SUSE Linux Sold for $2.5 Billion
British software company Micro Focus International has agreed to sell SUSE Linux and its associated software business to Swedish private equity group EQT Partners for $2.535 billion.
Also at The Register, Linux Journal, MarketWatch, and Reuters.
Previously: SuSE Linux has a New Owner
HPE Wraps Up $8.8bn Micro Focus Software Dump Spin-Off
Related: SUSE Pledges Endless Love for btrfs; Says Red Hat's Dumping Irrelevant
Related Stories
El Reg reports
Attachmate, the software shop that headhunted Novell and SUSE Linux, is itself being bought out by Micro Focus International.
The mainframe and COBOL specialist is acquiring Attachmate Group from its parent company Wizard in a deal calculated at $2.3bn before costs.
[...]
Attachmate gives MicroFocus access to SUSE and Novell, business units bought by the company in 2010 for $2.2bn. Novell owned SUSE Linux, which it had bought in 2003 for $210m. Under Attachmate, the two were broken apart.
putting 882 patents in its Linux portfolio up for sale to a consortium backed by Microsoft.
SUSE is chief steward of the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server while Novell has been re-shaped to sell end-point management and collaboration software.
Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard
SUSE has decided to let the world know it has no plans to step away from the btrfs filesystem, and plans to make it even better.
The company's public display of affection comes after Red Hat decided not to fully support the filesystem in its own Linux.
Losing a place in one of the big three Linux distros isn't a good look for any package even if, as was the case with this decision, Red Hat was never a big contributor or fan of btrfs.
[Matthias G. Eckermann] also hinted at some future directions for the filesystem. "We just start to see the opportunities from subvolume quotas when managing Quality of Service on the storage level" he writes, adding "Compression (already there) combined with Encryption (future) makes btrfs an interesting choice for embedded systems and IoT, as may the full use of send-receive for managing system patches and updates to (Linux based) 'firmware'." ®
Mmmmmm... butter-fs
Source: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/08/25/suse_btrfs_defence/
Submitted via IRC for Bytram
HPE says it has closed the $8.8bn deal to spin off much of its software business with Micro Focus.
The enterprise giant said that the deal – which sees HPE merge the unwanted portion of its software operation with the UK-based Micro Focus to create what analysts estimate to be the seventh-largest software vendor in the world – had been finalized.
"With the completion of this transaction, HPE has achieved a major milestone in becoming a stronger, more focused company, purpose-built to compete and win in today's market," said HPE CEO Meg Whitman.
"And, this transaction will deliver approximately $8.8bn to HPE and its stockholders."
First announced in September 2016, the reverse-takeover agreement sees HPE selling off its IT management, big data, and security lines to Micro Focus, which will try to make the products more successful than they were under the former HP Inc.
Source: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/09/01/hpe_8bn_micro_focus_software_spinoff/
(Score: 4, Funny) by DannyB on Monday July 02 2018, @05:43PM (2 children)
I remember back in 1999 when a box of SuSE Linux was only $75.
The anti vax hysteria didn't stop, it just died down.
(Score: 2) by WizardFusion on Monday July 02 2018, @06:34PM (1 child)
Well it is on sale, down from $8.8bn
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday July 02 2018, @07:08PM
I still have the version 5.2 box on my shelf from 1999.
The anti vax hysteria didn't stop, it just died down.
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Monday July 02 2018, @06:12PM (3 children)
At least it wasn't Microsoft.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 02 2018, @06:31PM
Swedes, even bigger traitors
(Score: 4, Interesting) by pendorbound on Monday July 02 2018, @06:44PM (1 child)
As the unfortunate user of two software packages purchased by Micro Focus in the past few years, I would have preferred Microsoft.
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Monday July 02 2018, @07:40PM
Oh, true ... I generally consider something dead if it's bought by them Same for Computer Associates.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by frojack on Monday July 02 2018, @06:41PM (17 children)
MicroFocus, and Novel and Attachmate, before them, have been systematically destroying the brand.
They treat it as an old pair of shoes purchased in a garage sale along with pots, pans, and used furniture.
Novel forced it into an unholy alliance with Microsoft.
Microfocus hasn't a single clue what to do with it.
Suse was one of the premier paid and free distros, for a long long time. You could buy servers with SLES from Dell. They were cost competitive with RedHat, and easily cheaper than Microsoft.
I've bought their boxed sets, paid for multiple license subscriptions for their Suse Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) versions and used Opensuse for decades.
I was fine with the knowledge that Opensuse was somewhat a test bed for SLES. You got the new toys sooner. Used to be you could email Hubert Mantel and get a polite reply, even though it wasn't the best use of his time.
But they've lost their way, and their quality has been sliding down hill for the last several releases. The Opensuse "board" is about as anti-user as any I've seen, berating people on their mailing lists, threatening to shut down the mailing lists if people don't agree with them, all while insisting Opensuse is a "community distro". They can no longer win Municipal contracts in their native Germany. They are releasing their flagship products with obsolete (EOL) and deprecated kernels that can't handle modern hardware.
They do have some amazing validation and testing infrastructure (much of which is used by many other distros).
Hopefully this group of owners can shed the Opensuse board entirely, break the SLES product out of its hide-bound ways of built in obsolescence, and stop wasting the bulk of their developer talent chasing BTRFS, (which Joe User doesn't need and can't afford, and Corporate User can't trust.)
I'd like to see them revived. In the meantime, my daily driver on several workstations is Manjaro with SLES still running on the servers.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 02 2018, @06:46PM (3 children)
I once tried Suse, starting from their damn slow Yawn package manager, that experience sucked so much, that never again.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by shrewdsheep on Monday July 02 2018, @08:34PM (1 child)
These days are gone and package management is just fine by now, but your experience indeed represents many of similar kind. Opensuse has produced too many unstable distros in the recent past (11.x/12.x/42.0) blatantly ignorant of any kind of usability, this was pointed out by GP (13.x was very good, BTW). A logical consequence would be to replace the Opensuse board but that seems to be factually impossible, watch a conference video on the opensuse youtube channel. I am still with Opensuse due to my understanding of the distribution but I am otherwise unwilling to contribute due to these endless hours I needed to spend on getting a usable system.
That being said, you can get a stable system if you install Leap (the non-rolling distribution) for which you have to manually upgrade several components (kernel, depending on hardware, perl using perlbrew). This is due to one of the recent mistakes to unify Leap and SLES on a common base. It was sold as a benefit to the opensuse user for being "enterprise", however, it only means outdated packages in practice and only makes it easier for SLES to pull more current releases.
What are the strong points? You can very efficiently post own packages and make them available for install (OBS), the updates for Leap have become very reliable, and package management works very well. For example, when 42.0 was announced I did an upgrade very shortly after release as the 13.x had extremely smooth upgrades. I was shocked by what was done to the distribution and I could downgrade to 13.3 from a 42.0 system with a completely reliable system thereafter. I later upgraded from 13.3 to 42.1 which worked fine. 42.2, 42.3 were fine, I have not dared to touch 15.0 just yet.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Monday July 02 2018, @09:28PM
Ditto about the package management. Yast and Zypper are the best I've seen for power and options.
I in-place-updated from 13.2 directly to Leap 15.0, (not wipe and re-install) and it worked perfectly.
I did have some clean up after the fact, mostly deleting packages that had been dropped over the intervening releases.
But still, package management isn't fast. Never has been. I'm spoiled by Manjaro: Into and out of package management in seconds, just to check out some tidbit of information. I avoid that like the plague with Opensuse, because getting into Yast, twiddeling thumbs while waiting for it to update every repository, I've forgotten why I went in there in the first place.
Zypper (command line package management) has more options than Carter has Pills, none of them particularly obvious, keeps me using Yast.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by eravnrekaree on Monday July 02 2018, @10:44PM
You can use zypper for upgrades/ package install which is actually faster in my opinion than the apt-get. Try zypper, its great.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday July 02 2018, @06:53PM (7 children)
https://manjaro.org/ [manjaro.org]
"User friendly Arch" - how similar is this to "military intelligence"?
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 3, Insightful) by frojack on Monday July 02 2018, @07:05PM (1 child)
You found the link, why not try it (in a VM perhaps) and see for yourself rather than posting cheapshots?
Either the KDE or XFCE versions make a good first installs. They have a Gnome version too, but the world does not need yet another gnome.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday July 02 2018, @10:39PM
So, leaving the world of cheapshots for a serious question: How's KDE with 4K displays these days?
Back when all my displays were 1920x1080, I used KDE as my daily driver and also as a product development target, and recommended it to the few people who asked... Then around 2014 I got a 4K laptop and I really couldn't deal with all the micro-fonts that showed up by default in Kubuntu 14.04... sure, it was fixable, everything is fixable, I just don't have the patience when other solutions work better out of the box.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 3, Informative) by Azuma Hazuki on Monday July 02 2018, @09:43PM
To paraphrase a bit, Arch *is* user-friendly, it's just really demanding about who it makes friends with and what it expects from said friends.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday July 03 2018, @01:54AM (2 children)
Arch is not user-unfreindly. Arch simply presumes that you know what you are doing, and know how to do it. And, Arch does provide a lot of cool documentation for those times when you knowledge falls short.
I'm not using Arch, primarily because the installers barfed on my SuperMicro build. I was in a hurry to get it running, and didn't want to spend the time required to figure things out. But, I was happy with Arch on my previous build. Maybe if I had chosen a different Arch installation media, it would have worked better.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 03 2018, @03:04AM
you must follow the installation procedure on the wiki... if you did not chroot into your new system your doing it wrong
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday July 03 2018, @12:49PM
We have different definitions of user-unfriendly.
When I want a widget to do something for me, the number (and difficulty) of actions required to make the widget do the thing is inversely proportional to its user friendliness.
Requiring a certain amount of knowledge for efficiently accomplishing certain tasks could be acceptable, and make something "user friendly for knowledgeable users." When common tasks (like configuration of the OS to a desired state) require 10x or more the amount of time and effort, regardless of knowledge level, that falls short of what I would call user friendly.
OSs like Cent and Ubuntu are more or less: burn a USB, boot from that USB, accept all defaults, usable on 99% of common hardware. It doesn't take too many required configuration steps and trips to the cool documentation to make something 10x harder to use than that.
Windows has actually fallen behind Cent and Ubuntu when it comes to installer friendliness, they're dependent on vendors pre-installing to achieve their "good out of the box" experience.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by cubancigar11 on Tuesday July 03 2018, @06:55AM
Manjaro is very user friendly if you want KDE. It is IMHO more user friendly that Kubuntu. If you like GNOME then go with Ubuntu.
Manjaro by default uses a wrapper over pacman [archlinux.fr] and also comes with UI for it (that I never use, but it works).
Really, imagine Kbuntu, then imagine it was as first class citizen of canonical-land as Ubuntu. That's Manjaro.
Just a happy user. All I had to do was forget about leaving systemd.
(Score: 2) by eravnrekaree on Monday July 02 2018, @10:42PM (3 children)
Your flat out wrong about btrfs. This is something that has appeal to common desktop users. You can easily add new hard drives to expand storage transparently and have the storage space integrated into the filesystem. COW snapshot features allow for a rollback of an upgrade (heaven forbid its necessary), making it easier to use for common users because this can be an easy way to reverse a problem, at least until a fix is made. btrfs is the best way forward and is a good investment in the distro and making it better for everyone. Its not just for servers, the features are invaluable for common desktop users. There are many features of btrfs that make it better for servers that also make it better for desktops, like improved reliability due to the COW architecture and improved performance. COW reliability, block checksums etc are even more necessary on a desktop system where they may not have a deluxe UPS. It is true that for most features, what improves things on a server also improves things on the desktop.
btrfs is mostly a stable filesystem anyway and the investments are being made by multiple companies.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday July 03 2018, @01:57AM
How big do you think a box need be? I already have apt-get with supercow powers. There isn't room for another cow in there.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 2) by cubancigar11 on Tuesday July 03 2018, @07:02AM (1 child)
I like the promises of btrfs, but damn is that unstable. I have data on a ssd formatted with btrfs as early as 6 months ago.
(Score: 2) by cubancigar11 on Tuesday July 03 2018, @07:03AM
I have LOST data on a ssd formatted with btrfs as early as 6 months ago.
Let me get a cup of coffee, please.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 03 2018, @12:25PM
Well, openSUSE board is *elected*, so you can vote who wins. Except maybe Richard Brown but then you can't win it all?
As for the new owners, they are investors, not managers that will come in and take over. They want to make money, not micromanage. Owners will not be making changes.
(Score: 2) by eravnrekaree on Monday July 02 2018, @08:32PM (2 children)
SuSE is a very innovative distribution with many strong points, such as the rolling release. The use of btrfs is a very smart decison, btrfs offers many advantages such as COW, the means to do filesystem level snapshots and the ability to add physical volumes. SuSE needs to continue its commitment to btrfs as this is a forward looking advanced filesystem.
In a one area, SuSE has fallen behind, it needs to implement for instance unprivileged LXC. The package selection is not as broad as other distros but this can be solved by installing Ubuntu userland in an LXC. The implementation of unprivileged LXC and the continued work to improve btrfs (encryption, getting Raid 5/6 right) are areas of work going forward I think. It would be nice to see work on allowing LXC to be used with brtfs based overlay filesystems (snapshots etc) as an alternative to overlayfs and making this utilize memory deduplication (different containers which are based off btrfs overlays over the same base filesystem can have shared libraries from the base filesystem automatically share memory between containers) which can be a less resource intensive solution than full virtualization, allowing many more containers to be created.
Many landmarks of the SuSE distribution such as the excellent YaST tool which makes system administration easier are good reasons to choose the distribution and should continue to be maintained.
Hopefully we will see SuSE become even more powerful and great for both servers and desktops alike.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Monday July 02 2018, @09:51PM (1 child)
Suse is late to the game of rolling releases, and quite frankly, not very good at it yet. They used to require periodic re-installs, they may have fixed that by now.
As for BTRfs, abandon all hope of space management if you go that route. You suddenly find yourself out of space and not a clue where it all went. Deleting things can actually take up MORE room.
I've lost data with btrfs corruption on three different occasions and had to restore from backups.
The rollback feature is buggy, a proper FSCK is a 13 step procedure [nabble.com].
BTRFS literally has nothing you need that wasn't already provided by LVM and more mature file systems. Its not faster, its not more reliable, and COW is a performance nightmare with large data structures like ISO images, its harder to manage, subvolumes are not actually limit-able as to size, and until recently it wasn't recommended for SSDs. Its the systemd of file systems and every other distro has walked away from it.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by eravnrekaree on Tuesday July 03 2018, @01:45AM
There was a problem with RAID 5/6. It was mentioned in the documentation you should not use the feature, yet. But it is being fixed. The problems will be ironed out. The basic concept of btrfs is sound, its similar to ZFS. In fact, if the ZFS license werent a big problem, its a great filesystem.
You do mention problems with btrfs. The basic concept of the filesystem is sound, but yes, the problems you mention do need to be fixed.
Intrinsically based on the technical merits rather than the implementation problems, I have a hard time seeing how XFS running over device mapper is intrinsically better than filesystem layer physical volume additions, snapshots, etc. When you want to add more space to the existing filesystem, you have to do a resize with some filesystems, some older filesystems are not designed for an efficient online resize operation, and may not even have a concept of a resize.
The functionality targeted by btrfs is not be hard to implement , its been done in other filesystems. So, it really should be a feasible thing to do.
(Score: 1) by AlwaysNever on Monday July 02 2018, @09:06PM (5 children)
Does it have SystemD? Honest question.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 02 2018, @09:18PM (1 child)
It's not listed here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Linux_distributions_without_systemd [wikipedia.org] so that suggests it does.
(Score: 3, Troll) by frojack on Monday July 02 2018, @10:05PM
It has systemd, and their systemd (like everybody elses) works perfectly and is easier to maintain and use than their old init system, and is fully opensource, easily mastered. Suse's standard set of systemd services, timers, and such are pretty standard. Its logging is better than the old rats nest of logs.
Adopting systemd actually cured many of Suse's problems. They suffered from the German Computing Disease" If one level of indirection was good, two, three, or five levels must be better.
Previously they had parameters hidden deeper and deeper in rats nests of config files for scripting structures stacked 5 layers deep. Way worse than other distros. Systemd pretty much banished much of that and saved Suse from themselves.
I'm still not happy with what systemd did to /etc/mtab but that's the only significant bitch I have.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by requerdanos on Monday July 02 2018, @10:55PM
Frojack says it does, and not only that, but that systemd made it less bad, not more bad, so that's two strikes against it right there if you are not in love with systemd.
That, plus that fact that it was sold to "something something equity group something partners" (goal "self-monetize, synergizing core competencies to maximize investor advantage in market-oriented segmentation buzzword bingo") and not a firm leading in technology or operating systems (goal: don't suck) should give you the basic overview of where things are headed.
As for the system itself, hey, why not try it? Could be fun while it lasts.
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by eravnrekaree on Tuesday July 03 2018, @04:31AM (1 child)
systemd, not SystemD. All of the major distros have it. Its nothing really unusual as Ubuntu had upstart for many years. systemd has allowed standardization between the distros and avoiding duplication of effort. You can use system v init scripts on systemd, so it does not take away any functionality from you.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 03 2018, @09:49AM
"All of the major distros have it."
Everyone does it, so it must be good? That argument doesn't really pass here -- this site's very existence is rooted in rebellion against that concept, as someone with sucha a low UID should know :)