Red Hat veteran will head up SUSE from May as Di Donato steps down

Out with the SAPper, in with a Hatter: Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen will take over at SUSE May 1st. Chief financial officer Andy Myers is interim CEO until the end of April. New boss van Leeuwen is an ex-Red Hatter. He joined the then-independent biz in 2004 and ended up as senior Vice President and General Manager of North America …

[gerryg]

Chameleon?

Red changing to Green?

[TVU]

"that was the good SCO. Van Leeuwen left in September 2000, just a month after Caldera acquired the company. This was a couple of years before Caldera changed its name to SCO and began its legendary sue-stravaganza in a long run of Unix-linked disputes".

There is a good account of the bad old days in Stephen Shankland's Fact and fiction in the Microsoft-SCO relationship article:

https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/fact-and-fiction-in-the-microsoft-sco-relationship/

Also, I wish Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen all the best at SUSE.

[Doctor Syntax]

"that was the good SCO"

Good it was but it still managed to price itself out of the market that could have been its own. It was doing well in the small server market but was too dear for the desktop. They did throw developers the sop of a distribution with full developer tools (which were an extra for the the normal server product) but with only a 6 month licence (although there was nothing in the software to enforce that).

By supporting them Microsoft not only spread FUD against Linux, the effort and cost of the litigation weakened SCO. Without that it might not have been as easy for MS to take over the server market.

[Anonymous Coward]

stormy waters

"he seems to have some experience of bailing out of Unixy businesses before they hit stormy waters. It's almost enough to make us worry about the Big Purple Hat."

Looking at it another way, considering some of what Red Hat has inflicted on Linux in recent history, maybe some stormy waters to stir things up a bit isn't the worst thing.