Looks Like SUSE Linux is Up For Sale (Again)!

If Reuters report is to be believed, SUSE Linux is again up for sale in the market with a price tag of $6 billion.

This is about enterprise-oriented SUSE Linux. openSUSE, on the other hand, is community-managed but heavily funded by SUSE. I like to think of SUSE Linux as Red Hat and openSUSE as Fedora.

So any decision taken by SUSE Linux impacts openSUSE, more directly than indirectly. We will have to see what direction it takes if SUSE is sold again.

Notice how I am reusing the word 'again'? That's because this is not the first time SUSE Linux has been sold.

Long history of changing hands

SUSE was founded in 1992 and provided the distribution along with support and services to enterprises. In fact, it was the first company to market Linux to enterprises.

It was first purchased by Novell in 2004 for $210 millions. Novell did put a lot of effort in popularizing Linux, pitching it against Windows and Apple. They even ran ads that some veteran Linux users might remember.

It was a good run until Attachmate purchased Novell in 2011 for a hefty $2.2 billion. SUSE was part of Novell and thus Attachmate took the ownership of the project.

And then in 2014, Micro Focus acquired Attachmate for $2.35 billion and thus once again SUSE saw a new owner.

Come 2018 and a private equity group EQT bought Micro Foucs for $2.535 billions. Needless to say, SUSE was part of the deal.

Except for the first one, the rest of the deals were for the parent company, not necessarily for SUSE. However, the current report suggests that EQT is only selling SUSE this time for approximately $6 billion.

Red Hat went for $34 billions

Red Hat is often considered SUSE’s closest competitor, as both primarily focus on enterprise customers. In 2019, IBM acquired Red Hat for $34 billion, making it one of the largest software acquisitions in history. Since then, Red Hat has become a central pillar of IBM’s hybrid cloud strategy, helping drive growth in areas where IBM had been struggling to maintain momentum.

Who could buy SUSE?

We can only guess, and if it were up to me, here are a few big names that could take advantage of SUSE:

• Amazon: Although Amazon has its own Linux distros for deploying AWS internally
• IBM: It already has Red Hat in its kitty. Getting SUSE means near monopoly in enterprise Linux. But this could also be blocked by regulators.
• Oracle: Oracle has its own Oracle Linux for enterprise. With SUSE, it can expand its business.
• Broadcom: They have already gotten VMWare and thus they already have one foot in the enterprise Linux market. With SUSE, they will only consolidate their position.
• Microsoft: They have Azure but that's primarily for cloud servers. For a company like Microsoft, $6 billion is not a huge amount. They can expand their enterprise offering with SUSE.

These are all guesses. For all we know, an unknown player could enter the scene, or it might not be sold at all.

Your turn now. What do you think of SUSE being in the market again. Which company should buy it?

Source: It's FOSS