CeBIT: The word in Hannover is that some German government agencies have switched their allegiance away from SuSE Linux, because following Novell’s takeover it is no longer a German company.
SuSE takeover ‘pushed customers to Debian’
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Eugenia Loli
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Ok so if it’s USA dump it? I would hope the Germans are not that stubborn. I’ve got lots of German in my blood and I’m very stuborn, but I try to think logicly despite this.
Novell has been one of the most ethical, straight companies I have ever known. So what if it’s an american company, it’s goal was always the benefit of it’s customers, not submission and bloodletting, like Microsoft.
nothing against debian….but this will only reinforce the perception by Americans that Germans (and French) are whiners who have an inferiority complex toward the US. No matter what the question, if the US says yes, they have to say no.
Switching from a preferred piece of software just because it happens to have been sold to an American company reeks of taking your toys and going home because you didn’t get your way.
i will just have to sell my Volkswagon and Mercedies Benz and Porche and buy a Mini Cooper, Lexus, and Chevrolet Corvette
“A German company that provides support for Debian, the free Linux distribution, has claimed that Novell’s takeover of SuSE Linux has been good for Debian-related business.”
And that’s all there is to the article, no hard facts, no research, no numbers. Impressive.
So you do believe marketing speech. The real reason is money ’cause the public sector is short on money. In the beginning none of the decision makers did trust linux in general but some good marketing of suse made them switch from windows to linux. Now these entities have used linux for a while, they have some people in the house that can run the installations, and their admins tell them that they are perfectly fine with replacing the linux stuff with debian. That’s it.
So much for the truth, you bigmouths.
Yes this could be believable I think..
The interests from german government and companies in SuSE products would have been to improve the poor german IT sector a bit more. There seem to be interests to keep the gross domestic product as well as the gross national product in the country. Now that Novell has bought SuSE the entire money that the german government and companies spent would move into the US.
> Ok so if it’s USA dump it? I would hope the Germans are not that stubborn.
But the ‘Buy American” movements during the early 1990s were okay?
Hey, noone is perfect, right?
This simply illustrates the advantage in using Linux no matter which flavor you choose to like.
With a proprietary offering like Windows for example our scenario would be
The word in Hannover is that some German government agencies have switched their allegiance away from Microsoft Windows, to Microsoft Windows because following the recent increase in price it is no longer cost efficient to use Windows.
Basically once you are there, you are stuck.
With Linux the following is possible….
The word in Hannover is that some German government agencies have switched their allegiance away from Suse Linux, to Debian because following the recent increase in price it is no longer cost efficient to use Suse.
Even though the news item was meant to illustrate another message this is the underlying advantage in using an Open Source product. No vendor lockin.
> i will just have to sell my Volkswagon and Mercedies Benz and Porche and buy a Mini Cooper, Lexus, and Chevrolet Corvette
Mini Cooper is made by BMW.
To all crying boo,
Think about it they have just ditched a US software company (MS) because ultimately thousands if not millions is pumped into the US economy, while the german IT sector could do with that money. So what do you decide ? pump money into an organisation in another country or pump it into a few local organisations which will in turn improve employment rates and also allows the local workforce to become more skilled. Its obvious why they would.
I think Debian was started in the USA, am I not right in saying this ? Which means that Germany isnt snubbing USA, but prefers to spend its money more wisely.
Also its a wise choice Debian is a definate excellent distro.
“Noèl Köthe, a Debian developer and a consultant at Debian support firm Credativ, said at CeBIT on Friday that his German-based company experienced a surge of interest in its Debian support offering after Novell completed its takeover of SuSE Linux in 2004.”
1) Couldn’t he be a little biased? he is a debian consultant.
2) does it really matter? its still a) linux and b) we have no idea if this would affect suse at all. what if 30-40 added suse so they gained as much as they lost.?
RE: Mini Cooper is made by BMW.
yes, i was aware of that before i posted, i like those little cars…
i bet that novell tried to sell and replace the entire german servers
with the gnome desktop
This does make sense. It’s not them whining. They just wanted to support a German company before. It’s no longer German so why not save a few dollars and keep the money in the local economy?
I am not American and I avoid American products if there is a local alternative. Having said that, I do purchase some American products and have no problems with it.
Why don’t they just use Knoppix? It’s free and it’s German.
Well, i can remember a GWB, caring for american steel worker vot.. eh employments, raising import duties in favor of the incompetitive american industry. The game is old, everyone plays it and it will ever be played for lots of reasons.
I live in Germany and read quite a lot German IT news every day. I’ve never came across any news that say that somebody switched from SUSE to Debian because Novell bought SUSE. After all this wouldn’t make sense anyway, since most companies and agencies run Microsoft Windows and Microsoft is from… right, the USA.
Now I read on the UK site of ZDNet that a Debian consultant, who’s name nobody ever heard before, says that some companies, which names he doesnt know or doesn’t want to tell, have switched from SUSE to Debian. Facts: None. Proofs: None.
Why on earth doesn’t that convince me? And more important: Why is this on OSNews with such a headline?
Personally I find that SUSE, since the Novell takeover, has definitely improved. Not necessarilly in quality (I don’t know if another linux release will ever impress me as much as SUSE 9.0 did), but certainly in generosity towards the users: 9.1, free Personal edition. 9.2, an excellent free DVD iso. You can freely download SLES and Novell Desktop… P2P sharing of SUSE Pro doesn’t bother Novell at all (I know what I am talking about)…
Well, if my German friends are really beginning to boycot SUSE simply because it isn’t German any longer, I feel sad.
I lived in Germany for quite a while, in several locations, and I find that the German people have two souls: one is extremely generous (and I truly mean it). The other one is a bit nationalistic.
– They’re switching to a locally produced product. Good for them.
– There’s nothing to back up the claims of the article. With no reference to back up their claim, the article is meaningless.
– The claim is made by a Debian consultant.
– A guy calling himself/herself “cheapskate” loves the mini-Cooper, an overpriced econobox.
The whole thing is silly.
Mini Cooper is British, and now owned by the German company BMW.
> i will just have to sell my Volkswagon and Mercedies Benz and Porche and buy a Mini Cooper, Lexus, and Chevrolet Corvette
Mini Cooper is made by BMW
—–
And lexus is made by Toyota…
But we haven’t hated the japanese since WWII
I also don’t use any american stuff. I use monitor from china, keyboard from china, mouse from china, PDA from china, harddrives from korea, motherboard from china, processor from malaysia, cellphone from china, wearing clothes from china, vietnam and india, burning CDs and DVDs from taiwan… :o)
A person that runs a business which relies on Debian tells stories about customers swiching from SuSE to Debian for obviously unreasonable reasons. Don’t you see that this is plain advertisement in to attract actual SuSE customers to his own business? This is not worth a story on OSNews.com (at least in my opinion).
> nothing against debian….but this will only reinforce the perception by Americans that Germans (and French) are whiners who have an inferiority complex toward the US. No matter what the question, if the US says yes, they have to say no.
I don’t believe this. Only quite recently, I remember that there was some drive in the USA to remove all references to France, ie. Changing French Fries to Freedom Fries. WTH ?!?!! Anyway, opinions defer as to where the French Fry was invented ; could be in Belgium or France.
Ok, I guess i am missing something here. Various government agencies have switched away for SUSE because it will no longer be a German owned company. How is switching it Debian going to change that? Debian is probably more of a gloabal based distrobution.
I guess I missing the point.
I wonder if there is some other issue at hand which is fostering the switch.
Oh that’s funny, what if people and government agencies stopped buying foreign automobiles? Or *gasp* stopped shopping at Wal-Mart, aka “Made in China”-Mart.
I know Debian has universal participation in its development, but it seemed the last time I looked there was a good amount of Spanish developers over others. It would be easy to say quickly, Debian is Spanish.
Regardless, that article was really lame and light on facts.
This does make sense. It’s not them whining. They just wanted to support a German company before. It’s no longer German so why not save a few dollars and keep the money in the local economy?
I am not American and I avoid American products if there is a local alternative. Having said that, I do purchase some American products and have no problems with it.
I think the first thing to do is actually *FIND* a product made in the US, then whether or not it is a reasonable price. In NZ, it is currently cheaper to purchase a low end BMW than it is to purchase a Chrysler. The cost of American made goods are astronomical, and the quality certainly doesn’t live up to the price attached to the.
As for the article itself, the fact remains that American consumers, both government and private, *REFUSE* to use products from overseas. Its pathetic when you see it. Heck, there are Americans who think that New Zealand had foot and mouth and Made Cow disease – neither one of those diseases have come near our shores in 200 years of being colonised!
I think it is also rich of Americans to call this an anti-American backlash considering that US screams freetradee, but quite happy to subsidise agriculture to the tune of $30billion each year, provide tax breaks to exporters, have extremely high import tariffs and quotas on goods being imported into the US.
Sorry, but trade and everything else is a two way street.
not being german but close to the border (.at 🙂 this just sounds stupid to me.
debian is a nice distro, as well as my favorite toy slackware, but with suse it is a lot easier to get a pleasant and integrated desktop up within an hour. considering the amount of tweaking it would take to make deb/slack convenient for the average (windows) office worker, they are just not comparable.
… by that logic. – 99% of Germans’ Software is Windows-based, and guess where Microsoft is from?! Righties… spot on.
Apart from Mini now belonging to BMW, it’s Volkswagen, Mercedes Benz and Porsche.
But don’t worry. Even if some government institutions should be dropping Suse in favor of Debian, there are still enough using Mikrozoft, Intal, or even Novall products.
Well, I do understand the point – I prefer to buy local products aswell, as it creates jobs, helps the economy and so on. Now that it’s just another American company, there’s no reason to stay loyal. I’ve been a Suse user for quite some time, but my feeling is that now I can compare the distributions more freely and choose the best, without any restraints. Currently, I’m most interested in Debian-based LiveCDs (Knoppix, Kanotix), but if the quality of SuSE products stays the same, I think I will continue using it.
@Bryant:
What would you like to tell us and what does it have to do with SuSE?
Exactly. My comment has been reported, but all I said is that Germans are very generous but also a bit nationalistic. Aren’t we all?
it’s beneficial for people to keep money in their country rather than sending it elsewhere. This has nothing to do with nationalism, unless SUSE provided them a vastly more efficient product than Debian does.
YOu might forget, as on heise.de/newsticker are so man y trolls and the forums of telepolis are also from heise, why shouldn’t there also trolls.
Well, at least that is what trolls want, start flamewars, but does not mean the troll thinks the same in real life.
I’m really sad of reading such a dumb article. There may be firms changing. But there were always firms changing, and not for this only reason.
There are no facts, no stats, no something to hold this.
And this change makes no sense. There is no equivalent “german” product with same ease of use and commercial support in the debian world. Correct me in this, if I’m wrong.
For my own, I ever used debian and gentoo. My parents will keep going on with SuSE, as the security and stable progs are more important than actual versions, and yes, easy to configure, too.
I can recall the same mindset here in Detroit when Daimler bought Chrysler–people were upset when a foreign company bought a local “icon”. Daimler has been a supporter of local events and festivals and also been involved in the revitalization of the Big D. And now it’s not so bad.
marytee
…to stop supporting a company which was German; which still employs several German citizens; and which produces the distribution best localised to the German language.
Which is why I’m taking the whole article with a grain of salt, people aren’t that stupid.
That and the fact that the article is based on a quote from a SuSE competitor, which is presumably trying to drum up support for their product.
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/57519
That message is currently wired over all press agencies and newstickers. I guess the “small debian guy” had some preinformation so he made his claim a few hours before thereby trying to find some reporters who… well.
To read about “German History”
He that is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone
And you know what I mean…
People shut up…it’s only software, no need to call on the pasts of other nationalities because of a rumor that Suse is loosing business. Everyone’s race has committed autrocities…..everyones…bottom line.
If the Germans want to support their economy then let them, more power to them, we do the same thing here in the US. It’s what capitalism is about. You can’t even park in a UAW parking here lot with a foriegn car.
Let’s put it this way..I am American and I buy what is best for my money. Since I work for my money, I am going to spend it as I see fit. If that means buying a Japanese car (let’s face it, they are the most reliable), Korean hardware for my computer, Japanese camera, German firearm (H&K), or Argentine beef, then so be it. I am not ignorant enough to let my options be limited because nationalist pride.
There is going to be opinions on whethere Suse is better because of Novell, but the point is is the product is good, who gives a rat’s ass where it’s from. If it’s cost effective and well made then use it. It’s your money, spend it as you like.
Unless of course they are Walmart…they are evil.
Yep, I also think so.
And Novell has also more advantages, SuSE will have finally a fully and actual supported (preconfigured) KDE _and_ Gnome Desktop.
@guidod
What has http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/57519 to do with the article in here? Nothing about the switch.
It only tells about the new run to the desktops of goverment and the “war” between MS and Linux-Distributors.
@osnewsfellow The debian guy can not compete with MS in the goverment sector but Suse can. The small guy feels himself great if he can snatch away some crumbs from Suse atleast in the (smaller) linux part of the market. Nobody would have listened to that if he would have gone to the press today where the big guys show they muscles going for the big market shares.
Pulling in some helper arguments is a nice idea in the term of marketroid tactics but nationalist favourisms are really at the very low end of the points that a decision maker is possibly thinking about. The first points are money, again money, quality, integration, technology acceptance, and few hundred other things that should be cared about. The overall effect is neglible for the big market and therefore nobody in the world can test/falsify the claim of that guy related to the crumbs for which he offers commercial services. With the news today nobody does even care to try: it’s unimportant.
> With the news today nobody does even care to try: it’s unimportant.
yep, I agree with that
“outside a few swastika manufacturers, thats just not a highly sought after market.
(psst., yes if you guessed I was just trying to take the rhetoric up a notch, you guessed right)”
You didn’t take it up a notch, you just sunk it into the abyss.
Unless you’re referring to Notch Johnson.
Good things ever since Novell took over SUSE. I believe SUSE will only continue to rise in popularity. Its website is great, there is great organization, clear documentation, and they’re constantly updating and improving it. Each new version is better than the one before. Very professional.
–EyeAm
but with suse it is a lot easier to get a pleasant and integrated desktop up within an hour
Don’t worry, government agencies will not install plain Debian, they contract a company to deliver a customized distribution which is also updated by that company.
For example http://www.credativ.de/ offering such a service (which also resulted in up-to-date KDE packages for Woody
)
Don´t believe everything that is published in the news !!!
I just can´t understand why do “dump” Suse cause Novell happened to bought it. IMHO it just brings more value to large organization by bringing new services (Zen, e-dir, identity management..) into hands.
Just goes to show just how stubborn germans are.
No wonder they got their ass kicked in both wars.