SUSE's sovereignty pitch meets an inconvenient $6 billion question

European-based SUSE devoted much of the annual SUSECON event to its sovereignty-focused pitch - even as reports swirl that its majority stakeholder is exploring a $6 billion sale which could land the Linux vendor in American hands. In March, Swedish private equity biz EQT – which spun out SUSE from US group Micro Focus in 2018 …

[ICL1900-G3]

Trump

Jesus, that man's an arse. The damage he's done to the world is appalling.

[Kurgan]

Re: Trump

Putin is very happy about it.

[nobody who matters]

Re: Trump

The long term repercussions are likely to last long after DJT has gone.

[dmesg]

Re: Trump

It is reported that Trump has a very low regard for history.

History will return the favor.

[wolfetone]

Re: Trump

There is no doubt that he's a cancer in the world. But I think there are positives to what he's done as well, in so much that the world has woken up to the dangers of blind trust in America and that the alternatives available to everyone outside of the country are more viable now than any point in the past.

So for that, Senior Tango Twat, you've done bigly good.

[SVD_NL]

Re: Trump

Exactly! Because of Trump my countries' politicians have finally woken up to the fact that it's a pretty good idea to have a proper military, and not put our government IT at the mercy of a foreign power.

Those two things (among others) have been major annoyances of mine for a while now, so I'd like to thank the Dorito in Chief for addressing those issues.

[MortyCapp]

Re: Trump

Totally, France always believed that and acted accordingly. 1966 kicked the US out of France. Then worked inside the EC and then EU to shape it to its benefit.

[Jamie Jones]

Re: Trump

Not just America, but oil. His Iran war has been great for the green energy movement! EV sales were up 50%, yet due to Trump cancelling Green investment, most of those sales have gone to China.

Trump pushes people away from fossil fuels and away from America. The fact his presidency is just a way to launder his personal fortune means he's completely treating America like one of his casinos.

[alain williams]

What effect on the future share price ?

If it were to become subject to the cloud act - would that make it less attractive to those in Europe who are worried about digital sovereignty ?

[Kurgan]

Re: What effect on the future share price ?

Yes. It will be just like any other tech offer, so there will be absolutely no push to move away from the current (MS, AWS, Google) to Suse.

[druck]

Pan-nationalisation

Never thought I'd say this, but SUSE need to get bought by the EU to keep themselves out of US hands.

Then hopefully the EU can have a standard open source operating system, they can mandate member states use.

[Enric Martinez]

Re: Pan-nationalisation

You mean by the EU or by an EU-based company?

I would see the benefits of something like an EU-curated distro, just like the French are doing with their police distro. I don't know why governmental distros are not a thing. And it wouldn't exclude private companies from providing the support, etc At the end of the day, no matter if they use Windows even for their toasters, but the servers and cloud infra will have to run Linux anyway, usually RHEL.

[doublelayer]

Re: Pan-nationalisation

"I don't know why governmental distros are not a thing."

Because most of the work required to run a distro isn't different for a government, so why should they, and if they change it too much, it's not useful for anyone else so they end up with the maintenance burden alone. What you'd end up with is either something almost the same as another distro or something so different that it gets out of date. The more users a distro has, the more people the cost of maintenance is spread between, and there's usually nothing secret in them so that sharing works fine between governments, businesses, individuals, and other organizations.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Pan-nationalisation

I don't know why governmental distros are not a thing.

Why would anyone in their right mind trust a government-supplied OS, from any government?

[Lee D]

Re: Pan-nationalisation

Because you can see the code.

Trust. But also verify.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Pan-nationalisation

And compile the whole thing from source yourself, otherwise you haven't truly verified it. Not really my idea of fun.

[Lee D]

Re: Pan-nationalisation

It doesn't have to be yourself personally, now, does it?

[heyrick]

Re: Pan-nationalisation

"I don't know why governmental distros are not a thing."

Overreach. The government can always justify shit that nobody actually wants (look at the UKs double whammy of the Online Safety nonsense and their repeated pushing of digital ID despite not only an appalling record of IT competence, but also now the PM himself has questions to answer regarding the appointment of a friend-of-Epstein into a position of authority).

Anybody that trusts a government disto is naive. Stuff will be added, privacy busting stuff, because it can be added. And should it ever get noticed, somebody unimportant will be sacked, lessons will be learned, and some slightly less obvious stuff will be added.

Plus, having an official government distro opens the door for finding excuses to disallow any of the others - after all a good citizen would not need the creations of a foreign agitator, right?

Having the EU adopt it in an open manner to keep it away from American hands is about as close as any rational person would want to go to officialdom handling the thing.

[Tron]

Re: Pan-nationalisation

they can mandate member states use.

So you want the EU to ban their citizens from using Windows, Mac OS, iOS, Android and other versions of Linux? That's more restrictive than the CCP.

We need to re-learn the value of getting on with each other and relying on each other, because building walls around our tribes will kill our economies and increase shortages and famines. When that happens, govts will cover it up by scapegoating foreigners and bombing them. You won't enjoy the inevitable wars as much as you might think. Especially if you live in a country whose Govt. can't even run a working pension system for their own staff. Nationalism always leads to war. It always has done and it will in the future, because most people are thick as poop, easily led and never learn from the past.

[Jamie Jones]

Re: Pan-nationalisation

Sure, those are great values to strive for, but it doesn't matter if your aggressor doesn't care about them.

Although its "only" 25% that now support the orange turd, that's still about 90 million. The best government ever could replace the current administration, but it's going to take generations before America will be trusted again, because there's nothing stopping it happening again in another 4 years.

And once the dollar is no longer the default world currency, things will only get worse.

https://indypendent.org/2026/03/end-of-the-american-empire/

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Pan-nationalisation

Micro Focus was a British company - with dual listings - until acquired by Opentext in 2023.

[Cliffwilliams44]

Re: Pan-nationalisation

Great idea, comrade!

[williamyf]

FOSS in general, and Linux distros in particular are collaborartive efforts. Much of the foundational blocks are VERY STRONGLY tied to entities and people in the USoA.

Having said that, Suse is in a strrong position compared to other entities.

First because they are the clear #2 in many important categories. (i.e. they have critical mass)

And second, because they make their own stack from the basic building blocks, unlike other companies that depend on other "base distros" based in the USoA.

For example, anything "European" based on RHEL/Fedora or on Debian (say Ubuntu, Mint or Zorin) suffers from this.

In other tack, too bad Suse scraped their OpenStack offerings a while ago.

[heyrick]

International collaboration != Owned by a company based in one country (known to be hostile to the idea of data sovereignty and/or privacy).

[williamyf]

Until the gov in which the main developers reside, where the foundation/non-profit under wich the project operates, and the main companies that back the project (either with money or developers) have their HQs starts harassing said companies, foundations and developers to throw a spanner in the gears of said project, or to nudge them to move said project in a certain direction...

[Taliesinawen]

Microsoft interoperability and collaboration Covenant

Covenant to Downstream Recipients: “Microsoft, on behalf of itself and its Subsidiaries, hereby covenants not to sue Downstream Recipients of Novell and its Subsidiaries for infringement under Necessary Claims of Microsoft on account of such Downstream Recipients’ use of Moonlight [SuSE) Implementations to the extent originally provided by Novell during the Term and, if applicable, the Extension or Post-Extension Period, but only to the extent such Moonlight Implementations are used to provide Plug-In Functionality. The foregoing covenants shall survive termination of the Agreement, but only as to specific copies of such Moonlight Implementations distributed during the Term, and if applicable, the Extension or Post-Extension Period.”

[Anonymous Coward]

Mixing Two Different Problems....And Calling Them The Same!

A CIO of company X in country Y has two data centres, each in country Y.

One data centre is the main resource, and the second one is a backup (disaster recovery and the like).

IT SURELY DOES NOT MATTER if the organisation used open source, SAP, ORACLE or IBM software..............

......the whole software stack is under the control of company X in country Y.

The problem people are talking about is "THE CLOUD"......you know.....Amazon, Microsoft, IBM and so on.

"Digital sovereignty" is when THE CLOUD is controlled in the USA.....but my hypothetical CIO does not have that problem....

.........irrespective of where the software stack came from!

[david 12]

On the other hand...

Having European ownership does weaken SUSE's American Sovereignty credentials. European corporations can be (and have been) compelled to hand over customer data held on servers located anywhere in the world to their German, French, and English governments.

Possibly, an American Investor considering putting $6B into SUSE might value American Sovereignty more than European Sovereignty.

[OhForF']

>Europe is relatively well-positioned in software<

Considering almost all bigger companies in Europe depend on services like O365, Teams, AWS, Entra, CloudFlare "relatively" is doing some heavy lifting in that statement.

[MortyCapp]

US owners means US company

They can spin it any which way they want, but if the majority shareholders are US, the company is US.

Being HQ'ed in the EU is a technicality that marketing and corporate comms will want to write about, but it fools no one and will not be accepted in restricted bid.

[Cliffwilliams44]

Soverignty my ass!

You fear the US all the while your nations descend onto Fascist states!

You are all too demoralized to even realize it's happening!

[Col_Panek]

You missed your chance

... to run the headline "Microsoft acquires SUSE", thirty days ago.