Richard Brown, chairman of the openSUSE Board, has already let know that he has been contacted by SUSE’s CEO Nils Brauckmann, that this will have absolutely no impact on the relationship etc with the openSUSE Project.
Thanks for the info, Knurpht. I was wondering about that myself. Good to hear that openSUSE won’t be impacted.
A general comment/question here.
Right now, the login to opensuse forums is really a login to microfocus.com. So I presume that will have to change at some time.
In my case, my login was originally a login to Novell. So I presume that, after this change, microfocus will still own my login data. Perhaps they will share it with the separate suse.com (as part of EQT). Or perhaps they won’t.
Some planning is probably needed for this migration.
AFAIK, due to the European Data Protection laws, Micro Focus (as a registered British company) is required to notify at least each European citizen that, the login data is being moved to EQT (a Swedish company and, therefore, also affected by European law) who, in turn, will have notify each of us that, they now have our login data …
Further to that, Micro Focus may, possibly, be required, under British commercial law, to retain our login data for a number of years …
Yes, this will definitely have it’s implications for our infra. I’m not too worried about the login feature, it’s used by SUSE as well, so something will be arranged on that side.
Re. our data: AFAIU the GDPR, MF is obliged to hand over the data, and remove them for those users that do not use their infra any longer. SUSE indeed will have to send out something to it’s users according to GDPR. My bet here is that SUSE Legal will investigate this and come up with a # of things that have to be done. I’d rather wait for some definitive reports from them than start guessing or speculating.
Since openSUSE is itself a foundation, MF could be regarded as a data processor and so openSUSE will simply be changing data processor. If MF have been smart enough to get SUSE/openSUSE registered as separate undertakings with their own data controllers, there may be no need to seek consent to the transfer as it will involve no change of data controller, only of the data processor.
My thoughts exactly. It serves no useful purpose to speculate. In due time we’ll be notified of any action needed with respect to our user accounts.
And it’s not. We’re a self-organized community project, with SUSE as our main sponsor. But we’re definitely no foundation, or any other legal entity.
Oh this is new to me, thanks for the info. Will there be any major changes in the future?
Not because of this sale.
I think this could be good for both SuSE and OpenSuSE.
Having a owner that does not have a business related to Tech give’s the company great freedom to attack all markets, with no restrictions or guide lines attached to other similar Tech oriented owner.
The disadvantage is that the new owner can have the temptation to turn a quick profit since SuSE is a Major player in the Linux world and Linux is taking over the World.
We have seen the example of RedHat being acquired by IBM … well in that case RH was already a big part of IBM IT operations.
On the other side the EQT fund manager also have a longer term vision since they are mostly retirement and Sovereign funds investments … those typically look further into the future growth revenues.
But none the less … this is great a good news.