SUSE started around a year before RedHat, in 1992. Sure, we haven't had the same success and growth, but I would disagree that RedHat pioneered the model. I wouldn't even argue SUSE pioneered it (arguably it was Cygnus in 1989 -- though it was eventually acquired by RedHat in 2000). And even earlier you could argue that RMS pioneered it with his distribution of GNU Emacs in the early 80s (which had a description of the business model as the final chapter in the manual).
[I work at SUSE and am obviously biased, but it is a little bit annoying that people always ignore that we still exist...]
I have a SUSE Linux certification, and at two companies folks from the Linux team commented that SUSE makes them uncomfortable because they're unsure of how to pronounce the name. It's like GIF or Porsche but worse. Half of them pronounced it Suzy, like the person's name. Some pronounced it closer to Zeus with a -e at the end. Some pronounced it "Soos" like it has a silent -e. They preferred Red Hat or Ubuntu not because of technical superiority but because they were embarrassed to attempt pronouncing SUSE. It's likely the only time they heard it pronounced was from coworkers who didn't know how to pronounce it either.
All jokes aside, I think most folks would agree that SUSE's marketing really needs to be reworked very significantly.
And Linus Torvalds[1] originally pronounced it with a bit more ee and oo (almost lee-nooks) than he does now[2] (lih'-nucks).
[1] https://youtu.be/uK0xXFZtJ8Q
[2] https://youtu.be/5IfHm6R5le0
And gnu and gnome and Debian and nginx and SQL and GIF and ...
The industry is full of made-up words with non-obvious or disputed pronunciations.
People needed to be told that it's Ooboontoo and not You-ban-too (or whatever else people came up with).
Amusing the irony in this considering most people pronounce "Ubuntu" and indeed "Linux" incorrectly.
FWIW, it was the first distro I ever tried back in 1999 and I always pronounced it "Suzy" but have heard a few variants. Everyone pronounces different words differently so it doesn't really matter.
More generally, it's an example of why I think that, for US companies, "weird" names are a bad idea. People don't like to sound stupid and something as simple as a name that's difficult to pronounce, or sounds odd can limit adoption of your product.
I’ve known of SUSE for a long time, but it was never the name that stopped me from doing anything with it. I just never used a product or worked on a project where it was used, and so I was never exposed to it.
TIL, I’ve been pronouncing it wrong for probably something close to a decade.
It may have bigger market in Europe but when I heard it sets the default file system to btrfs when others are jumping off that ship, I wonder what their plan is.
P.S. Eight years at Red Hat, ending a year and a half ago. Glad not to be under IBM's inept thumb as my erstwhile colleagues soon will be.
Count me among them. I wasn't even aware that the SUSE Linux project was still a thing, let alone one backed by a business.
Marketing might not be a terrible idea at this point in time - the best product in the world won't sell if nobody knows about it.
I think the IBM acquisition is a fantastic opportunity for SUSE to start their engines here in the US. They have a fantastic value proposition: start with openSUSE Leap for free, then upgrade to a paid SUSE contract (can be done on place). This should appeal to CentOS and Fedora users who consider using RHEL, but don't because it's too hard to switch. They can also appeal to people who don't need the IBM integration but feel like they're not getting as much attention as before (priorities will likely change at RedHat). They can also appeal to developers with their rolling Tumbleweed release (which can also convert to openSUSE Leap/SUSE).
If SUSE had publicly traded stocks, I'd consider buying in right now as they have a really good opportunity over the next few years to steal customers from RedHat/IBM. They're big Linux contributors (Greg Kroah-Hartman used to work on the project), so they are _very_ attractive.
I think the pendulum is now swinging back to the pre-PC days of large corporations, centralized control of technologies where only groups with large resources can participate. However that will only be a temporary phase until the next generation of mammals are able to come up with the tools to create competition once more and the whole cycle will repeat.
The flip side is that companies that take over the operations part of the value chain and not just corporate liability are fully able to compete with closed source companies, and that kind of hosted service is where corporate open source is likely to go.
IMO they were rather in the business of being a professional scapegoat. Someone to blame when that scary open source thing goes wrong.
Maybe Red Hat and IBM aren't as different as we like to think.
Not once have I had an insurmountable problem with any Linux platform.
The same is not true with Microsoft, Oracle and IBM from experience, even with paid up top tier support. Even 60,000 employee defence companies have no real power. I've seen someone forced to throw a registry fix out to 5000 desktops (over hundreds of disparate sites) because MSFT wouldn't fix a fucking bug.
> Something goes wrong
> Blame Red Hat
> Keep your job
Sounds about right.
I can relate to this. The other sad truth is that if you do not 'out-engineer yourself', then your open source project will likely not even be able to get any users to begin with; it's extremely competitive. It took me over 5 years of work; constantly refining my project in order to reach almost 5000 stars on GitHub and 50K downloads per week. Those are pretty big numbers for a framework targeted entirely at developers but in terms of monetization, it's barely enough to cover a single salary and my project is one of the lucky ones because it's back-end and it's somewhat more opinionated.
Front end frameworks and non-opinionated back end tools (e.g. the ones that just implement existing standards/protocols) have near zero monetization opportunities. For front end frameworks, you need a huge success like Vue.js or React in order to monetize at all. It seems that Evan You from Vue.js gets enough money to cover his salary - But Vue has over 100K stars on GitHub and is one of the top 10 repos in the world. If Evan was a musician or an actor, he'd have a multi-million dollar salary for sure.
In practice, the funding often comes from those people or companies that more urgently need the improvements or those that are pushed by end users who are willing to pay a premium to avoid lock-in. There is a longer tail of users who free ride and pay nothing for improvements.
Even businesses that support open source, at any moment in the future, have strong incentives to use network effects to steer their customers into more subjugated positions and adopt proprietary non standard or non open systems, or to sell themselves to businesses that will do that.
The coagulation of tech companies in a few large players is a sign that this may be happening right now.
I wonder if there are ways to promote wider investment in open source and open standards technology that benefit more people and get us into better economic Nash equilibria.
it mentions in 2014, their Market cap was: - Microsoft: ~$300B - Amazon: ~$160B - Oracle: $160B - VMware: $40B - Red Hat: $10B
I'm not sure how true this was back in 2014, but the current market cap 4 years later for these companies is as follows:
- Microsoft: ~$833B (177% increase) - Amazon: ~$803B (400%) - Oracle: $181B (13%) - VMware: $60B (50%) - Red Hat: $30B (200%)
it's incredible to see in the same period of time just how massive both Microsoft and Amazon have been able to perform (market wise at least) and specifically the hockey stick market cap of Amazon in that time frame...
This doesn't mean there won't be other successful open-source companies. It seems like each generation of open-source projects fills a different economic need, all specific to the business landscape at the time:
In the early-mid 2000s we had open-source as a retention bonus for good engineers and PR campaign for the companies involved (Hadoop, Nutch, Protobufs, Snappy, and other Google open-source projects, Cassandra, HBase, Hive, HipHop, and other Facebook open-source projects).
We also saw open-source as a means of securing cooperation between different corporate interests (WebKit) or securing critical partnerships & goodwill by assuring the source code would be available (Chromium, Android).
Starting in the early 2010s, we saw companies releasing an open-source product and then making money off a hosted version of it (Elastic, Datastax).
Nowadays in the crypto world we see organizations releasing an open-source software system, reserving some of the currency for the development team, and profiting off the capital appreciation of the currency. (Ethereum etc.)
There is no other pure-play software company of comparable market success.
The consumer personal-computing operating system market resisted incursions by CPM, other DOS vendors, other GUI alternatives, x86 commercial unices, Linux, FreeeBSD (and others), and BeOS. Apple's share remains a scant fraction.
Likewise, the Office applications, and small-business server market remains dominated by Microsoft, especially file, print, mail, and directory services (AD).
Contenders in the software space tend to be small, heavily reliant on professional services (IBM, Oracle, Salesforce, consulting firms), specialised (Adobe, AutoDesk)<, or hardware-integrated (Apple, also Sun/Oracle and some others).
The SaaS market has impinged somewhat; Gmail, Google Docs, etc., but still only marginally.
This from someone whose watched and criticised Microsoft for decades, and strongly prefers Linux. I've not had a Microsoft desktop personally or professsionally since the mid-2000s, and even then it was under protest and largely avoided.
There might be room for another Red Hat now that Red Hat will no longer be independent. IBM may have just legitimized Red Hat as a top-tier player.
That is, of course, if IBM still has the clout and capitalization to be considered a top-tier player. 20 years ago, it would have been considered funny to say "IBM is great and all, but they're no Apple". My oh my have times changed.
Elastic and MongoDB also offer cloud hosted versions of their tech.
