The Enterprise Linux war is about to start, I better get some popcorn!
this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2023
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About fifteen years ago, Microsoft felt threatened by Linux’s growing market share, and decided to team up with/outright buy patent trolls and use the new portfolio of around 230 patents to claim that the Linux distributions were infringing on Microsoft’s intellectual property and potentially sue them.
As Red Hat and other FOSS companies entrenched in their positions and geared up for a long and expensive legal fight, SuSE saw an opportunity to displace Red Hat, and threw everybody under the bus by saying something like, “Yes, Linux absolutely infringes on Microsoft patents. We will pay you for using your IP if you shield us from litigation.”
So that threw out the entire argument that Linux did not infringe on Microsoft patents because you had the second biggest Linux company saying it was true and the right thing to do was to pay Microsoft for all of their wonderful contributions. So Microsoft did this kind of mobster thing where they let SuSE pay them for “protection” from lawsuit, and then used this as precedent that the other Linux distributors weren’t playing fairly unless they also paid for patent use. And SuSE hoped that this would result in only Novell/SuSE being the legal Linux to buy in the market and everybody would run to them with open arms. Kind of a dick move.
This emboldened Microsoft, and resulted in lawsuits from Microsoft over things like, accessing the FAT filesystem from a Linux device (TomTom, at the time GPS device company) and is historically the reason that Nexus phones (which became Google Pixel phones) never came with SD card expansion (so they wouldn’t be accessing a FAT filesystem from Linux). So for the next half decade or so, Microsoft decided to just start suing everybody over patent infringement, and this is how the smartphone era was born and why it is really difficult to do things that would be obvious on a computer – smartphone designers had to invent new ways, even if obtuse, to get around patents.
In 2018 Microsoft decided that they needed Linux, and ended hostilities by giving the patent portfolio (now up to 60000+ patents) to a consortium of companies called Open Innovation or something like that, that was originally designed to share patents freely without litigation in response to Microsoft’s aggressive behavior a decade earlier.
The Enterprise Linux Cold War seems to have finally came to a boiling point
I’ve seen this before and also responded to it, note that I don’t work for or even use SUSE, openSUSE, etc.
https://lemmy.world/comment/966395
It’s good history, I don’t think it really has any bearing today though.
Novell purchased SuSE Linux AG. Novell signed the agreements, and they were very controversial at the time. Novell was much more involved in the day to day than IBM is at Red Hat, SUSE was not an independent business they were a big part of Novell (the SuSE founder left at one point because of how they ran things, he did eventually return). Novell was later purchased by Attachmate, which made SUSE an independent business unit, both were acquired by Micro Focus. It was sold to EQT Partners in 2018 and operates as an independent business today.
Novell and today’s company are not the same, they’ve gone through significant changes multiple times, which is maybe a better reason to at least put in some thought.
(The end was not very clear, but I was merely pointing out that the changes in ownership might be a reason not to go with SUSE)
Around that 15 year mark Novell was also in a lawsuit with SCO regarding ownership of Unix copyrights, their success is the primary reason that SCO disappeared. I think this was a much larger deal than the maneuvering Microsoft was doing (except when Microsoft was giving money to SCO).
So if I understand this correctly they will hard fork RHEL. So it won't be a clone going forward in the way Alma / Rocky currently are. The advantage for RHEL users in moving to this fork are that they get an enterprise distro that's well-supported by another large enterprise Linux company (SUSE) instead of RH. SUSE can probably offer them some cost advantages too to sweeten the deal. For SUSE, this is a great way to get people to move away from RH and use this or eventually one of their other distros.
Is that it? I am all for it and so should RH because this is what they wanted people to do instead of creating clones. I hope this works out for SUSE and they do even better in the future. I am going to be rooting for them.
It sounds like something like that. Oracle has also announced something similar, we could end up with a really weird situation with SUSE, Oracle, Alma, Rocky on some sort of collaborative Enterprise Linux distro base and Red Hat playing catch up or on the outside.
An interesting thing I wasn’t aware of until I saw a comment on HN: the SUSE CEO just started there in May after 18 years at Red Hat. That’s not bad experience for such an endeavor.
Edit: I hadn’t read SUSE’s actual press release close enough. They are already collaborating with CIQ/Rocky on this.
Yes! This is huge news.
Fuck Redhat!
Hahahahaha. Hahahahaha. Hahahahaha.
SUSE feels a bit more relevant nowadays. All in all, I feel this is a win for European tech.
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