Ladies and Gents, I’ve been a SUSE user for what seems like forever, back when it was S.u.S.E.
As of late I have seen a worrying trend. I like to use SUSE everywhere. Yes I have a SLES box as well
but by and large I exclusively use OpenSUSE in desktop and server environments which I find it to
do an outstanding job. The problem as I see it are other projects that are dropping support or do not
support the OpenSUSE distro. Some examples: Processmaker and Zimbra come to mind. Processmaker
doesn’t outright NOT support OpenSUSE, it just doesn’t put many resources into ensuring it works. Zimbra
used to support SLES and by extension OpenSUSE somewhat. Zimbra has recently outright dropped SLES
support and OpenSUSE I’m sure will suffer in that regard as well. The reason given was not enough systems
deployed with that distro to warrant upkeep. The point is, the mindshare about SUSE
is on the decline or at least stagnant. If people aren’t using it in a server environment I can see why, but surely
SLES should be prominent in the ‘supported distro’ list of major open source projects and frankly it isn’t. I am worried about
the continued viability of SLES/OpenSUSE and I don’t want to have to manage RedHat/CentOS/Ubuntu as
I find them all to be proportionately more difficult to deal with and maintain. Not sure what can be done about
it other than evangelize which is what I try to do, but believe me when I tell people I use SUSE they look at
me kinda quizzically like, Why? Once I explain it, they are like, “Maybe I’ll give it a try.” but I wonder how many
do? Apparently not enough.
I’m in the corner of “Really old farts” (as in having been around since the 90s in the “SuSE-scene”) and I think the incomprehensible hatred Novell and SUSE had/have towards having a non-enterprise supported fork of SLES is really coming to bite them in the ass in the form of irrelevance outside certain select enterprises.
Not much more to say other than “I think they made a mistake and now they’re paying the price for it”, in becoming less and less popular.
On Mon 08 Jun 2015 08:26:01 PM CDT, GofBorg wrote:
Ladies and Gents, I’ve been a SUSE user for what seems like forever,
back when it was S.u.S.E.
As of late I have seen a worrying trend. I like to use SUSE everywhere.
Yes I have a SLES box as well
but by and large I exclusively use OpenSUSE in desktop and server
environments which I find it to
do an outstanding job. The problem as I see it are other projects that
are dropping support or do not
support the OpenSUSE distro. Some examples: Processmaker and Zimbra come
to mind. Processmaker
doesn’t outright NOT support OpenSUSE, it just doesn’t put many
resources into ensuring it works. Zimbra
used to support SLES and by extension OpenSUSE somewhat. Zimbra has
recently outright dropped SLES
support and OpenSUSE I’m sure will suffer in that regard as well. The
reason given was not enough systems
deployed with that distro to warrant upkeep. The point is, the mindshare
about SUSE
is on the decline or at least stagnant. If people aren’t using it in a
server environment I can see why, but surely
SLES should be prominent in the ‘supported distro’ list of major open
source projects and frankly it isn’t. I am worried about
the continued viability of SLES/OpenSUSE and I don’t want to have to
manage RedHat/CentOS/Ubuntu as
I find them all to be proportionately more difficult to deal with and
maintain. Not sure what can be done about
it other than evangelize which is what I try to do, but believe me when
I tell people I use SUSE they look at
me kinda quizzically like, Why? Once I explain it, they are like, “Maybe
I’ll give it a try.” but I wonder how many
do? Apparently not enough.
Hi
I note zimbra has also dropped Ubuntu support as well… 
https://www.zimbra.com/downloads/zimbra-collaboration-open-source
I would imagine the SLES 11 support has been ‘deprecated’ (and not
dropped) as SLES 12 is now out and maybe have not released a supported
version.
According to my contacts SUSE is alive and well, maybe just a quiet
time to give the new owners a chance to sort things out…?
–
Cheers Malcolm °¿° LFCS, SUSE Knowledge Partner (Linux Counter #276890)
SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 12 GNOME 3.10.1 Kernel 3.12.39-47-default
If you find this post helpful and are logged into the web interface,
please show your appreciation and click on the star below… Thanks!
On Mon, 08 Jun 2015 21:16:02 +0000, Miuku wrote:
> I think the incomprehensible hatred Novell and SUSE had/have towards
> having a non-enterprise supported fork of SLES is really coming to bite
> them in the ass in the form of irrelevance outside certain select
> enterprises.
What? I was with Novell when they acquired SUSE, and I never saw
anything of the sort from the company.
There was a period of not knowing what to do with it. Outright hatred,
though? Nope, not at all.
Jim
–
Jim Henderson
openSUSE Forums Administrator
Forum Use Terms & Conditions at http://tinyurl.com/openSUSE-T-C
On 2015-06-09 02:54, Jim Henderson wrote:
> On Mon, 08 Jun 2015 21:16:02 +0000, Miuku wrote:
>
>> I think the incomprehensible hatred Novell and SUSE had/have towards
>> having a non-enterprise supported fork of SLES is really coming to bite
>> them in the ass in the form of irrelevance outside certain select
>> enterprises.
>
> What? I was with Novell when they acquired SUSE, and I never saw
> anything of the sort from the company.
He refers to the fact that there is no open-SLES variant. They have been
always opposed to that idea.
Till now, the next release is kind of that. And that the are opening
SLES itself.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 13.1 x86_64 “Bottle” (Minas Tirith))
Insinuating that they’ll take legal action was just saying they thought it was a good idea I guess.
Oh well, I don’t care any more to be honest.
…and you still reproduce the openSUSE mark incorrectly! lol!
On 2015-06-08, GofBorg <GofBorg@no-mx.forums.microfocus.com> wrote:
>
> Ladies and Gents, I’ve been a SUSE user for what seems like forever,
> back when it was S.u.S.E.
> As of late I have seen a worrying trend. I like to use SUSE everywhere.
> Yes I have a SLES box as well
> but by and large I exclusively use OpenSUSE in desktop and server
> environments which I find it to
> do an outstanding job. The problem as I see it are other projects that
> are dropping support or do not
> support the OpenSUSE distro.
I think that might be overstating the problem. Sadly, my use of openSUSE has declined recently since I’ve moved onto
specialist hardware which isn’t properly utilised by any binary distribution, which has forced me into a source
distribution solution (i.e. Gentoo). However, I always have a standby openSUSE installation because there’s one thing it
has that makes it 1000% more useful than any Debian-based distribution: proper LSB compliance. For some people, that may
seem trivial but with the number of times copying LSB-based binaries from openSUSE roots into Gentoo chroots has saved
my bacon so many times, I’ve a lot to thank openSUSE for!
Here are some reasons why openSUSE is not losing relevance:
- the new Tumbleweed/Factory rolling release
- BtrFS
- the choice of desktops
- the success of openSUSE/SUSE in non-English speaking countries
- the moves from SUSE to promote it for enterprise use alongside SUSE
- the success of openSUSE as a test bed for SUSE
On Tue, 09 Jun 2015 03:14:06 +0000, Carlos E. R. wrote:
> On 2015-06-09 02:54, Jim Henderson wrote:
>> On Mon, 08 Jun 2015 21:16:02 +0000, Miuku wrote:
>>
>>> I think the incomprehensible hatred Novell and SUSE had/have towards
>>> having a non-enterprise supported fork of SLES is really coming to
>>> bite them in the ass in the form of irrelevance outside certain select
>>> enterprises.
>>
>> What? I was with Novell when they acquired SUSE, and I never saw
>> anything of the sort from the company.
>
> He refers to the fact that there is no open-SLES variant. They have been
> always opposed to that idea.
There’s nothing wrong with that. openSUSE is an upstream project to SLE.
There’s a difference between “no, we won’t release an open source version
of our commercial product” and “hate”.
Two entirely different things.
> Till now, the next release is kind of that. And that the are opening
> SLES itself.
Yes.
Jim
–
Jim Henderson
openSUSE Forums Administrator
Forum Use Terms & Conditions at http://tinyurl.com/openSUSE-T-C
On Tue, 09 Jun 2015 07:56:01 +0000, Miuku wrote:
> hendersj;2714174 Wrote:
>> What? I was with Novell when they acquired SUSE, and I never saw
>> anything of the sort from the company.
>>
>> There was a period of not knowing what to do with it. Outright hatred,
>> though? Nope, not at all.
> Insinuating that they’ll take legal action was just saying they thought
> it was a good idea I guess.
I never saw anything like that - no insinuations or anything like that.
> Oh well, I don’t care any more to be honest.
Fair enough. But it seems unreasonable to me to characterize whatever it
is you saw as “hate”. They certainly didn’t hate the upstream project
for SLE. They sponsored the project - and you don’t sponsor and give
financial support (and dev resources) to something you hate.
Jim
Jim Henderson
openSUSE Forums Administrator
Forum Use Terms & Conditions at http://tinyurl.com/openSUSE-T-C
I got it from people that I won’t name personally when I was doing inquiries about making a SLES variant that was to be unsupported by Novell and all patches were to be binary compatible. In essence I would have taken the SLES patches, strip out branding and re-distribute.
It was insinuated that if I were to do that, they would take legal recourse.
After that I stopped giving two asses about Novell.
Welcome to the world of product ownership and protection of assets.
Where I work, the use of SLE and openSUSE is on the increase.
.
That statement could imply that SUSE want to see openSUSE run alongside SLED for example? My understanding is that SUSE want to be in a better position to offer customers additional packages sourced from “openSUSE 42” repos to run on say SLED, which is not really the same thing.
Which is hilarious in its own right since vast majority of the software that they ship is actually made by others in exactly the same fashion. They take it, throw their own branding on it and presto, something worth threatening people over.
I guess it’s “open source” only if it doesn’t interfere with their business. Can’t say I wept when I saw Novell take it up the number two.
Hi
It’s the value add that the subscription covers, it’s not just the branding, infrastructure etc it’s also for taking said updates and backporting fixes where required creating a nice stable release which is the subscription model and supporting it for many years. RedHat do the same… same thing SLX do currently with openSUSE, take it brand it as an enterprise product and sell it along with support.
BTW, who (were) are Novell? I only see SUSE these days…
Indeed - and further a number of SuSE-GmbH employees are also signficant open source contributors. I believe the kernel, alsa, office libre, KDE, … are just a small number where that contribution funded by SuSE-GmbH comes from. One only has to look as far as Mandriva to read the results of a failed business model, and hence note a functioning business model is important.
Further - given this thread is about today’s relevance and not yesterdays I can’t say I see the relevance wrt weeping or not weeping about Novell.
As I already noted - where I work we are increasing our use of SLE and openSUSE.
Mandriva had exactly same business model as SUSE - they had the free version and the server version which was €.
Fact is that SLES is ridiculously expensive, especially if you want to roll it out for a sizeable number of servers - VM or otherwise. In fact it is so expensive that a volume license Windows server becomes cheaper in less than 3 years, not to mention you get lifetime updates for it.
All we wanted was something in the middle but apparently that threatens someone’s “business model” and since any criticism of SUSE seems to be “unacceptable” here, I’ll just drop this. Have fun defending them to the grave.
In fact it is so expensive that a volume license Windows server becomes cheaper in less than 3 years, not to mention you get lifetime updates for it.
I have follow the tread, I’m a old Novell user. From what I know Novell have never been dissed from old S.U.S.E.
On the other hand There is a point, small to middle companies have never been attracted of SLES(price).
My Win SBS2003 server will stop having updates 14 of June/July 2015. What? EverGreen? LTS? Not even near.
I do not agree of the expression of lifetime updates on Winserver. I have other experiences WinServ R1, R2, some are free other cost money. l
Looking forward to a common base of SLE/openSUSE.
regards