I really want to understand this better, and if I can, help to formulate a clear, concise explanation of the relationship between SUSE and openSUSE. I work at SUSE myself, after all, and nobody explained it to me! I assumed that it was comparable to the way that the 2 other Linux vendors that target the Linux market do it. I was apparently dead wrong in this, and I'm sorry that I annoyed people with my wrongness. I want to get it straight. --------------------------- So, for comparison, here's the way I understand how the competitors' models are. As I see it, there are 3 enterprise Linux vendors out there: #1, at least in size and money: Red Hat, with RHEL, Fedora and CentOS #2, maybe biggest in mindshare but not making much money from it: Canonical, with Ubuntu #3, but making a good business and product from it: SUSE, with SLE and openSUSE At home, I run Ubuntu. But they've killed off my favourite desktop, Unity, so I may well switch to openSUSE soon. I've been running Ubuntu since it came out, when I switched from SUSE Linux Professional. (I mostly ran review copies, because I regularly reviewed SUSE and Red Hat for UK magazines such as PC Pro and Personal Computer World). Ubuntu was much smaller and easier to install, and it ran the snazzy new GNOME 2 desktop. (I loved KDE 1, tolerated KDE 2 and found KDE 3 intolerably over-complex and fiddly, so I was looking for something new.) --------------------------- Ubuntu's model is easy. It's small-F free. It's paid for by Mark Shuttleworth, who personally made 2/3 of a billion US$ when he sold Thawte to Verisign. Ubuntu is his way of giving something back to the FOSS world: an easy, friendly, end-user desktop OS to rival Windows, free of charge. Derived from Debian with extra integration work, non-free drivers and firmware, and updated components. New releases every 6 months, April and October; updates available for 9 months. "Version number" is the last 2 digits of the year of release plus the month of release. Every even-numbered year, the April release is a Long Term Support release, and gets updates for 3 years on the desktop and 5 years on servers. Still free of charge. Canonical sells support, but it's never turned a profit and is still funded by Shuttleworth. There's no enterprise version or anything: one size fits all, but if you want support and consultancy, it's there for a price. --------------------------- Red Hat Used to sell a distro and merchandise. Switched to an enterprise-centric model around 2000. Now there are 3 product lines: RHEL. Enterprise distro, long support lifetime. Technically doesn't cost money but you can only run it if you have 1 support subscription per machine. Source code distributed for free, but binaries only available to paying customers. No fixed release schedule: major releases about every 2-3 years, point releases about every 6 months. Fedora: free community-maintained, community-supported. Releases roughly every 6 months, with an incrementing integer version number. Updates available for approx 12-13 months, i.e. until after {version+2) is released. No stable or long-term releases. No paid support. All GPL/FOSS, so doesn't include any nonfree drivers or firmware at all. If your hardware doesn't work, tough. Red Hat sponsors development but as of 2016 announced that community contributions had just overtaken in-house ones -- 40% RH staff, 60% community. Periodically a snapshot of Fedora is taken and forms the basis of the next RHEL major release. So essentially Fedora is a periodic alpha-test for future releases of RHEL. That was it. Simple, clear, easy. Several groups downloaded the sources of RHEL, compiled and distributed it as a free community distro, notably CentOS, Scientific Linux, White Box Linux. These were essentially identical to RHEL but with the name changed. Oracle did the same to create Oracle Unbreakable Linux, as a hostile attempt to reduce RH's share price, possibly with a view to acquisition. This did not work but eventually contributed to the death of Solaris, acquired along with Sun. Then RH muddied the waters by buying in CentOS. Now RH officially offers a free, stable distro _as well as_ its commercial stable distro and free unstable one. --------------------------- SUSE This is the one I apparently got wrong. My impression was as follows: It's comparable to RH. Novell bought SUSE and changed the product lineup to something resembling RH's. The baseline product was made free-of-charge, a separate, super-stable enterprise distro was spun off from it. SLE, the enterprise distro. Slow release cycle, stable, supported, costs money -- traditional software licensing model, comparable to but not identical to RH's support-subscription model. And openSUSE, the free, community-supported only version. Used to be a continuation of the venerable and time-honoured SUSE Linux Professional product, with continuing version numbers even, but then a few years ago, was split in 2. This has 2 flavours: * Tumbleweed, a rolling release flavour. No version number. * Leap, with periodic stable versions and a finite update cycle -- I'd guessed based on snapshots of Tumbleweed, as Fedora releases are of Rawhide, Debian releases are of Sid, and Ubuntu is of Debian. Version numbers frankly a bit of a mystery. So the equivalences are: SLE ~= RHEL openSUSE Tumbleweed ~= Fedora (specifically, Rawhide, the rolling-release pre-alpha version comparable to Debian "Sid") openSUSE Leap ~= CentOS (fixed release cycle, stable-ish, no commercial support) I assumed that SUSE sponsors openSUSE development the same way that RH sponsors Fedora -- it (until very recently, at least) is mostly developed by SUSE staff and is the testbed for future releases of SLE. --------------------------- But now I have been told, strongly, that this is not correct. That openSUSE is far more independent of SUSE than Fedora is of RH. That in some ways it's almost a rival or an officially-sanctioned fork. So what _is_ relationship of SUSE to openSUSE? Does SUSE sponsor openSUSE? If not, who does? Who's paying for it? Cui bono -- who benefits? Who does most of the development? What's the ratio of SUSE to non-SUSE contributors? Is that tracked? Is it public info? Which distro is upstream from which? Is it akin to RH: Tumbleweed (is the upstream of) SLE (which is the upstream of) Leap as Fedora → RHEL → CentOS ...? Oh, and for comparison... --------------------------- Linux Mint Derived from Ubuntu, but adds in more proprietary codecs and so on for a more seamless experience. More recently, swapped out the unpopular Mac-like Unity desktop. Initially did its own fork of GNOME 3, Cinnamon, which gives it a Windows-like makeover. Also "adopted" the GNOME 2 fork, Maté, so now offers a choice of 2 Windows-like desktops, one for high-end machines with hardware OpenGL, one for low-end ones and VMs. Gecko Linux is to openSUSE what Mint is Ubuntu. :-) So, is this all totally wrong? If so, what's wrong, and how can I fix it? -- Liam Proven - Technical Writer, SUSE Linux s.r.o. Corso II, Křižíkova 148/34, 186-00 Praha 8 - Karlín, Czechia Email: lproven@suse.com - Office telephone: +420 284 241 084 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-factory+owner@opensuse.org