SUSE Will Soon Be the Largest Independent Linux Company (qz.com) 57
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.
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.
Re: (Score:2)
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
No the best thing from Suse is (Score:2, 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
Re: (Score:2)
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 ei
Friends don't let Friends use IBM (Score:2, 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.
Re:Friends don't let Friends use IBM (Score:4, 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.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Re: Friends don't let Friends use IBM (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.
Re: (Score:1)
It makes no sense at all, (so they probably will).
Correct me if I'm wrong (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Re: (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.
Re: (Score:2)
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 giv
Re: (Score:2)
Well, I have on Tumbleweed, but that's to be expected.
Re: (Score:2)
OpenSUSE?
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:1)
Since version 15, openSUSE can be upgraded to SUSE Enterprise 15
Larger than Canonical? (Score:3)
Is Suse larger than Canonical? Surprised if so.
Re: Larger than Canonical? (Score:2)
Significantly larger.
Re: (Score:3)
Three reasons I really prefer OpenSUSE:
1 - Hardware support is unsurpassed, better then any other linux distro I've tried.
2 - OBS ecosystem [opensuse.org]
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
Re: (Score:2)
On the minus side, Suse uses RPM. That's a deal killer for me.
Re: (Score:2)
Citation needed.
Re: (Score:2)
Give me a break, you have obviously not experienced the horrors of rpmbuild.
I've used SUSE since 7.2 (Score:2)
SUSE was my first time (Score:2)
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 :-)