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As soon as I heard this news, I was looking to invest in SUSE until I found out they were just bought by a private equity firm earlier this year. What's going

As soon as I heard this news, I was looking to invest in SUSE until I found out they were just bought by a private equity firm earlier this year. What's going on with Linux providers? Is Amazon really just dominating the space?

kazen44 8y ago
no, but most cloud providers are not opensourcing their contributions to linux.
- cthalupa 8y ago
  Is that really true? The big three cloud providers all have commits to the Linux kernel: ~/linux   master ● $ git log --author=amazon --format='%h %s%n %ad, %an <%ae>' --date=short | grep @amazon | wc -l 206 ~/linux   master ● $ git log --author=microsoft --format='%h %s%n %ad, %an <%ae>' --date=short | grep @microsoft | wc -l 1825 ~/linux   master ● $ git log --author=google --format='%h %s%n %ad, %an <%ae>' --date=short | grep @google | wc -l 11283
  - dirkgently 8y ago
    Good on Google. Besides the kernel contributions, Google has a long list of open source projects: https://opensource.google.com/projects/list/featured https://opensource.google.com/projects/list/featured For all the hates Google gets on HN, they have been at the forefront of supporting OSS.
    - palunon 8y ago
      Google develops Android. It's in their best interest that their changes to the kernel get mainlined... The internal APIs of the kernel tend to change a lot, and Linus doesn't really care about out of tree breakage.
      - chupasaurus 8y ago
        That's how userland Android is.
    - omegabravo 8y ago
      https://opensource.microsoft.com/ https://opensource.microsoft.com/ https://aws.github.io/ https://aws.github.io/ https://opensource.fb.com/ https://opensource.fb.com/ https://netflix.github.io/ https://netflix.github.io/ https://uber.github.io/ https://uber.github.io/ https://opensource.apple.com/ https://opensource.apple.com/ This list is not nearly exhaustive, but my main point is Google is hardly the outlier here. Good on all the developers pushing for open source so much. The industry is in a much better place than it was 25 years ago.
cyphar 8y ago
SUSE has been acquired many times in the past several years (Novell, Attachmate, MicroFocus). In theory, EQT will help us "get back on our feet" in terms of self-sufficiency but how things will actually pan out is obviously still unclear. [Disclaimer: I work at SUSE.]
signal11 8y ago
Ubuntu (Canonical) just stared looking more attractive as they were trying to be an independent commercially-supported Linux offering. Or, if you don’t like Canonical (and to be fair they do a lot less than Red Hat do), encouraging corporate users to sponsor Debian directly would be amazing.
- techntoke 8y ago
  I'd rather corporate users sponsor Arch. My guess is Canonical will be announcing they are getting acquired by Microsoft soon.
  - tim-- 8y ago
    Except corporate users usually want support. It does make me wonder though if it would ever be possible for a bunch of business savy open source developers could ever get around to creating an open source co-op. Something like the commercial version of the FSF. Build open source products with solid support contracts, and build/contribute to open source that way. The organization would be owned by the very people building and contributing the code. RedHat is the only company that I can see that really did everything in the open. I'm not sure which one I feel worse about, Oracle buying Sun, or IBM buying RedHat? I feel that Oracle did some major missteps in their acquisition (for this I look squarely at OpenOffice, and their misshandling of it, although, the OOo community hated the Oracle acquisition from day one, which I guess might have made it a little like poison berries - no one would want to go near it). Oracle completely ruined MySQL during the acquisition too.
    - M_Bakhtiari 8y ago
      > Except corporate users usually want support. What prevents anyone from offering an enterprise support program for Arch?
  - flukus 8y ago
    Corporate users can barely get around to patching windows desktops and are happy with Redhat being so slow moving, they're not going to jump on the arch constant upgrade cycle anytime soon.

kazen44 8y ago

no, but most cloud providers are not opensourcing their contributions to linux.

cthalupa 8y ago
Is that really true? The big three cloud providers all have commits to the Linux kernel: ~/linux   master ● $ git log --author=amazon --format='%h %s%n %ad, %an <%ae>' --date=short | grep @amazon | wc -l 206 ~/linux   master ● $ git log --author=microsoft --format='%h %s%n %ad, %an <%ae>' --date=short | grep @microsoft | wc -l 1825 ~/linux   master ● $ git log --author=google --format='%h %s%n %ad, %an <%ae>' --date=short | grep @google | wc -l 11283
- dirkgently 8y ago
  Good on Google. Besides the kernel contributions, Google has a long list of open source projects: https://opensource.google.com/projects/list/featured https://opensource.google.com/projects/list/featured For all the hates Google gets on HN, they have been at the forefront of supporting OSS.
  - palunon 8y ago
    Google develops Android. It's in their best interest that their changes to the kernel get mainlined... The internal APIs of the kernel tend to change a lot, and Linus doesn't really care about out of tree breakage.
    - chupasaurus 8y ago
      That's how userland Android is.
  - omegabravo 8y ago
    https://opensource.microsoft.com/ https://opensource.microsoft.com/ https://aws.github.io/ https://aws.github.io/ https://opensource.fb.com/ https://opensource.fb.com/ https://netflix.github.io/ https://netflix.github.io/ https://uber.github.io/ https://uber.github.io/ https://opensource.apple.com/ https://opensource.apple.com/ This list is not nearly exhaustive, but my main point is Google is hardly the outlier here. Good on all the developers pushing for open source so much. The industry is in a much better place than it was 25 years ago.

cyphar 8y ago

SUSE has been acquired many times in the past several years (Novell, Attachmate, MicroFocus). In theory, EQT will help us "get back on our feet" in terms of self-sufficiency but how things will actually pan out is obviously still unclear. [Disclaimer: I work at SUSE.]

signal11 8y ago

Ubuntu (Canonical) just stared looking more attractive as they were trying to be an independent commercially-supported Linux offering. Or, if you don’t like Canonical (and to be fair they do a lot less than Red Hat do), encouraging corporate users to sponsor Debian directly would be amazing.

techntoke 8y ago
I'd rather corporate users sponsor Arch. My guess is Canonical will be announcing they are getting acquired by Microsoft soon.
- tim-- 8y ago
  Except corporate users usually want support. It does make me wonder though if it would ever be possible for a bunch of business savy open source developers could ever get around to creating an open source co-op. Something like the commercial version of the FSF. Build open source products with solid support contracts, and build/contribute to open source that way. The organization would be owned by the very people building and contributing the code. RedHat is the only company that I can see that really did everything in the open. I'm not sure which one I feel worse about, Oracle buying Sun, or IBM buying RedHat? I feel that Oracle did some major missteps in their acquisition (for this I look squarely at OpenOffice, and their misshandling of it, although, the OOo community hated the Oracle acquisition from day one, which I guess might have made it a little like poison berries - no one would want to go near it). Oracle completely ruined MySQL during the acquisition too.
  - M_Bakhtiari 8y ago
    > Except corporate users usually want support. What prevents anyone from offering an enterprise support program for Arch?
- flukus 8y ago
  Corporate users can barely get around to patching windows desktops and are happy with Redhat being so slow moving, they're not going to jump on the arch constant upgrade cycle anytime soon.