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SUSE to go private

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Re: SUSE to go private

#181

Post by Vogtinator »

Jnr wrote: post #178
ekianjo wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even Fedora tends to update packages faster than Arch

Having used (and still using) Arch for over a decade, I can tell it is probably a good thing. Maintainers seem to know which packages bring trouble after updates and they do seem to test those more thoroughly. I have not experienced major breaking changes for desktop or other important piece of software in many years now. For example, things like Gnome always come to Arch months after it has been released upstream. B…

Somehow my experience is the other way around: Arch updates more slowly but somehow still manages to be much less stable...

Re: SUSE to go private

#183

Post by Stranger43 »

wlesieutre wrote: post #69
COGlory wrote: post #68

I am cautiously optimistic. From the article: > Both SUSE’s Management and Supervisory Boards have expressed support for the strategic opportunity presented by this delisting. They believe that it will enable SUSE to concentrate on its operational priorities and the execution of its long-term strategy without the pressure of public markets. Lets hope their incentives more strongly align with their customers, now. I a…

Don't know that I've ever been optimistic about a company being purchased by private equity. Anyone have counterexamples where that turned out well for customers? The justification sounds good, but they'd say something like that even if the plan was "squeeze money out of the company at the expense of users and customers and reputation."

The basic problem that gives private Equity firms a bad reputation is that winding down an fading company that have fundamentally stopped growing over a 3-5 year lifespan, is a pretty good way of getting a good return on investments so it happens a lot to downward sloping companies with enough of an nostalgia inducing brand to be newsworthy.

It’s not the only ways PE companies make money sometimes they do actually allow companies to thrive on the long term by letting them escape the short term thinking that some stock traders demand but those tend to fly under the radar as well it’s not as newsworthy as some beloved brand turning to dust over a 5 year time span.

EQT the company in question here bought SuSE from Novell for a song listed it on the stock market in 2021 for a pretty decent profit and is now buying back stock at about half what they sold it for in 2021, so is itself kind of an counterexample to the narrative that PE firms always destroy what they buy.

Re: SUSE to go private

#184

Post by jhoelzel »

Love it! Personally i dont think the public offering has done them any good. They are unparalleled in the kubernetes space and im expecting much more awesome things to come. (and no, i dont simply mean clicky bunty rancher)

By now i am suggesting Suse products to all my clients with the guarantee that even if i get hit with a bus and will not return, there will always(!) be someone to support their software. They are for instance the only ones actually doing this.

Cloud times are shifting again, especially with machine learning and i could not be happier about it.

The fact alone that with windows 11 a lot of orgs have a LOT of compute simply being thrown out makes for excellent dev environments and local clusters

Re: SUSE to go private

#185

Post by rurban »

unmole wrote: post #114
LanternLight83 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Snapper creates a Btrfs snapshot before any change in the root filesystem. If something breaks, you choose an older snapshot to boot from via grub.

That's why Fedora also switched to this BTRFS snapshot model last year. It's slower than ext4, but much easier to rollback.

I got burned by debian btrfs upgrades, so I'll stay with ext4 though.

Re: SUSE to go private

#186

Post by Vogtinator »

znpy wrote: post #48
jkaplowitz wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Debian is great indeed (I am a a Debian developer myself although rather inactive) - but today’s news isn’t much of a change in whether SUSE is or isn’t on any definition of the dark side. Why do I say that? Simply, as per the linked announcement itself, this takeover offer is by the current majority shareholder who already owns 79% of the company. They can already win any shareholder vote they want to win. They alre…

> If they get rid of the German entity and keep only a Luxembourg entity, that may no longer apply If that was the case, I’d bet 10$ that the german government would intervene and block that. Germany is all for free market until its their stuff in sale.

I'd bet $10.50 that they don't care. Look what happened to Kuka.

Re: SUSE to go private

#187

Post by rurban »

JimXugle wrote: post #88
treesciencebot wrote: post #81

Is 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…

My knowledge on this is limited, and US-specific, but I'd imagine the situation in Europe is similar... In the US, publicly traded companies are subject to a lot of laws that private companies aren't subject to, most notably being required to make periodic public disclosures about finances and (to a more limited extent) business plans. Making false statements on these required disclosures is a crime, even if not inte…

it looks more to me that the key feature is the wording "long term" in their announcement.

if you plan long term strategic shifts, most shareholders will bail out earlier when the quarterly publications once doesn't look too good. which hurts the whole plan.

so if you need to invest long term, it's better to get rid of those short term investors, which can bring everything down. private you don't need to publish your results, that's why most German companies prefer to stay private. they think in 6 year plans, not 1/4th year plans

Re: SUSE to go private

#188

Post by sofixa »

znpy wrote: post #48
jkaplowitz wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Debian is great indeed (I am a a Debian developer myself although rather inactive) - but today’s news isn’t much of a change in whether SUSE is or isn’t on any definition of the dark side. Why do I say that? Simply, as per the linked announcement itself, this takeover offer is by the current majority shareholder who already owns 79% of the company. They can already win any shareholder vote they want to win. They alre…

> If they get rid of the German entity and keep only a Luxembourg entity, that may no longer apply If that was the case, I’d bet 10$ that the german government would intervene and block that. Germany is all for free market until its their stuff in sale.

> If that was the case, I’d bet 10$ that the german government would intervene and block that

Has Germany done something similar before?

> Germany is all for free market until its their stuff in sale.

Isn't everyone?

Re: SUSE to go private

#189

Post by rurban »

riffic wrote: post #108

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?

Everybody who uses gcc, because Suse maintains it. KDE Plasma also, but this userbase is not that large

Re: SUSE to go private

#190

Post by rapht »

m01 wrote: post #156

I 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?…

Basically from quick math, this amounts to financing 80% of the buyback through debt and 20% through presumably cash brought by the investors listed alongside EQT in the press release. (If all non EQT shareholders accept the offer, EQT will earn c.€460m in dividend, while the full cost of buying back those same shareholders, including dividend, is c.€580m.) What we don't know is how much EQT will be diluted by those new investors in the end.
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