> Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen, CEO of SUSE, said,<p>According to LinkedIn Dirk-Peter started at Suse 3 months ago as CEO and worked for Red Hat for 18 years and was a Senior VP at Red Hat.<p>I think this move of Suse could be a credible threat to IBM / Red Hat's RHEL.
I'm continually baffled that so many companies follow RHEL compatibility to this day.<p>I've been using Linux for nearly 30 years. Admining as a profession for at least a quarter of that. 20 years ago, it made a ton of sense. Today, less so.<p>The 'stable version but we backport patches' mantra doesn't make any sense today. I can't even describe how many things that have broken that you can't even find an answer for because it was some RH specific patch.<p>Between Debian, Nix, Arch, and others, I can't figure out why RHEL compat is so desirable. I'll go as far as to say that my Arch boxes have been far more predictable than my RHEL boxes.
> This investment will preserve the flow of innovation for years to come and ensures that customers and community alike are not subjected to vendor lock-in and have genuine choice tomorrow as well as today.<p>Wow, that's pretty rich from a company that has made good money from vendor lock-in. I'm still bitter when they drastically increased our SLES-prices for academic institutions, that was probably around 2010/11, and I've never touched SUSE since. That they now fork RHEL is pretty funny, since I vividly remember talking to a SUSE sales rep at that time, and I said we would now switch away from SLES to Scientific Linux, and he called it a "parasite project". Of course, you are allowed to make money off FLOSS software, but please, get off your high horse when others do the same.
Don't get me wrong, I am very happy with this announcement, however it bothers me slightly when I see these kind of announcements with the tone of "we love open source and we want to give this to the community" when the rationale for this probably was "RHEL is going to lose a bunch of customers and we can profit off of that". If it was a non-profit they might convince me but as a Linux for enterprise-kind of company I am not fully convinced behind the motivations.
What is this supposed to be? SUSE responding to Red Hat obstructing RHEL clones by creating a new RHEL clone? Or are they forking RHEL into something that will try to remain compatible, while not being a clone?<p>The latter is what Red Hat seems to want: a broader ecosystem that competes with Debian on community, while allowing Red Hat to sell RHEL with an "original recipe" sticker.<p>SUSE coming out with an announcement that effectively cannibalizes its existing enterprise distribution kind of makes Red Hat's move look risky, but perhaps not dumb after all.
Did SUSE coordinate this announcement With Oracle? Because they also announced similar thing yesterday <a href="https://www.oracle.com/news/announcement/blog/keep-linux-open-and-free-2023-07-10/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.oracle.com/news/announcement/blog/keep-linux-ope...</a>
I still don't forgive SUSE for buying Rancher and then unceremoniously killing k3os. They just left the website up and everything, made no announcement, made no attempt to help the community take over, just left the Github repo to rot: <a href="https://k3os.io/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://k3os.io/</a><p>Hard to have confidence in SUSE's commitment to another open source operating system side project after that. SUSE's announcement at the time:<p><i>Like SUSE, Rancher is 100% open source and equally as passionate as SUSE about true open source innovation, community empowerment, and customer success. SUSE and Rancher share the same goal – happy and satisfied customers.</i><p><a href="https://www.suse.com/c/suse-acquires-rancher/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.suse.com/c/suse-acquires-rancher/</a>
Could Alma, Rocky, SUSE and Oracle team up, coordinate with each other, pool their resources? (The announcement mentions Rocky and SUSE working together, but not Alma or Oracle.)<p>I wonder how IBM / RedHat might react to that, were it to happen.
I had a feeling SUSE would smell blood in the water when Red Hat shot itself in the foot. I don't know what Red Hat was thinking. They grievously misread their position in the market and are far more vulnerable than they seem to have realized.
I've been saying RHEL is only relevant because it's an agreed-upon standard with an adequately slow rate of change. Entities want to be able to easily use code and documentation from elsewhere, and easily hire experts to support it (1). Some of that is inertia driven, but nothing else about it really matters. Thinking they can generate their own network effects is a really classic IBM blunder (2).<p>Much of RH's historical relevance was basically "RedHat exists to launder Linux for the National Labs" and that basis is not a terribly deep moat - hell the big physics centers maintained their Scientific Linux fork for 16 years before fully shifting onto CentOS then getting rug-pulled... which is not the kind of relationship maintenance you want to do with the customers whose network effects create your value proposition.<p>The death condition for RH is if the Alma/Rocky CentOS community successors and the Oracle type commercial clones all agreed to a different reference point for "Standard Enterprise Linux"(3), and the big producers of code people want to use (your large Physics centers and and NIH scientific compute projects, and/or the shared infrastructure like OpenHPC) tracked that other reference point, suddenly RH brand EL is mostly irrelevant.<p>SuSE running their own EL fork is interesting because there was not an obvious successor reference point to coordinate the non-RH ELs and/or major users if they have trouble tracking RHEL, and now there kind of is - it'll be really interesting to see what happens if there is any divergence.<p>(1) The support point is "why not Debian," they've never had the commercial support partners, certs, etc. Having that was a huge part Ubuntu/Canonical's proposition, but they never really got the enterprise/scientific compute/HPC penetration that RH has.<p>(2) Ya'll remember PS/2 and MCA (Micro Channel Architecture)? IBM was gonna take back control of the PC industry by setting an new (much more license controlled) standard and... the PC cloner industry set up outside coordination points and end-ran them with EISA/VLB and eventually PCI.<p>(3) It might not get called SEL for SuSE or Standard because that would be confusing/trademark problems with the adjacent-industry Schneider Electric. I half jokingly translate the "Enterprise Linux" terminology into "Srs Bsns Linux" some of the time anyway, so the name game will surely be funny.
This is very positive news, I wonder though how far will compatible mean? My biggest problem with opensuse is the lack of cockpit support and integration that RHEL has.<p>Also that they use apparmor instead of selinux as default, I wish that selinux would become the standard MAC, with really good tools (cli and gui alike) for handling selinux policies.
It is announced last year [1] called SUSE Liberty Linux . I think priciple converting current RHEL/CentOS repository to own inhouse repository like Oracle did [2] or MS did [3], and get the money from providing subscription for support and security.<p>1: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30006699">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30006699</a>
2: <a href="https://docs.oracle.com/en/solutions/migrate-centos-ora-linux/switch-oracle-linux1.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://docs.oracle.com/en/solutions/migrate-centos-ora-linu...</a>
3. <a href="https://github.com/microsoft/CBL-Mariner">https://github.com/microsoft/CBL-Mariner</a>
Honestly, this is a brilliant move. Fork RHEL and pay to keep the open source community around it alive (Rocky, Alma). It's like EEE in reverse.<p>Between this and Rancher (which is gaining a lot of popularity within the enterprise), SUSE is really stepping it up.
I knew suse used rpm packages, but I always thought they were their own... good to know they are putting in the work to distance themselves from the IBM mess.
Setting aside the implications of the move Red Hat made for a moment, can we all just appreciate what a perfect storm of terrible messaging they've settled into with this one? From what it sounds like, the announcement surprised a lot internal associates not working on RHEL that are now falling into this trap that Red Hat created.
I always assumed that SUSE was rolling their own rpms, but were they? Maybe they were somehow dependent on RH to the extent that this move now makes sense also for the rest of their business?
Name one distro apart from the EL clones that offer MAC policies for the software in the core repos. SELinux in Debian is a joke, so are the AppArmor policies.
This is just a weak PR statement. Alma and Rocky already revealed that these things are not trivial to maintain and I fail to see beyond pure fork how on earth would SUSE maintain RHEL compatibility and avoid litigation from IBM at the same time.<p>And then SUSE might be sold off again to some predatory company similar to IBM. What's even the point then of not using pure community distros like Debian?
I've always had a fondness for SuSE. My first experience with Linux was a boxed set of SuSE 7.3 (released in 2001 with Kernel 2.4!) purchased at a Borders book store in Glendale, CA. My dad taught me how to quit vim, use make to install software, etc.<p>I haven't used it since then - Debian convert thru and thru - but I keep meaning to take Tumbleweed for a spin as I hear great things about it.
I guess the unwritten part of that press release is the fact that Red Hat are taking RHEL in some sort of proprietary direction? Is anybody able to TL;DR me an explanation of what's going on?
1. If SUSE wants to preserve choice, it should offer a systemd-free distribution.<p>2. Agree with silisili's bafflement at how corporations are sticking to RHEL.