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SUSE to go private
- doctoboggan 3y agoRecently I’ve been getting more and more into the Rancher ecosystem as they always have some offering that meets my needs and I can trust it will interop well enough. I really hope that this does not affect the future of Rancher.
- cyberpunk 3y agoRKE is Apache licensed, I think it has a long future.
- janosdebugs 3y agoThe license matters little if SuSE is the one footing the bill for developing it.
- prmoustache 3y agoWhen a product is great but a company turn bad usually most of the good DEV flee. I think it is quite frequent that former developers start a new company or join a company that has the same of developing that product or a fork of it.
- janosdebugs 3y agoIt works only if the change is abrupt enough. If the change happens slowly, the bleed is also slow and the talent is gradually leaving.
- CharlesW 3y agoHN SmartFriends™, what does this mean? What's the risk for companies which are highly invested in SUSE?
- jacooper 3y agoEQT already owned the majority of SUSE, I doubt this will change anything.
- JonChesterfield 3y agoThe PE firm sees a path to profit by changing things about SUSE. This might be fine - e.g. they can write off the existing debt to themselves in order to strengthen the company finances. If the exit plan is some variant on improving the company and selling it on, could be good all round. The trepidation is that PE firms are also a bit prone to asset stripping and discarding the remaining carcass of the organisation, in which case this marks the beginning of the end of SUSE. I've no idea how to tell which path is more likely or even which is their current intent though.
- mamonster 3y agoThere are usually 2 plays tech PE does: 1)Expedited vendor lock-in: Figure out who is locked into the software, make the software maximally shitty/maximally costly so that these people would still not switch and then make money off the cost savings/higher prices and hope to make up investment. 2)Off market prep for trade sale: SUSE could be interesting for someone to acquire but a competitor/strategic buyer can't afford to buy the company and do the reorgs needed itself as it would tank the share price too much. The PE firm buys it, does the reorg off market and then does a trade sale of a reorged company to the buyer, but only now SUSE is way better as an acquisition target.
- jacooper 3y agoNot again..... Edit: it's the same EQT firm that made the SUSE IPO, and owned the majority of it since 2018.
- chucky_z 3y agoI’ve never seen anything good come out of PE delisting like this. Someone please correct me if I’m wrong.
- hkatx 3y agoX formerly twitter was one of the biggest LBO in history which is typically the process PE companies acquire companies as well. Priority is to increase margin, because the leverage comes from loan and debt servicing & principal repayment are pretty big sums. Its done capex reduction. Easiest way to do it is to reduce labor cost. X went from >7000 to ~1500(I may be off on numbers) Another is to increase revenue, so twitter blue(a subscription) and increasing incentives to be on twitter blue(no ads, potential account growth because you are shown up on follow list, no or less throttle on number of posts in feed).
- heylook 3y agoSir, this is a Wendy's.
- mkl95 3y ago> SUSE’s Management Board and Supervisory Board support the strategic opportunity from delisting of the company as it will allow SUSE to focus fully on its operational priorities and execution of its long-term strategy What does this mean? Is their current status adding some significant overhead that would go away by going private?
- paxys 3y agoGoing private means you don't have to answer to shareholders and their short term demands, which may be a good thing for a company. Of course it would be naive to assume that the private equity firm that bought it is in it for the good of the community rather than pure profit.
- jacooper 3y agoShareholder pressure? Maybe because of their recent goodwill moves against Red hat?
- pmontra 3y agoShareholder pressure is also the need to make the value of the share grow, with any mean, or shareholders will buy something else and the value of the company will go down, no more deals paid with shares, no bonuses for the CEO, etc. A private company might attract different managers and pursue different goals. However Finance and Industry usually don't go along well. Finance eats industries to make profits.
- pyrophane 3y agoProbably that as a private company it would be easier for them to do things that would have negative short term impact on revenue but be better for the company in the long term.
- Ensorceled 3y agoSOX and other SEC regulatory constraints and costs. Disclosure rules. Shareholder accountability for strategic decisions. Stricter accounting and audit requirements. Often your board has representatives of large shareholders, who have their own considerations and limitations, as opposed to owners.
- bloopernova 3y agoWhat are the success stories of private equity firms taking over a corporation? (Where success is the products are still made, quality and staffing is maintained at previous levels)
- kmeisthax 3y agoNone. Private equity's entire business model is to suck the quality and staffing out of the product and make money off the gap between the product getting cheaper and people moving to a viable alternative.
- silisili 3y agoThat's been my experience twice now personally, and having read numerous other accounts. They'll always tell you after purchase that's not the case, how they see long term value, want to grow it, etc etc. It's never true - if PE buys your company, run for the hills.
- qwytw 3y agoThey already bought SUSE years ago though and their previous owners weren't much better (or possibly objectively worse..)
- gumby 3y agoConversely I would answer "high". PE is basically a parasitic business, designed to suck money out of the purchased company until it collapses. You do this by borrowing a ton of money to purchase the company. Then for the privilege the company pays the buyer a special bonus that conveniently covers its costs (and often more) out of the cash it had on hand when bought. Then the buyer continues to get various payment streams, like guaranteed dividends or all sorts of other obligations, until the company collapses. Sad to say I'm not exaggerating. I say "basically" because there are a couple of exceptions. Dell was purchased in a special deal with the founder so that the company actually operates but the founder was enriched in the process. VC is a branch of private equity (an almost invisible pimple on the PE business TBH) where they don't buy the whole company and hope to make money on the IPO. But it's a small business: there are numerous companies out there with an asset base larger than the entire VC industry.
- r0ckarong 3y agoAnd thus the squeeze cycle can begin anew. Brauckmann made his money, DiDonato made her money, the EQT guys made their money. Time to share this cake with more ants.
- subtextminer 3y agoYet another reason to move to Debian. While in many ways not comparable to what's happened with Redhat, with Suse turning to the dark side one wonders how much longer Canonical will last before doing something similar. Make no doubt about it, private equity is all about short term shareholder returns. That's not a bad things in principle but if you don't want to wake up yet again with your distro having the rug pulled out from under it, switch to Debian.
- jzb 3y agoIf you consider Red Hat “on the dark side” but not Canonical, I’m curious how you’re defining dark side.
- jkaplowitz 3y agoI presume their definition is “owned by some huge and/or evil parent corp”, together with viewing IBM and private equity firms as each having one or both of those attributes. I’ve seen many valid criticisms of Canonical, but huge doesn’t seem applicable to them and evil seems to go beyond what’s fair for their flaws. As for their owner, again, few would place Mark Shuttleworth in the same category as either IBM or private equity firms, other than probably having had a peak (though not current) net worth of over $1 billion.
- jkaplowitz 3y agoDebian is great indeed (I am a a Debian developer myself although rather inactive) - but today’s news isn’t much of a change in whether SUSE is or isn’t on any definition of the dark side. Why do I say that? Simply, as per the linked announcement itself, this takeover offer is by the current majority shareholder who already owns 79% of the company. They can already win any shareholder vote they want to win. They already control SUSE. Most of what this will do is two things: one, pay the current minority shareholders of SUSE 67% more than their shares are worth on the open market, and remove the quarterly earnings pressures of the German equivalent of Wall Street from SUSE management, at least unless and until any future IPO or a sale to another public company. Not obvious that this transaction makes anything worse than it already was. There could be a less obvious difference: SUSE currently has a German corporate structure with very strong worker rights including participating alongside management on the supervisory board. If they get rid of the German entity and keep only a Luxembourg entity, that may no longer apply, though German labour law certainly still would for employers based in Germany. I’m not an expert on any differences between German and Luxembourg worker governance participation rights, and in this paragraph I’m more raising a question than asserting anything.
- greatNespresso 3y agoOk naive question but SUSE was the first Linux distro I used 15 years ago and never touched it again. For those of HN that use it today, what's their strength compared to RHEL or Ubuntu in the enterprise world?
- xtracto 3y agoJust recently I was reading about OpenSuse thimbleweed rolling release. I read a lot of Great things about it, everyone said it was great. Then I saw a couple of videos and realized its UI (of their control center) is stuck in the 90s and it has several rough edges (like when installing it, I wont show you a list of WiFi access points, but ask you to manually enter the name of your AP and the encryption method... in 2023). I decided to keep Mint. So far it's been the best distros in terms of "not having to bother" so much. I use it as my daily dev environment.
- prmoustache 3y agoHow many times in a year do you expect to go into the "control center" to change config? And how bad is it to have an old UI stuck in the 90's [1]compared while most distros still expect you to edit config files like in the 70's/80's[2]? Besides I am pretty sure you can configure tumbleweed without even touching that control center. I haven't tried tumbleweed, but I have tried Mint a few months ago and it didn't really striked me as having much more modern tool and I don't think I even used a configuration management tool. [1] that many people would praise nowadays by the way. [2] which still works really well and is still a pretty good UX imho.
- Stranger43 3y agoFirstmost an close relationship to SAP due to being headquartered in the same German region. Secondly SuSE have an relatively good track record of delivering an stable and predictable distribution with SLES, and have been around longer then any other commercial Linux vendor, and despite several changes in ownership over the years it's never been felt as an user. Compared to Ubuntu running SLES is breath of calmness with changes happening slow and well coordinated and while RHEL used to be the same that's changing after being taking over by IBM.
- username332211 3y agoSuse IPOd in 2021 at 30€/share. Now they are buying it back at 16. I think we should thank everyone who bought shares at the IPO for their charitable contribution to open source software.
- t0mas88 3y agoCharitable contribution to EQT and other shareholders. I don't think the company saw much of that money.
- yawaramin 3y agoSo...uh...after all that drama from SuSE about how 'IBM' destroyed RHEL after acquiring Red Hat, they turn around and get acquired by the nearest bidder. That's hilarious. Nowadays I often compare this kind of hypocrisy to the 'Avengers: Age of Ultron' scene where Strucker shouts 'No surrender!' and riles up his henchmen, then immediately turns to his second-in-command and says, 'I am going to surrender'.
- username332211 3y agoCan you revise your statement when you read the second paragraph of the press release?
- yawaramin 3y agoDid SuSE bother to read the GPL license before they made their statements about RHEL?
- username332211 3y agoWhat does that have to do with you pontificating on events that aren't actually happening?
- yawaramin 3y agoBingo.
- NotYourLawyer 3y agoThe company is already 79% owned by the acquirer. Who exactly do you think should be slamming on the brakes here?
- yawaramin 3y agoNobody. And I never insinuated that they shouldn't get wholly acquired. I just said that they made a big song and dance about how getting acquired was the downfall of Red Hat, then went ahead with their own acquisition. That's what I found funny.
- whizzter 3y agoWhile fears of PE is quite well founded in many cases, EQT might be one group that might actually have proper long term interests. Ownership of EQT goes up to Investor and the Swedish Wallenberg family, they're the same people that among other things has held big stakes in Ericsson, Astra Zeneca (The British covid vaccine),etc over 90 years by now.
- zeruch 3y agoPrivate Equity needs to be regulated into oblivion.
- qwytw 3y agoSo companies shouldn't be allowed to own shares of other companies?
- zeruch 3y agoNo, but they shouldn't be allowed to not act as fiduciaries, and do what they do now, which is to load debt, do bolloxed sell-lease contracts, and basically take money from all sides, and screw everyone else into a pulp. It's a garbage model out of a Dicken's novel and is a huge reason why a groundswell of anti-capitalistic sentiment keeps growing. It's a case study in "worst practices" of venality.
- qwytw 3y ago> which is to load debt ... and screw everyone else into a pulp Individuals are just as capable of doing this, just look at Twitter and there are plenty of adequately run companies owned by PE. We just don't pay attention to them. But yeah somehow severely limiting debt funded acquisitions (when the debt is offloaded to the company which is being acquired) would probably be a very good idea.
- zeruch 3y ago"Individuals are just as capable of doing this," Yes, but fiduciaries aren't (and even VCs generally try not to). " there are plenty of adequately run companies owned by PE Define "adequate" and which ones are they? I've certainly experienced directly and indirectly enough to know I'm quite burned on them, and I have yet to meet a single person who enjoyed dealing with one, that wasn't one; anyone on the receiving end of endless cost cutting, sell leasebacks, forced vendor changes to more closely align with portfolio choices regardless of sense, etc. No, the people who seem to love PEs are either Ayn Rand's fluffer contingent, adjacently or are making money off one already without having to be subjected to their profoundly absent graces. Pass.
- coopreme 3y agoI don’t know why I read it this way, but I read “go private” as “closed source”. After reading, SUSE is no longer going to be a public company.
- hemloc_io 3y agosame I had no idea they were publicly traded.
- berbec 3y agoIf anyone is interested, here's the offer: https://www.eqt-marcel-offer.com/websites/3004_ma/English/1000/announcements.html https://www.eqt-marcel-offer.com/websites/3004_ma/English/10...
- dezren39 3y agoprivate company, open-source
- tristor 3y agoStart of the end, private equity ruins everything it touches. RIP SUSE
- rbera 3y agoSUSE was private just a few years ago, owned by the same firm that IPOed them and is now taking them private again. If there were any truth to your statement, it would’ve happened a while ago.
- wheelerof4te 3y agoPrivate companies funded by public funds is my jam. So, most of the tech megacorps in the US. Oh, the glory of fasc...ehem, capitalism.
- alphanullmeric 3y agoFascism is when I can’t make rules about how other people spend their money. Hilarious when people associate capitalism with a movement founded by none other than Benito Mussolini. If you read the fascist manifesto and the Green Party platform back to back you’d think they came from the same book.
- msla 3y agoFascist corporations have more to do with unions than they do with business corporations: http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/corporatism.htm http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/corporatism.htm
- COGlory 3y agoI am cautiously optimistic. From the article: > Both SUSE’s Management and Supervisory Boards have expressed support for the strategic opportunity presented by this delisting. They believe that it will enable SUSE to concentrate on its operational priorities and the execution of its long-term strategy without the pressure of public markets. Lets hope their incentives more strongly align with their customers, now. I am a huge SUSE fan, been using their products for 15 years. What they've been doing the last 5 or so has been almost unparalleled in the Linux space.
- wlesieutre 3y agoDon't know that I've ever been optimistic about a company being purchased by private equity. Anyone have counterexamples where that turned out well for customers? The justification sounds good, but they'd say something like that even if the plan was "squeeze money out of the company at the expense of users and customers and reputation."
- deaddodo 3y agoMany could argue that Dell improved substantially after its 2013 transition to private ownership. At least, from the consumer perspective, things improved drastically. Linux support, a wider variety of competitive lines with much needed improvements to legacy lines, adoption of AMD for CPUs/GPUs, etc. I can't speak of their server/enterprise business, however.
- profwalkstr 3y agoI think Dell went downhill after the acquisition, their hardware quality is junk all across their line: servers, workstations, laptops, monitors, etc. Every device from them that I had my hands on recently have, at best, terrible build quality, and at worst, multiple failures. And their support is a bad joke.
- ethbr1 3y agoMy experience was limited to laptops and monitors, but hardware's been good and service has been excellent. Honestly, it reminded me more of early-Amazon customer support, than anything more recent. E.g. support agent following up with a personalized email to me to make sure everything worked out okay with a warranty claim. Talking to humans was novel and pleasant. That was on the consumer side though.
- kergonath 3y agoI don’t know how to feel about this. I want to be optimistic, because in my view OpenSuSE is one of the best distribution for the general public, and has the right balance of bleeding edge and stability for my use case. Hopefully this will mean that they’ll be able to support the community with fewer incentives to extract money for shareholders or distractions with the share price. Otherwise I’ll be in a pickle to find another distribution for daily use.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- treesciencebot 3y agoIs there any reason for the buyer here who already owns almost 80% of the company to offer a 67% premium for the remaining 20% of the shares? What would have happened if they offered a 30% premium or a 15% one (from what I understand, they have both simple majority and qualified majority so that means they don't really need to ask anyone for anything). It's not like they want to get 100% ownership since this is a purely voluntary buy-out and existing investors can choose to stay.
- sdenton4 3y agoIt's probably a question of who exactly holds that other 20% of shares... There's a decent chance it's mostly held by one or a few long-time investors/contributors/??? and the premium is the price of good-will.
- JimXugle 3y agoMy knowledge on this is limited, and US-specific, but I'd imagine the situation in Europe is similar... In the US, publicly traded companies are subject to a lot of laws that private companies aren't subject to, most notably being required to make periodic public disclosures about finances and (to a more limited extent) business plans. Making false statements on these required disclosures is a crime, even if not intentional. The majority stakeholder might've done the math and realized that it's cheaper to buy out the other shareholders than it is to continue making those disclosures and risking criminal prosecution.
- justinclift 3y agoIn some countries, minority stake holders over a certain percentage (5% ?) from memory can be entitled to various measures as well. eg being able to check the company books / financials, and so on
- rurban 3y agoit looks more to me that the key feature is the wording "long term" in their announcement. if you plan long term strategic shifts, most shareholders will bail out earlier when the quarterly publications once doesn't look too good. which hurts the whole plan. so if you need to invest long term, it's better to get rid of those short term investors, which can bring everything down. private you don't need to publish your results, that's why most German companies prefer to stay private. they think in 6 year plans, not 1/4th year plans
- KomoD 3y agoPrivate equity... Oh boy.
- coopreme 3y agoI hope this doesn’t step on Rancher. I could see Rancher, RKE2, Neuvector start to get tighter integration and become more of a licensed model.
- riffic 3y ago20 something years of using Linux and I have never had the urge to even look at Suse. who's life is affected by this?
- spicyusername 3y ago...e...everyone who uses it...? I'm not sure if you're aware of this, but when something isn't directly in your line of sight, it still exists...
- bob-09 3y ago> who's life is affected by this? who is life is affected by suse
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- sharts 3y agoWho knows? I like the distro but don't use it anymore because nobody else does.
- rurban 3y agoEverybody who uses gcc, because Suse maintains it. KDE Plasma also, but this userbase is not that large
- pmatilai 3y agoThat is, ahem, a peculiar view. https://gcc.gnu.org/git/?p=gcc.git;a=blob_plain;f=MAINTAINERS;hb=HEAD https://gcc.gnu.org/git/?p=gcc.git;a=blob_plain;f=MAINTAINER... Yes there are many people from Suse, but not predominantly so, let alone "maintained by".
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago> They believe that it will enable SUSE to concentrate on its operational priorities and the execution of its long-term strategy without the pressure of public markets. What have they put into a contract to make sure that happens. Companies will make many promises when they undergo changes in ownership. All those words and intentions are worth nothing unless they are specified as part of a binding legal contract.
- zeruch 3y agoIt's not going private. It's getting ready to spiral out in typical PE fashion. Start planning your migrations folks, as its all downhill from here.
- Blackstrat 3y agoSadly, I’ve been through the PE takeover experience. It wasn’t pleasant and the surviving company bore little resemblance to prior self. The best that can be said for the experience was they gave me a decent buyout. Leap was my main driver for a good number of years though of late Arch in VM has been my daily. I see a migration from SUSE in the near future.
- brnt 3y agoLeap has been announced to be EOL a while ago anyway.
- Blackstrat 3y agoI know. I had considered just going to Tumbleweed. But that's why I tried Arch. And since they extended Leap's EOL for another year, it gave me more time to play around and figure out where I wanted to land.
- zeruch 3y ago"Sadly, I’ve been through the PE takeover experience." Same (more than once)...in both cases there were a few positives and a cavalcade of negatives, with the latter category expanding like a famished amoeba. I could fix the whole PE realm in one move: require PE firms to operate as fiduciaries, with severe penalties for failure to comply. The whole sector would collapse or stop sucking, and I don't care which happens.
- pxc 3y agoopenSUSE was one of the first Linux distros I ever used. When I picked it up, I was just a kid, and new to the whole GNU/Linux universe. I quite scared of the command line, and along with the relatively familiar KDE3 desktop, openSUSE's emphasis on comprehensive graphical configurators appealed to me. As I grew more comfortable with Unix fundamentals and I learned more about the GNU/Linux desktop userland, I left openSUSE behind because I didn't care so much about the GUI configuration tools like YaST. I bounced between Gentoo, Ubuntu, Arch, and more obscure derivatives of each, experimenting and learning a lot about the 'bones' of a Linux distro: the init system, the display server, the initramfs tooling, the filesystem, etc. I became especially fascinated with the 'bones' that truly make a class of distros unique: the package manager and the developer tooling used by maintainers to build the distro. At some point I revisited openSUSE and realized that underneath the more 'superficial' things— important things, but things that are visible from the get-go— I'd loved about the distro as a newcomer were some truly impressive 'bones'. I can back to find that zypper was the most powerful, ergonomic package manager (of its type) that I'd ever seen. I was blown away by the flexibility and diligence of the Open Build Service infrastructure and how easy it made it for me to maintain repositories for nearly any distro, and grateful for the generosity of the openSUSE org for letting basically anyone make an account and leverage that sophisticated build infrastructure for free. The fact that they even automated QA for pre-boot stuff using screen scrapers and QEMU left a lasting impression on me. Some years after that reintroduction, I fell in love with NixOS, which is now my daily driver everywhere. But I still have a lot of respect and affection for openSUSE. I hope this change helps drive openSUSE forward over the long term. openSUSE is a great operating system that I'd recommend to anyone looking for a traditional distro that's pleasant to use and easy to maintain. openSUSE seems extremely underrated, at least here in the US. And everyone should check out the Open Build Service. You know how on GitHub, you can browse to any repo and click the 'Fork' button to get your own copy that you can hack on and publish? OBS gives you that for Linux packages. You can automatically put together a repo full of packages that track whatever upstream source you like, but build with your own custom patches, build for your CPU architecture, etc. You can even fork a package from a different distro (or different release of your own distro), have it build against whatever you're running, and then get dumped neatly into a repo for you. (All builds happen in clean slate VMs, so you are very unlikely to miss any dependencies.)
- gosusego 3y ago> In an unexpected corporate restructuring move If there's one thing that is expected of SUSE is a periodic restructuring.
- gosusego 3y agoOpensource is getting attacked on all fronts. SUSE becomes another risky choice. Nothing companies control is out of limits for a bait and switch (a la Hashicorp). Wake up folks.
- swozey 3y agoI hope that SUSE saved the staff of Rancher from the previous assholes who ran the place. God that was an absolutely awful company to work for. I'm glad they started their own stupid acorn or whatever service nobody will ever use. Rancher had a lot of incredibly intelligent people who were treated like absolute shit.
- lambdasquirrel 3y agoRancher worked decently well until about a year after the acquisition. But I’m not so sure about some of the design decisions like in-place node updates.
- jb_gericke 3y agoI believe the founding Rancher members left to start Acorn (https://www.acorn.io https://www.acorn.io) some time ago.
- V99 3y agoWe did, and are seemingly the assholes to which he refers.
- swozey 3y agoYou were grinding your Engineers into the ground and sold 3-6 months after I started. We were wondering why we were so overworked and then we knew, you were in the middle of the sale and probably just trying to get big names under the portfolio. This was at the HEIGHT of Covid no less so we already had that additional stress and nobody at Rancher cared about that at all. There wasn't a single email or meeting or anything giving people grace that I saw, telling them if they need time away to take it, etc, the entire company just acted like nothing was going on. Absolutely the opposite of the next company I went to. I've only worked at one other company that comparatively treated their Engineers as badly and overworked as R. I started at the company with 3 other people on my team. None of them were there 1 year later, including myself. IIRC I quit after 6 months on the spot with no backup plan. We were expected to make how-to videos, how-to articles, make labs, run labs w/public questions, give hour long tailored demos, 2-5 meetings with clients a day (potential and current) while also doing the actual technical work to deploy clusters, technical work testing various things (like Longhorn performance), complex cluster troubleshooting, all while having to keep on top of knowing everything about k8s and infra daily. Probably much more I don't remember right now. I worked SO many nights and weekends to keep caught up as did others. I was so excited to work there as a k8s contrib getting to actually be paid to work on k8s and it was .... that. Thrown into a meat grinder with no room to breath. Every single day and week.
- creatonez 3y agoThis is a good thing, for those who actually want to see SUSE evolve and reshape itself to fit the next generation of Linux distributions -- which is to have immutable base operating systems for containers to run on, combined with plenty of options for backwards compatibility to continue to accommodate the old systems. Without going private it is not clear that SUSE ALP, which is a technically brilliant idea, would hold up to market skepticism to see its completion.
- jb_gericke 3y agoRancher price increases over the last few years have made it prohibitive for a good number of our customers. Personally, I don't think SUSE has done much to evolve the lifecycle side of Rancher - I want a platform that updates my node operating systems when I upgrade Kubernetes (this has been in OpenShift for years and is in Tanzu). Rancher OS was silently killed off, forcing us to rebase certain customer environments, at the time RKE and Micro OS didn’t play well together, that seems to have changed somewhat but the lifecycle side is still seemingly immature. Harvester looks interesting but we haven’t found many uses-cases for hyperconverged Kube (or perhaps more accurately, appetite within enterprises). Neuvector though is pretty damn awesome. I wonder how this plays out against the Red Hat foot gun, and if it’ll allow SUSE to aggressively go out to displace RHEL (My feeling is most of the high paying enterprise customers don’t really care about what Red Hat has done).
- m01 3y agoI think the TFA is the interesting bit. > SUSE has committed to declare and pay an interim dividend to all shareholders [...] will be funded by SUSE through a combination of existing cash and additional borrowing [...] in the form of loans [...] to a maximum of EUR 500 million. So EQT is asking SUSE to take its cash, borrow up to 500M EUR, pay a dividend (of which 79% goes to the PE fund). Then EQT will use (some of? All of?) that money to buy more shares. It doesn't sound like EQT is investing any new money into SUSE here. Sounds like EQT will do well regardless of whether SUSE ends up going private. SUSE meanwhile will get another (up to) 500M of debt and lose a chunk of its cash from its balance sheet. Hmmm... (opinions my own)
- rapht 3y agoBasically from quick math, this amounts to financing 80% of the buyback through debt and 20% through presumably cash brought by the investors listed alongside EQT in the press release. (If all non EQT shareholders accept the offer, EQT will earn c.€460m in dividend, while the full cost of buying back those same shareholders, including dividend, is c.€580m.) What we don't know is how much EQT will be diluted by those new investors in the end.
- noam_compsci 3y agoSuch a large premium on current share price. I can’t see this end any way other than a PE gutting of the company to make the economics work.
- xyst 3y agoRIP SUSE. Yet another victim to private equity. I give it 3-4 yrs before a chapter 11 bankruptcy is filed.
- thepostman0 3y agoI hope they keep doing the music videos https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6sYHytyKN2-X93TurF3JptW8qSVm0DzA https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6sYHytyKN2-X93TurF3JptW8...
- ceva 3y agoEverything will be just fine
- jhoelzel 3y agoLove it! Personally i dont think the public offering has done them any good. They are unparalleled in the kubernetes space and im expecting much more awesome things to come. (and no, i dont simply mean clicky bunty rancher) By now i am suggesting Suse products to all my clients with the guarantee that even if i get hit with a bus and will not return, there will always(!) be someone to support their software. They are for instance the only ones actually doing this. Cloud times are shifting again, especially with machine learning and i could not be happier about it. The fact alone that with windows 11 a lot of orgs have a LOT of compute simply being thrown out makes for excellent dev environments and local clusters
- currygen 3y agoYes, we've been using MicroOS for years and never had any problems with it. It makes managing a k8s cluster on premise so easy
- SSLy 3y ago>They are for instance the only ones actually doing this. And Red Hat isn't? What am I missing?
- jhoelzel 3y agoRed Hat has much less product on the market for this purpose and is nowhere near as complete as SUSE. OpenShift is powered by kubernetes. SUSEs solution IS kubernetes. Furthermore, i think they have clearly demonstrated how they see things.
- spicyusername 3y agoOpenShift is also just regular old Kubernetes.
- jhoelzel 3y agoGuys while I know that Redhat also contributes to SIGS for kubernetes, My point is that SUSE is just much more available. This is especially true on the edge and unless you are a megacorp, i don't see anyone forking over money for the license. The open source offering is not to be used for production and simply as a testing ground for features that make it upstream... OKD, could have been a closer match to k3s in terms of cost but not necessarily simplicity and we are not even talking about how ready rke2 is. SUSE's offerings, provide a balance of simplicity and enterprise features, making them compelling for SMEs. Here in Europe there is not even a question about it. Kubernetes is free and in the end of the day simply a wrapper of apis, which should not require licensing.
- finnjohnsen2 3y agoIs SUSE relevant? Maybe I live under a rock, but I don't hear anyone talking about using it for anything anymore. Feels like 10+ years since it went off radar
- lysium 3y agoI had the same thought, then I read the comments to be shown the wiser, eg. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37169896 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37169896
- gigatexal 3y agoOf course they are. The company gets passed around like the bong did at college.