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> Red Hat is a fantastic company, and a pioneer in successfully commercializing open source. However, beyond Red Hat the effort has largely been a failure from
by cyphar 8y ago
> Red Hat is a fantastic company, and a pioneer in successfully commercializing open source. However, beyond Red Hat the effort has largely been a failure from a business standpoint.
SUSE started around a year before RedHat, in 1992. Sure, we haven't had the same success and growth, but I would disagree that RedHat pioneered the model. I wouldn't even argue SUSE pioneered it (arguably it was Cygnus in 1989 -- though it was eventually acquired by RedHat in 2000). And even earlier you could argue that RMS pioneered it with his distribution of GNU Emacs in the early 80s (which had a description of the business model as the final chapter in the manual).
[I work at SUSE and am obviously biased, but it is a little bit annoying that people always ignore that we still exist...]
- falcolas 8y ago> it is a little bit annoying that people always ignore that we still exist Count me among them. I wasn't even aware that the SUSE Linux project was still a thing, let alone one backed by a business. Marketing might not be a terrible idea at this point in time - the best product in the world won't sell if nobody knows about it.
- beatgammit 8y agoIt's very popular in Europe, RedHat is very popular in the US. I think the IBM acquisition is a fantastic opportunity for SUSE to start their engines here in the US. They have a fantastic value proposition: start with openSUSE Leap for free, then upgrade to a paid SUSE contract (can be done on place). This should appeal to CentOS and Fedora users who consider using RHEL, but don't because it's too hard to switch. They can also appeal to people who don't need the IBM integration but feel like they're not getting as much attention as before (priorities will likely change at RedHat). They can also appeal to developers with their rolling Tumbleweed release (which can also convert to openSUSE Leap/SUSE). If SUSE had publicly traded stocks, I'd consider buying in right now as they have a really good opportunity over the next few years to steal customers from RedHat/IBM. They're big Linux contributors (Greg Kroah-Hartman used to work on the project), so they are _very_ attractive.
- mprev 8y agoAt this point SUSE is just as niche in Europe as it is anywhere else. In an enterprise setting, why would you throw your lot in with a company that seems to change owners every few years rather than the biggest name in open source that also now happens to be owned by IBM?
- eloisant 8y agoIn France, I've never worked for or even heard about a company that uses Suse. It's usually Debian if the sysadmin have all latitude, RedHat if certifications or having a company behind the product mattered for the managers.
- forapurpose 8y ago> This should appeal to CentOS and Fedora users who consider using RHEL, but don't because it's too hard to switch. It's hard to switch from Fedora and CentOS to RHEL? Isn't CentOS almost exactly the same bits, minus the branding and a few proprietary pieces?
- type0 8y agoIt's not something that RH says you could so there you go. You can't just pull one system out and put a new one, specially Fedora, this would be equivalent of pulling a rug from underneath someone standing on it, who knows you might be lucky, just try it. SUSE on the other hand encourages switching after the introduction of LEAP 15, in other words it's supposed to be trivial to do.
- notacoward 8y agoI think you're being a bit over-sensitive. They said a pioneer, which does not preclude other pioneers. Also, what's the bar for "successfully" commercializing open source? In a world where anything less than a unicorn is considered failure - and bear in mind the OP is from a promoter of that ethos - Suse's trajectory might not qualify. Even if it did, it would be one of the few exceptions to the general rule that commercializing open source largely has been a failure. Open source as a development method is alive and well, but as a business in its own right not so much. P.S. Eight years at Red Hat, ending a year and a half ago. Glad not to be under IBM's inept thumb as my erstwhile colleagues soon will be.
- erikb 8y agoIs anybody still using Suse besides some big three letter corps?
- cyphar 8y agoYes. https://www.suse.com/c/success/ https://www.suse.com/c/success/
- NikolaNovak 8y agoFYI/FWIW, I think they were preferred for Canadian Government / Shared Services Canada deployments until a few years ago
- spicytunacone 8y agoWhat's preferred now? I know Canadian schools liked SUSE as well.
- NikolaNovak 8y agoI believe SSC currently prefers RedHat, but I'm nowhere near the authoritative source :)
- erikb 8y agoI also heard, that the American continent is more and more Blue Hat focussed and Suse is more a European thing.
- madhadron 8y agoI was delighted to find that SuSE has started using btrfs to do the same root filesystem snapshotting that Solaris does with ZFS! Suddenly it was back on my radar after not paying much attention to it since the 1990's (I went into Debian land and stayed there, pretty much).
- h1d 8y agoYou need to read more into the news. It's actually a reason to get unexcited about. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14907771 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14907771
- cyphar 8y agoRed Hat doesn't have any btrfs engineers, they all moved to Facebook -- so they don't currently have anyone in-house to do btrfs work. SUSE does (one of the upstream maintainers is a SUSE guy). Facebook also runs btrfs. Red Hat's plan for "replacing" btrfs is to write a bunch of additional tools around devicemapper/LVM. My experience with using LVM is that this is not going to end well -- if you thought btrfs was unstable you've seen nothing yet. To be clear, btrfs does have its issues, but linking to RHEL no longer supporting something they never actually fully supported is a bit of weird thing to argue is a negative of btrfs. Red Hat doesn't get to by the sole arbiter of what is and isn't good software (and it should be noted that Project Atomic's snapshotting using ostree is simply not as good as using btrfs and the transactional-update integration into openSUSE Kubic -- btrfs snapshots are atomic for a start and rollbacks are a single syscall away).
- freehunter 8y agoPurely anecdotal and I've never worked for or on a team whose main responsibility was Linux administration, but at two places I worked in the past, our Linux guys didn't like SUSE. It wasn't a technical problem, and more marketing could probably help fix the problem. I have a SUSE Linux certification, and at two companies folks from the Linux team commented that SUSE makes them uncomfortable because they're unsure of how to pronounce the name. It's like GIF or Porsche but worse. Half of them pronounced it Suzy, like the person's name. Some pronounced it closer to Zeus with a -e at the end. Some pronounced it "Soos" like it has a silent -e. They preferred Red Hat or Ubuntu not because of technical superiority but because they were embarrassed to attempt pronouncing SUSE. It's likely the only time they heard it pronounced was from coworkers who didn't know how to pronounce it either.
- cyphar 8y agoThere was a video explaining how to pronounce SUSE several years ago (both funny and a little worrying that such a video was necessary)[1]. It is pronounced strangely since it was a German name and so you have to put on your best German impression to get the "s" sound right. All jokes aside, I think most folks would agree that SUSE's marketing really needs to be reworked very significantly. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4lFHP-UxTk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4lFHP-UxTk
- taejo 8y agoThe German pronunciation would be pretty close to "zooza", so the pronunciation in that video isn't German, and a German accent would hinder you from pronouncing it that way (in German you can't have the /s/ sound at the beginning of a word followed by a vowel). Either way, "sooza" and "zooza" are not exactly hard for English speakers: they're just completely non-inferrable from the "SUSE" spelling.
- cyphar 8y agoYeah, most of my German colleagues say "zooza" -- but saying it this way makes it difficult for English speakers to infer what you're talking about. So I say it as "sooza" even if it's _slightly_ incorrect.
- bewo001 8y agoWasn't there a close collaboration between IBM and SUSE?
- wmf 8y agoBack in the early days of enterprise Linux, IBM wanted to avoid Red Hat becoming a monopoly so they backed SUSE (and later Ubuntu) quite a bit.
- h1d 8y agoAnd then it got too big for IBM to pay a fortune to stop taking its pie?
- cyphar 8y agoIBM uses several distributions. I know that both RedHat and SUSE (and probably Canonical but I'm not sure) have IBM departments as customers.