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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.
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Everything will be just tickety-boo today.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday September 17 2014, @02:05PM
My opinion is probably tainted by sites like
http://w3techs.com/technologies/details/os-suse/all/all [w3techs.com]
"SuSE is used by 0.4% of all the websites whose operating system we know."
I guess on the bright side, if 0.4% is worth $2B or so, then the 23% ubuntu has implies the sales price of ubuntu would be $115B, or even slowly dying redhat would be worth $24B at this valuation.
0.4% of the world market is so small, that even with the amplification factor of (size of germany) vs (size of world) that even in Germany even if only Germans use SUES, that would still imply practically no one uses SUSE even in Germany.
Not being in Germany I had the impression Debian pretty much owns Germany, like everywhere else.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 17 2014, @02:11PM
Not being in Germany I had the impression Debian pretty much owns Germany, like everywhere else.
Debian is developers. Debian is geeks. But in a commercial environment? If by some miracle it is not Microsoft? Good chance it is Suse.
So, this was it for me with SN. This is a showstopper. Good bye.
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(Score: 2) by zafiro17 on Wednesday September 17 2014, @02:26PM
SUSE has been my go-to distro since 2001, when I uninstalled Win98 and never looked back. I don't have any insight into SUSE's popularity, but I suspect it's not being primarily used for websurfing, so it's potentially not going to be showing up well in systems that try to guess distro's popularity by that measure. It's always been in the top 5 of Distrowatch's statistics, and it seems to be one of the "big guns" of Linux distros, so that must count for something.
My only gripe with SUSE is RPM and related tools instead of APT-GET, which is so phenomenally awesome. But other than that, it's got some tools that make things damned easy, and you can get huge amounts of configuration done - even over a SSH connection - using YaST - without touching the command line. That's useful.
I used it on a VPS server for a while before getting burned by an end-of-life that meant I couldn't get up-to-date packages. I turned to FreeBSD for my servers and have never regretted it. But on my desktop, even though I occasionally run PC-BSD and Bodhi Linux, SUSE is my first choice. Takes a while to install but it doesn't give me any hassle whatsoever with things like printers, runlevels, network settings and resettings and reconfigs, and has a huge repository of packages, plus a build service that makes it easy to get other software compiled and running on openSUSE.
Attachmate has done good things to the distro and they're poised to do some more innovation, especially around YaST, which has been an essentially underutilized resource ever since the original, German SUSE company was bought out by Novell. Novell, for their part, wasted a lot of time dicking around under Miguel deIcaza's "supervision" porting a bunch of KDE stuff to Gnome, and then back.
If you want a good KDE distro, SUSE is one of the best. And they're clearly making money off it, so good for Attachmate and good for Micro.
Dad always thought laughter was the best medicine, which I guess is why several of us died of tuberculosis - Jack Handey
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Wednesday September 17 2014, @05:04PM
I miss Corel linux... thanks Microsoft for killing it. You bastards.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. I have always been here. ---Gaaark 2.0 --
(Score: 2) by Blackmoore on Wednesday September 17 2014, @08:44PM
that is odd. but we're looking into it. afterall is it counting you- or AC in general? I have no clue. was it 25 from your IP in 24 hours?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by cykros on Wednesday September 17 2014, @10:16PM
Heh, just a timely reminder that just because we got Slashcode functioning over here doesn't mean all of the kinks are worked out, or even that the admins have had a chance to comb through everything.
Sounds like a policy the old site had, at least back when it was on Slashcode. With our userbase though, it'd definitely be nice to see the minimums inflated a bit, as chasing away reasonable traffic isn't something we should be engaged in quite yet if you ask me. Sounds like it just had to do with anti-flood measures that came up at one point or another in the old site's long and varied history.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Thexalon on Wednesday September 17 2014, @02:19PM
More to the point, that suggests the value of Linux itself as a server platform is at a minimum something like $200B. I'd actually guess that's undervalued, because of organizations like Debian that are quite clearly not for sale. That's about half the market cap of Microsoft. And it also doesn't include all the other uses of Linux, including embedded systems, Android phones, and even desktops.
A basic rule in the tech industry: Nerds beat suits, given sufficient time.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 2) by ticho on Wednesday September 17 2014, @02:50PM
Are you really judging real use by something as miniscule as web servers usage? There is more than web to computing. Suse is being deployed by the hundreds around Europe to run SAP with many terabytes large databases. SAP even has some sort of "alliance" with Suse, where they prefer them over Red Hat. All the new SAP HANA solutions run on Suse. I know, I have to support and deploy these systems, even though I would prefer Red Hat.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday September 17 2014, @03:24PM
"Are you really judging real use by something as miniscule as web servers usage?"
Yes, and making a boolean judgement based on the ratios being utterly ridiculous like being over 50 times smaller than each of the major competitors.
I agree with you completely in that the error bars are way too high to make a useful judgment of close competitors like Ubuntu vs Debian.
Based on one sig fig engineering data I wouldn't make predictions about the ranking of size of very similar compact cars, at least without a better yardstick. But the ratios here are comparing the tiniest smartcar to the largest open pit mining dump truck ever made. Actually that ratio isn't big enough. Its like comparing a barbie doll to the statue of liberty. No matter how far off your yardstick calibration, one is obviously really big and the other is obviously really small.
I don't think SAP really matters outside the very largest megacorps. Everyone other than multinational megacorps run when they hear it. Google searches give really weird results like there's only 101000 total installed SAP servers (probably many at the same site) yet 254000 "customers".
SAP is very strange in that nobody likes it but every big company sends them absolutely enormous sums of money. Its very expensive and hard to use and lowers productivity quite a bit, but its very popular. Generally companies in deep decline flock to it as a silver bullet which doesn't help with the rep.
Its a strange, but fundamentally irrelevant software company. I wouldn't read very much into it.
Its kind of the Lotus Notes of the 2010s.
I'm sure a tiny little smart car is very personally important to the person who owns/admins it, etc etc, yes yes very important that the owner commutes to work, at least to that one owner. Just don't pretend its the same size as a 150 ton open pit mining dump truck.
(Score: 1) by ticho on Thursday September 18 2014, @01:48PM
"Generally companies in deep decline flock to it as a silver bullet which doesn't help with the rep."
Well, I can tell you that SAP is being used internally by many more medium to big companies than you would think, very few of them being "in decline".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 17 2014, @03:10PM
Probably not too surprising for a distribution that focuses on the desktop.