Oh wow. SUSE family of distribution is relatively small footprint. Whole story sounds like "splitting the hair". The only reasonable explanation is that SUSE hired some self-glorified marketer from big corp. omg...
No, there are good reasons for it. A lot of people get confused between SUSE and openSUSE offerings. Often SUSE customers show up in openSUSE places, because they believe that it's a place they can get official support. And I'm sure a lot of potential customers might get confused in the same way too.
On the flip side there are also a lot of openSUSE (adjacent) users who think SUSE is (secretly or not) making openSUSE development decisions or think they can dand SUSE to do that and that.
So there are some good reasons to consider a rebranding, but also some speaking against it, like the less of recognition it might entail.
And you really think, people who are willing and able to buy enterprise support for their Linux distro get confused by the naming? Sure, there's that one confused dude, but you also have people asking Facebook where they left their keys.
OpenSuse is essentially free marketing for SUSE, nobody would know them otherwise. Why would you give that away?
Suse is not a huge company, it has neither a large enterprise backer nor any killer features, and its market share is relatively small compared to Red Hat or Canonical. Throwing away free marketing while alienating a relatively passionate community is a kind of brainrot only MBA can come up with.
And you really think, people who are willing and able to buy enterprise support for their Linux distro get confused by the naming?
No, I don't think that. I *know* that because I'm active in the community.
OpenSuse is essentially free marketing for SUSE, nobody would know them otherwise.
That is absolute nonsense. SUSE mostly serves large enterprise customers. That's an entirely different demographic from people who care about Desktop Linux or setting up a home server.
Edit:
its market share is relatively small compared to Red Hat or Canonical.
I'm pretty sure SUSE is bigger than Canonical.
Editedit: According to wikipedia SUSE's revenue is about twice as high as Canonical's
LibreSUSE 😎
Rename it to openSUS
Doesn't SUSE actively benefit from openSUSE development? I thought Tumbleweed and SLES had a similar relationship as Fedora and RHEL.
Notice that "Fedora" does not have "Redhat" its name. Maybe the request is reasonable. I don't know how many people think that thy don't need SLES, because there is openSUSE.
My comment was more about how SUSE benefits from openSUSE development (and vice-versa) and that Tumbleweed has a similar relationship to SLES as Fedora has to RHEL, as they are both upstream of their respective enterprise distributions.
Besides, people don't need SLES. Enterprises do because of the support they get. And I'd assume employees responsible for that kind of thing at such enterprises would know the difference.
And the Red Hat logo is literally a fedora hat.
If it's just a name change done well, I couldn't care less (although openSUSE is a very recognizable name and brand recognition would have to be reestablished). I just hope that this isn't the beginning of something worse.
SUSE provide a lot of the infrastructure for openSUSE and base their enterprise Linux from factory.
wow. I had a good opinion of suse up to this point. what a silly request after all these years.
Corporate backing is a two-edged sword, unfortunately.
TIL SUSE exists and wouldn't have found out if not for OpenSUSE and this news. It's kinda weird to open their website and see this:
SUSE is such a stupid name. Like, it is stupid to say in German.
Just rename it SUSGeckoOS
I don't know what's stupid to say about Gesellschaft für Software und Systementwicklung mit beschränkter Haftung
That must be annoying just after OpenSUSE went through a branding redesign process. I guess they'll have to give up the gecko logo since SUSE also uses it?
And there's more at stake than a rebranding it seems. This could signal SUSE withdrawing development support from OpenSUSE:
Let’s face it: SUSE has been more than just a namesake for openSUSE; it has actively provided resources and support far beyond what it would ordinarily need for its business operations.
This generosity has fostered a thriving openSUSE project that has excelled under SUSE’s goodwill and informal support, including contributions made by SUSE employees on company time.
However, the recent request for a branding separation has overshadowed this partnership. If openSUSE does not handle this request with the sensitivity and cooperation it demands, the project risks not just a reduction in support from SUSE but a potential shift in priorities away from it.
The “Factory first” policy, a cornerstone of the engineering synergy between SUSE and openSUSE, could also be scrutinized, emphasizing the gravity of the current situation.
This could signal SUSE withdrawing development support from OpenSUSE
i had a similar thought; feels like the centos/redhat episode we had a couple years ago.
This is a massive miss-play on Suse's part. Essentially all the good will, and recognition I have for Suse is based on OpenSuse. It's the reason many of the places I've worked at now run a Suse product instead of redhat. Seriously, when I think of OpenSuse and Suse as a whole I barely differentiate the toonunlike redhat and fedora. That's likely the reason for the switch but I cannot see how-this does anything but benefit them.
From the article too there are some concerns. Suse is, admittedly, trying to cause opensuse to change direction ans managment to further suit it's buisness at threat of removing support. This is sad to see.
The request was respectful and SUSEs support on OpenSUSE is very helping the project so I’d personally be fine with fulfilling that request
Honestly, for a good distro, the brand is not great. Perhaps this can be viewed good opportunity to go with something more unique!
Lizard Linux
Lizard Linux
Lizard Linux
OpenSUS
Since I had to deal with some representatives of SUSE corp, I can say that the whole experience was just plain horrible. Don‘t like that company at all and thus am not surprised that the name change topic is even discussed at all.
OpenSussy
Seems a pointless endeavour. The open and enterprise sides are so deeply linked, it makes sense that they share a brand.
Separating them only weakens the broader SUSE ecosystem.
Just change the name. It’s not a big deal. SUSE is a stupid name anyway.
I think it's one of those things that will become a bigger deal indirectly because of all the knock-on effects. Like the branding, they'll have to have the logos all redesigned, the domain name will have to change, it'll mess up a lot of troubleshooting when people google the old name etc.
Finally
ClosedSUSE
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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