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SuSE larger than RedHat
Suse: We are the largest.
As a reaction to the IPO of RedHat, which requires the company to disclose its earnings, german Linux distributor Suse has disclosed their own numbers. While RedHat reported a turnover of $11M between March 1998 and February 1999, Suse reported a turnover of almost $15M (Deutschmark 26.6 M) between 01-Apr-1998 and 31-Mar-1999. Like RedHat, most of this is due to their distribution sales (Deutschmark 17.4M). Unlike RedHat, who lost $130.000 during this time, Suse was able to report earnings of an undisclosed amount during this time.
Both companies employ approx. 130 people each at the time and are growing rapidly: In 1Q1999 Suse reported a turnover of Deutschmark 9.5M, an increase of 230% compared to the year before. Since the funding of SUSE Inc. in the USA, german Distributor Suse is focusing more and more on the international market. CEO Roland Dyroff reported a larger than proportional growth of the US daugther. He did not want to answer direct questions about an IPO, though. "
My reading of the YAST license is that sharing is okay, selling is not. I.e., you cannot create "Sassy Linux" based on SuSE Linux and make money selling it. But you can install one copy on every workstation in your office if you want.
Still, the YAST license is the main reason why I am still running Red Hat on my machines. There are other reasons (Red Hat is more enterprise-friendly in the way they lay out their filesystem, for example), but the YAST license is the key.
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
Of course it would not kill them to GPL the installer, but the founders of SuSE do not want competitors based upon their product. Remember, SuSE Linux exists because they took Slackware and translated it to German. They don't want anybody doing to SuSE what they did to Slackware.
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
It sure is It has 5 cd's! Switch to FreeBSD and spear that Penquin in the a**.
-- Ted tsikora@powerusersbbs.com
A Pentium III -- what a wimp, using somebody else's ready-made CPU.
My CPU doesn't even have transistors, it uses electromagnetic relays hand-made from old paperclips and rubber bands. And toggle switches -- a real programmer just touches the bare wires together.
Kids these days.
-- Alastair
In the past, I've been all for supporting Redhat, and buying the boxed package for 40 dollars, since I knew a good amount of that money was flowing back into the community (Reganomics? Ack!). But I think $80 dollars is a bit much for a free operating system, especially when the latest SuSE is going for 20 dollars, and of course there is always Cheapbytes. But I felt good knowing I was supporting Free Software Development, considering I'm a beginning coder myself. But this 80 bucks crapola reminds me more of a certain other 0$ company that starts with the letter M, than a OSS package. I'm disappointed Redhat. $40 is reasonable, $80 is just out of range for me.
You can whistle? I had my lips ripped off in the war. The dog tore out my tongue. I am sending this by pulling my shorts up REAL tight and singing (screeching) into the phone. That's the only way I can send data. How do I read it? My dog is trained to hear a modem squeal and draw the page in the sand.
Computers.... Who needs em?
:P
"It compiles, SHIP IT!" -Overheard at Microsoft's development lab
Suse is quite big in europe and lets not forget linux is very popular in europe I heard somewhere that linux was used on 40% of the computers in germany that gives you an Idea of what Kind of market they have.
My SuSE 5.3 is amazing. I loaded up Redhat 6.0, but switched back. I'm not surprised it makes money, especially when it has such a large marketshare.
Is anyone running SuSE 6.x? Is it as good as I hear?
It's a thankless job, but I've got a lot of Karma to burn off
Slacker. I edit the inodes via magnet.
(yes, i know i stole if from UF, forgive me)
Companies in the US at least keep two sets of books: one done using GAAP for financial reporting purposes and the other for taxes. The financial accounting numbers are the ones you see in SEC filings and such and are totally separate from the way taxes are calculated.
A more interesting question is the difference between US and German accounting systems. My knowledge of German accounting is very sparse.
So we can finally decide to stop the Red Hat bashing. :-/
;-)
But then I have a question, which of Red Hat and SUSE bring back most to Linux? Red Hat pays kernel hackers (Alan Cox and others) and GNOME programmers. I know that SUSE makes X servers but not much more.
Well, I use Debian anyway but to me the company that pays Alan Cox is more likely to get my money.
I think in the future when Linux grows even more we will have stars like in sports where people want someone they can identify themselves with. Could Alan Cox be such a star? Well maybe not for the big masses.
I keep my threshold at -1 anyway. :)
FWIW, I think this whole thread should be a 5.
Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.
"Besides, it's an INSTALLER. What do you need it for other than to install their distro from their CD's?"
Because I like to share my CDs with my friends.
I can do that with my Red Hat CD. Even though SuSE may have slightly more revenue, Red Hat probably has a lot more users.
Wow, you have access to electricity? I envy you rich kids. You may be pampered throughout life, but I bet you folks sure get to live it up.
I've been doing DNA computing, using sequences derived from my own blood. Concocting a cheap replacement for the gel electrophoresis was the hardest part. I was able to save and recycle enough Jell-O to do it, and instead of running an electrical current over the gel I've been blowing gently on the DNA sequences to seperate them out by length.
Even though I've lost a lot of blood, it's really worth it to get to read slashdot. I don't think I'd faint quite so often if I didn't have to waste so much computation time on adfu.blockstackers.com. But it's still worth it. Go Linux!
"Whatever happened to fair use?"
-- Duff-Man
"Well, my distro's company has 135 people on-staff, and yours only has 127."
"Oh, yeah, well, my distro uses the latest version of the KNODE desktop, and yours defaults to an older version of GNM!"
"Oh yeah, well, my distro has version 1.0.3a of libdumbthing, and yours is stuck at version 1.0.3!"
"Oh yeah, well my distro is supported in my native language, at least!"
"Oh yeah, well my distro's company channels 127% of their profits into development of Open Source software for getting food to Vietnamese orphans!"
"Oh yeah, _VIETNAMESE_ orphans... that went out with glibc 2.0. My distro's entire staff pays $25/hour for the privelege of contributing to the code, into a fund to educate Laotian children to program in Java."
"Whatever."
"Moron."
I re-write the kernel everytime I turn my machine on, changing memory locations manually with static electricity gathered by rubbing a ballon against my head...
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
Becuase accounting standards in Germany and the US are quite different. US accounting standards are very conservative when compared to the accounting standards of most European countries. Whatever "Profit" SuSE earned may be a loss if their books were calculated according to US GAAP.
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
If you think a Red Hat monopoly would be bad, imagine a world with a SuSE monopoly. Red Hat has invested a lot of money to further free software development: RPM, hiring Alan Cox, Gnome, now even a KDE developer. Everything they write is GPL. What has SuSE done? They release some proprietary X servers and contribute some code to XFree86. That's all I can think of off hand. Their distro is also loaded with freedom subtracted products.
It's important to remember that 'losses' or
'gains' in any quarter or year are all a matter
of accounting, especially for a these relatively
young and small companies.
In some situations it
is better for them to report losses and avoid paying income taxes than to report huge gains and end up paying taxes on them.
Without a serious analysis of the two companies'
financial situations, I wouldn't put much stock in the article.
"If you are falling, dive." -Joseph Campbell
For what it is worth... the general rule of
thumb for US businesses is that during the first few years of operation they want to post a small
loss -- particularly if they are looking to obtain
investors. There are tax reasons for this, but
the general logic is that a company should not
show a profit for the first few years so that it
is clear that they are reinvesting their receipts
into development of the business.
Incidentally, I have RH6 because that's what they
had at work, but I'd agree SuSe is probably the
better dist.
Electricity! That is for weaklings - my machine is based on a design by Charles Babbage - gears, levers and other mechanical implements - all driven by weights and chain. It operates and is programmed in octal, entered via a modified mechanical typewriter found in an antique shop near me. Display output is accomplished via a board made up of many small little flipping tiles, with one hell of a complicated gearing system to select row/column pairs to make a crude (but effective) bit-mapped display. Printing is done via a Guttenberg (sp) style machine, with automatic type setting. And lets not forget storage - a very large multi-tier cube (10 meters on a side!), individual bit cells filled with buckshot or left empty to represent bits!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
That's a desktop share on a specific web site. Is it a Windows web site? Are they specifically made for Internet explorer?
Web browser hits mean crap. If it were true, we could say that Linux has a huge market share by the number of browser hits from Linux on slashdot.
SuSE is more popular in Europe, where local phone usage is generally metered, making downloading a couple gigs' worth of Linux distro much less appealing to European users than to American users...
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