Marcel LUX III SARL (Marcel) as the largest shareholder in SUSE is planning to take the company private and delist it from the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. SUSE will be merged with an unlisted Luxembourg entity. Marcel currently owns a 79% stake in SUSE.
I wonder what would that mean for openSUSE, given that, apparently, an equity firm is making decisions on behalf of the SUSE board 😞
It’s private equity. Assume it’s going to involve bending over with no lube and a lot of lawyers.
Choo choooo all aboard the Enshittification Express
A bit of a shame because i’ve been eyeing a few Rolling Release distros to move to.
Edit: typo
There’s really no reason not to check out OpenSUSE, if you wanted to. If it does go down the enshittification path, it’ll no doubt be forked, given how relatively popular it is.
This move isn’t anything new by the way - SUSE was only public for two years, and was a private entity prior to that. If you’re worried about enshittification, you should’ve worried about it back when it was acquired by Novell, in 2003. Everyone said SUSE was doomed, but it continued on without any issues. SUSE changed ownership thrice since then, and yet it still stands strong, even two decades after Novell’s acquisition. So I expect this move won’t change anything, at least in the short term.
That’s a good question, and who is the mysterious 3rd party SUSE is going to be merged with?
Debian is looking better and better everyday.
Hopefully nothing too drastic, but also according to the article they were only publicly traded from 2021 to now, so for most of their existence they were in private hands anyway, albeit being passed around a fair bit.
SUSE was already private under an equity firm until 2021 (EQT). Probably fine.
