SuSE larger than RedHat

kris writes "German c't magazine has a story about SUSE (english site: suse.com) reporting a larger turnover that RedHat (26.6 Mio. DM == 15 Mio US$ vs. RedHat with 11 Mio. US$). Suse also reported earnings, while RedHat reported a loss of $130,000 during the same time." kris has translated the article below if you want. Else use babelfish. Here is a rough translation of the article:

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. "

Comments

My distro can beat up your distro...

[emerson]

"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."

SuSE Not Good

[Aaron M. Renn]

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.

Re:SuSE Not Good

[John Fulmer]

Whoa there Tex! Suse has done some very nice things for the Linux community and are doing even more.

They are responsibe for adding 3DLabs, Rendition, some trident, Cyrix, and SiS X servers, most of which are now in the current XFree server.

They are also supporting the development of ALSA, by hiring the primary programmer, Jaroslav Kysela, full time and allowing him to work on ALSA professionally.

Both of the above are either in the GPL or under the XFree License.

They may not spend 10% of their earnings in new development, and may not have hired a lot of well known Linux people, but they seem to be a quality company, and many people like the distribution.

Lighten up...

jf

All a matter of accounting

[LLatson]

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.