which really make SUSE first class with a fast package manager. Yast was also fully open sourced at this time and also uses the zypp infrastructure. You have a choice between command line package management with zypper or to use Yast now so you really can have it either way.

  14. I've used SUSE since 7.2 by kalpol · · Score: 1

    I've been using Suse/OpenSUSE since 7.2 and it's been great, except for the switch to systemd which was annoying (I now use FreeBSD for web services because of that). It's a really good distribution with a lot of support and packages available and I am glad they are doing well. Once my Win7 support expires I'm switching to them probably for full-time desktop use.

    --
    12:50 - press return.
  15. SUSE was my first time by renegade600 · · Score: 1

    SUSE was distro that introduced me to linux. Though I no longer use it, I will always remember it as my first. I am still using linux about around 15 years later. Might have to give it a try again to see how well it aged :-)

  16. SuSE isn't independent.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    They are owned by Accenture or someone now, who bought Novell, making them not only a non-independent entity, but an 'owned' Linux company on the same level as Redhat etc all. Honestly between the systemd steamroll in Debian and their OpenSSL patches that compromised key generation randomness, they seem to have bowed to third party interests as well.

  17. OpenSUSE in bed with the NSA? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    They moved their headquarters to right down the street from the new NSA building in (Provo?) Utah and are now owned by a big corp who suddenly splashed in with more money than either they or Novell ever approached having.

  18. It's funny you should mention these... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    It's funny you should mention these brands but, Red Hat just works on our Lenovo Thinkpads. The only printers that work reliably on our network are HP printers. Just because I mention this doesn't make me ignorant or a fanboy.

  19. Soon From A Linux-Head by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    "Well I've never used SUSE, I've only used (names 3 distros), so SUSE doesn't matter!"

    Seriously, parochialism dominates so much of Linux discussion. It's usually framed as "personal stories and advice", but it's difficult to avoid the subtext. Anything not personally and directly relevant to me is irrelevant to everyone.

  20. Suse by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Walmart now uses Suse for all their Handhelds.