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Melissa Di Donato Appointed CEO of SUSE

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Re: Melissa Di Donato Appointed CEO of SUSE

#21

Post by jankotek »

ggm wrote: post #11

I came late to linux in heavy use, being a BSD person of old. Commercialized BSD exists but the foundation(s) behind the major flavours are clearly NFP models. So as a late linux adopter, in Debian, I am wondering why people see value in SUSE and RedHat since all my experience has been the SLA value is .. dreck. No problem we had with a RH kernel or OS behaviour was fixed inside our $SLA$ in the EL release we had. Al…

From top of my head:

- Redhat and Suse have LONG binary compatibility, like 20 years. Debian has 3 or 5 years?

- If something goes wrong, you can sue and get something. Debian has no money.

- Redhat and Suse actually develops linux kernel, underlying filesystems etc... Very important if you have weird concurrent database issue on large cluster.

- Debian is political and has no commercial predictability. For example there is very small chance it may decide to abandon systemd and move to something else.

- Commercial certification; you wont get SAP R/3 or Oracle support contract for Debian, even if would manage to install it.

Re: Melissa Di Donato Appointed CEO of SUSE

#22

Post by mugsie »

ggm wrote: post #11

I came late to linux in heavy use, being a BSD person of old. Commercialized BSD exists but the foundation(s) behind the major flavours are clearly NFP models. So as a late linux adopter, in Debian, I am wondering why people see value in SUSE and RedHat since all my experience has been the SLA value is .. dreck. No problem we had with a RH kernel or OS behaviour was fixed inside our $SLA$ in the EL release we had. Al…

These sort of decisions are made at a level where they want "support".

A C(I|T)O wants someone that they feel that they can shout at if something goes wrong.

For you, with 20 nodes managed by yourself or a smaller team, CentOS / openSUSE / Debian / Fedora / Ubuntu all work.

(They also work for much larger situations, but RedHat / SUSE will sell execs on "fleet management tools" and "integrated installers" "SSO" and access to the devs that wrote the software running on top, and extract a fee. Most companies would be better employing a few highly skilled people, but that comes out of a different budget)

Re: Melissa Di Donato Appointed CEO of SUSE

#24

Post by codegeek »

My first introduction to self installable Linux OS was with SUSE Linux. I still remember my summer break of 2001 when I spent most of the time installing and configuring SUSE Linux on my laptop. At the time, finding certain drives/applications to run few things were really hard compared to Windows but man that was fun. I remember being able to install sound driver and do some cool things. Nowadays, everything is pre-packaged and no fun :)

Re: Melissa Di Donato Appointed CEO of SUSE

#25

Post by mugsie »

jankotek wrote: post #21
ggm wrote: post #11

I came late to linux in heavy use, being a BSD person of old. Commercialized BSD exists but the foundation(s) behind the major flavours are clearly NFP models. So as a late linux adopter, in Debian, I am wondering why people see value in SUSE and RedHat since all my experience has been the SLA value is .. dreck. No problem we had with a RH kernel or OS behaviour was fixed inside our $SLA$ in the EL release we had. Al…

From top of my head: - Redhat and Suse have LONG binary compatibility, like 20 years. Debian has 3 or 5 years? - If something goes wrong, you can sue and get something. Debian has no money. - Redhat and Suse actually develops linux kernel, underlying filesystems etc... Very important if you have weird concurrent database issue on large cluster. - Debian is political and has no commercial predictability. For example t…

> - Redhat and Suse actually develops linux kernel, underlying filesystems etc... Very important if you have weird concurrent database issue on large cluster.

That is what they sell you alright, but actually getting access to these devs, unless you are a massive customer (and even then it can be difficult) you will never see anything more than a bug report, which might actually get more traction in an upstream bug tracker

Re: Melissa Di Donato Appointed CEO of SUSE

#26

Post by rootforce »

ggm wrote: post #11

I came late to linux in heavy use, being a BSD person of old. Commercialized BSD exists but the foundation(s) behind the major flavours are clearly NFP models. So as a late linux adopter, in Debian, I am wondering why people see value in SUSE and RedHat since all my experience has been the SLA value is .. dreck. No problem we had with a RH kernel or OS behaviour was fixed inside our $SLA$ in the EL release we had. Al…

One of the things companies like SUSE and RH provide is testing across a variety of expensive storage and compute platforms. It turns out that continuous integration testing is just getting started in kernel land. Major Hayden had a cool presentation at TXLF 19 about it.

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1T0JaRA0wtDU0aTWTyASw...

Re: Melissa Di Donato Appointed CEO of SUSE

#27

Post by alxlaz »

ggm wrote: post #18
mitchty wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know people that work at SuSE, in a nutshell, they are like Redhat in that they don't really provide linux only, they provide ways of integrating it into your business. That is where Debian just isn't going to compete. And that is why SuSE exists, they're selling much more than linux.

That integration can be super-useful. If you "get" SAP or "get" salesforce or whatever, having a vendor who can talk vertically integrated helps. But right now, I think we're all staring at alpine in kubernetes asking if the old giant unix model is the one we want.

> But right now, I think we're all staring at alpine in kubernetes asking if the old giant unix model is the one we want.

I think "all" is a bit of an exaggeration though :). Besides, something is hosting all those Alpine containers, and while I'm pretty far removed from this field, I hear it's not Alpine most of the time.

Re: Melissa Di Donato Appointed CEO of SUSE

#28

Post by tempodox »

craigsmansion wrote: post #2

From the end of the press release: ``About SUSE SUSE, the world’s largest independent open source company'' "Wait, isn't RedHat the lar... oooh, someone at SuSE marketing is on the ball."

Te operative word being independent. RH may be bigger, but it's not independent any more.
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