Marcel LUX III SARL (Marcel) as the largest shareholder in SUSE is planning to take the company private and delist it from the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. SUSE will be merged with an unlisted Luxembourg entity. Marcel currently owns a 79% stake in SUSE.
I wonder what would that mean for openSUSE, given that, apparently, an equity firm is making decisions on behalf of the SUSE board 😞
I know nothing about this firm and the suse board (that seems to agree with the plan) but normally is great for companies to not be listed in stock market, usually the market put much pressure in short term profit and does not care about long term sustainability.
It’s private equity. Assume it’s going to involve bending over with no lube and a lot of lawyers.
Username checks out
Choo choooo all aboard the Enshittification Express
A bit of a shame because i’ve been eyeing a few Rolling Release distros to move to.
Edit: typo
There’s really no reason not to check out OpenSUSE, if you wanted to. If it does go down the enshittification path, it’ll no doubt be forked, given how relatively popular it is.
This move isn’t anything new by the way - SUSE was only public for two years, and was a private entity prior to that. If you’re worried about enshittification, you should’ve worried about it back when it was acquired by Novell, in 2003. Everyone said SUSE was doomed, but it continued on without any issues. SUSE changed ownership thrice since then, and yet it still stands strong, even two decades after Novell’s acquisition. So I expect this move won’t change anything, at least in the short term.
That’s reassuring, never knew about OpenSUSE’s aquisition history. Thanks for the info 👌
I checked out Leap a while back and was really impressed with how well thought out everything is, especially the control panel (I think it was called Yast?)
Of course they weren’t doomed during the Novell era, when they helped MS screw over the entire Linux community, and they sold Linux licences to MS that MS would sell to their customers as security that they won’t sue them for using Linux and therefore infringing on MS’s patents.
Debian calmly sipping tea in the corner
That’s a good question, and who is the mysterious 3rd party SUSE is going to be merged with?
Debian is looking better and better everyday.
No, don’t jinx it.
Too late. Already had to deploy GitLab on it.
Nothing. The oS maintainers put safeguards in place. At worst they would need to come up with a new name because of trademarks. openSUSE is sponsored by other companies than just SUSE. That doesn’t go just away.
Hopefully nothing too drastic, but also according to the article they were only publicly traded from 2021 to now, so for most of their existence they were in private hands anyway, albeit being passed around a fair bit.
I missed the point wrt 2021. That’s somehow comforting/reassuring. Thanks.
SUSE was already private under an equity firm until 2021 (EQT). Probably fine.
From what I’ve read this Marcel LUX III SARL company is also just a holding company under EQT. So nothing major has changed there.