cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/37281970
Believe it or not, an unexpected conflict has arisen in the openSUSE community with its long-time supporter and namesake, the SUSE company.
At the heart of this tension lies a quiet request that has stirred not-so-quiet ripples across the open source landscape: SUSE has formally asked openSUSE to discontinue using its brand name.
Richard Brown, a key figure within the openSUSE project, shared insights into the discussions that have unfolded behind closed doors.
Despite SUSE’s request’s calm and respectful tone, the implications of not meeting it could be far-reaching, threatening the symbiotic relationship that has benefited both entities over the years.
New name suggestion:
“The Distro Formerly Known As openSUSE”
TDFKOS
Careful, Germans take it seriously.
openDISTROFORMALLYASKEDBYSUSETOREBRAND
same energy (and impact) as “X formerly known as Twitter”
Which is the same energy as Prince has with this, sweet summer child.
It’s a play on “The Artist Formerly Known As Prince”
Removed by mod
This is absurd
Years ago, when there were talks about establishing an independent foundation, sane people already warned that relying on a trademark not owned by them is risky. That was batted away as a non-issue. Now here we are.
AbsurdOS – the free enterprise operating system
Just change the name. It’s not a big deal. SUSE is a stupid name anyway.
All people named Susanne: 😐
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.
I agree but it could be worse (Pop!_OS)
OpenSusame
open sesame
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
That is absolute nonsense. SUSE mostly serves large enterprise customers.
And where do you think the people deciding what to buy get their information? Mind share is important.
I’m pretty sure SUSE is bigger than Canonical.
That’s actually surprising to me, but I’d argue that Suse offers more products, it seems like Rancher, Longhorn, etc. have no canonical equivalent.
And where do you think the people deciding what to buy get their information?
Advertisements at large airports
If enterprise IT departments could decide what kind of IT infrastructure gets bought, systems administrators across the world would be elated.
Unfortunately, a lot of technical decisions are made in conferences, on golf courses, in sky boxes near stadiums, and in plain and simple YouTube ads.
I agree that mind share is important, but Fedora seems to be doing a fine job selling Red Hat Enterprise Linux, as did CentOS before it. You don’t need to have an identical name as long as the company maintaining the free product has its logos everywhere.
as did CentOS before it
Fedora is older than CentOS?
And where do you think the people deciding what to buy get their information? Mind share is important.
Most certainly not in Linux distro community spaces, because those are completely irrelevant for them and their needs.
I’m surprised and happy that SUSE is still doing well. I have fond memories of using SUSE in the enterprise especially around their “perfect guest” campaign for using it in virtualized environments. I thought they had very well-baked integration with large Windows networks—things just worked out of the box that didn’t with RHEL. I’m sure a lot has changed in the last decade but I appreciated their cooperative stance in the enterprise.
OpenSuse is essentially free marketing for SUSE, nobody would know them otherwise
I’ve been working for big enterprises for many years, SUSE is used in enterprise environment to run SAP systems because it’s recommended by SAP, OpenSuse has nothing to do with that.
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.
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.
@thehatfox @banazir
Suse and Oracle already have an enterprise-level community project, OpenELA. This image explains very well in my opinion why SUSE is asking the openSUSE community to remove the SUSE name.I’m curious as to where they’re actually going with this. They got news, they got repo, but still nothing to run even after almost a year?
Name it UnownOS. The other variants like MicroOS and Leap all have logos that look like Unowns.
I’m sure Nintendo wouldn’t mind. Their lawyers are known to be pretty chill…
If the just called it other.
It would gain a huge boost in desktop usage figures.
Off the top of my head…
- Gecko or GeckOS
- LizOS
- ReptilOS
- ChamelOS
- KomodOS
A bad time to install Tumbleweed? I just downloaded the ISO today, not kidding.
It’s as a good time as any. I would just install and use it. Name change or not, it shouldn’t affect your usage. Don’t worry
I don’t personally care for anything suse based. I find that rhel like is more stable and easier to work with
This won’t affect anything major, you’re fine.
They should name it something original like Green Lantern
Zuse Linux
Call it gecs os and have 100 gecs do the promotion for it.
OpenSueUs
Holy shit that was so good lol
OpenSussy
