20 something years of using Linux and I have never had the urge to even look at Suse. who's life is affected by this?
> who's life is affected by this? who is life is affected by suse
[deleted]
SUSE to go private
151–160 of 245 posts
Re: SUSE to go private
#152Is there any reason for the buyer here who already owns almost 80% of the company to offer a 67% premium for the remaining 20% of the shares? What would have happened if they offered a 30% premium or a 15% one (from what I understand, they have both simple majority and qualified majority so that means they don't really need to ask anyone for anything). It's not like they want to get 100% ownership since this is a pur…
In Finland if someone controls over 90% of the shares they have right to forcefully buy rest of the shares (and also obligation if someone wants to sell at at that point). So if they wanted to go fully own the company they need to high enough offer that they will at least hit 90%. I'm not sure if you could from public company to private without all shareholders agreeing to it as that would benefit large shareholder a…
For me in the US, it’s a strange notion that you could compel someone to buy the last 10% of the company. That does not always seem possible. What happens if you literally can’t do it? That’s probably rare, but if 90% of the company is most of your assets, and you’ve somehow borrowed against it already, it could be almost literally impossible.
Re: SUSE to go private
#153I hope that SUSE saved the staff of Rancher from the previous assholes who ran the place. God that was an absolutely awful company to work for. I'm glad they started their own stupid acorn or whatever service nobody will ever use. Rancher had a lot of incredibly intelligent people who were treated like absolute shit.
I believe the founding Rancher members left to start Acorn (https://www.acorn.io) some time ago.
Re: SUSE to go private
#154This is a good thing, for those who actually want to see SUSE evolve and reshape itself to fit the next generation of Linux distributions -- which is to have immutable base operating systems for containers to run on, combined with plenty of options for backwards compatibility to continue to accommodate the old systems. Without going private it is not clear that SUSE ALP, which is a technically brilliant idea, would hold up to market skepticism to see its completion.
Re: SUSE to go private
#155Rancher price increases over the last few years have made it prohibitive for a good number of our customers. Personally, I don't think SUSE has done much to evolve the lifecycle side of Rancher - I want a platform that updates my node operating systems when I upgrade Kubernetes (this has been in OpenShift for years and is in Tanzu). Rancher OS was silently killed off, forcing us to rebase certain customer environments, at the time RKE and Micro OS didn’t play well together, that seems to have changed somewhat but the lifecycle side is still seemingly immature. Harvester looks interesting but we haven’t found many uses-cases for hyperconverged Kube (or perhaps more accurately, appetite within enterprises). Neuvector though is pretty damn awesome. I wonder how this plays out against the Red Hat foot gun, and if it’ll allow SUSE to aggressively go out to displace RHEL (My feeling is most of the high paying enterprise customers don’t really care about what Red Hat has done).
Re: SUSE to go private
#156I think the TFA is the interesting bit.
> SUSE has committed to declare and pay an interim dividend to all shareholders [...] will be funded by SUSE through a combination of existing cash and additional borrowing [...] in the form of loans [...] to a maximum of EUR 500 million.
So EQT is asking SUSE to take its cash, borrow up to 500M EUR, pay a dividend (of which 79% goes to the PE fund). Then EQT will use (some of? All of?) that money to buy more shares. It doesn't sound like EQT is investing any new money into SUSE here.
Sounds like EQT will do well regardless of whether SUSE ends up going private. SUSE meanwhile will get another (up to) 500M of debt and lose a chunk of its cash from its balance sheet.
Hmmm... (opinions my own)
Re: SUSE to go private
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
In Finland if someone controls over 90% of the shares they have right to forcefully buy rest of the shares (and also obligation if someone wants to sell at at that point). So if they wanted to go fully own the company they need to high enough offer that they will at least hit 90%. I'm not sure if you could from public company to private without all shareholders agreeing to it as that would benefit large shareholder a…
For me in the US, it’s a strange notion that you could compel someone to buy the last 10% of the company. That does not always seem possible. What happens if you literally can’t do it? That’s probably rare, but if 90% of the company is most of your assets, and you’ve somehow borrowed against it already, it could be almost literally impossible.
Read it carefully, they have the right but not the obligation to buy the remaining stake so this is not applicable at all.
Re: SUSE to go private
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
Open Build System and OpenQA, for automated building and testing of packages. This is what gets updates to their rolling release Tumbleweed faster than Arch, but with no instability ever. I can't emphasize enough how rock solid Tumbleweed is. OBS also doubles as their own AUR equivalent - you can make your own repo and do your own builds and install from the command line, or browse and install what other people have…
I have been using Tumbleweed for a few years now, but while it seems like a stable rolling release distribution, I am not quite sure about the "rolling release" part. Each month, a new snapshot comes out, which upgrades every single package you have installed, regardless of whether there were actual upstream updates. With a full Texlive installation and just a few more suites this amount to roughly 10,000 packages an…
There are new snapshots at least once a week. While there are large updates every once in a while, those are usually due to gcc or glibc upgrades which require a rebuild of most packages -- which doesn't happen every month. If you actually have upgrades of every single package every month, you should open a bug report to figure out what is going on -- that is absolutely not normal. On my machine I usually see 10-30 packages per update, with some updates hitting ~100 packages -- anything more than that is quite rare. Large rebuilds should be uncommon, though some packages might do them more than others.
There are quite a few things I've grown to dislike about Tumbleweed after using it for the past 7-8 years, but the upgrade experience is not one of them.
Re: SUSE to go private
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
Open Build System and OpenQA, for automated building and testing of packages. This is what gets updates to their rolling release Tumbleweed faster than Arch, but with no instability ever. I can't emphasize enough how rock solid Tumbleweed is. OBS also doubles as their own AUR equivalent - you can make your own repo and do your own builds and install from the command line, or browse and install what other people have…
ooo, that auto rollback sounds really cool-- got any idea how that's done? I assume it's handled by checking for eg. a dirty-fs-flag just before the initfs boots the real system, but what if there's breakage in userspace (eg. the login manager) or in the initramfs itself?
To add to the SP, the initramfs is kept on the same filesystem as everything else by default, not on a separate partition, so the initramfs is loaded from the snapshot too. However if GRUB breaks then you won't be able to boot.
Re: SUSE to go private
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
In Finland if someone controls over 90% of the shares they have right to forcefully buy rest of the shares (and also obligation if someone wants to sell at at that point). So if they wanted to go fully own the company they need to high enough offer that they will at least hit 90%. I'm not sure if you could from public company to private without all shareholders agreeing to it as that would benefit large shareholder a…
For me in the US, it’s a strange notion that you could compel someone to buy the last 10% of the company. That does not always seem possible. What happens if you literally can’t do it? That’s probably rare, but if 90% of the company is most of your assets, and you’ve somehow borrowed against it already, it could be almost literally impossible.
In Italy you are actually compelled to do a "residual buy" if you own 90% of the company.
This is supposed to protect small investors from finding themselves owning shares they can't sell on the market anymore.
The price is set by the equivalent of the SEC.
If that fails to buy all the shares, the company must sell enough stock so that the market is again liquid enough.
I _think_ many countries have similar rules, as cursory googling shows the London stock Exchange changed their minimum free float requirement some years ago.