42
votes
SUSE announces RHEL fork and 10+ million dollar funding
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- Title
- SUSE Preserves Choice in Enterprise Linux by Forking RHEL with a $10+ Million Investment | SUSE
- Word count
- 731 words
I did not know Dirk-Peter had taken over the helm as CEO at SUSE. He has been with RedHat for quite a while (google says from 2010) in senior positions. Good for SUSE!
Question, why does this make sense for SUSE?
They already have enterprise offerings, so it's not like it's directly advantageous to their business model to take on this task.
From my perspective:
The moves SUSE seems to be making are to easily convert companies to their support structure. With the controversial moves RedHat is making SUSE is capitalizing on the chaos.
By offering a RHEL clone, they can show on paper to the decision makers, they will not have to en masse replace all their systems from RHEL to SUSE. They can continue using RHEL but with support from SUSE, and when time comes for major upgrades, they can nudge them to move over to SUSE flavored RHEL. Eventually they will offer an easy upgrade path to SUSE itself, or several major versions of SUSE down the line, they may have some way to switch between yum or zypper and seamlessly make the distro behave as SUSE or RHEL depending on some vitualenv, maybe? (ofc this is all speculation on my part).
The larger point I am making is that SUSE is making decisions that will allow them to gain a larger market share in the Enterprise Linux market, which I perceive as a good thing, more competition is better at the end of the day!
This seems like a perfectly plausible explanation, thanks !
That and SUSE's Satellite-equivalent supports multiple distros already. Its little extra work for them to have a nice migration path.
He was the head of Red Hat in Asia Pacific IIRC when I started.
I wonder if RH anticipated something like this. They really fumbled the bag here.
The plot thickens. Sounds good!
Lovely.