[ Please find below a message from Thomas Di Giacomo, SUSE's President ] [ of Engineering and Innovation. Note that Thomas is copied, and I am ] [ sure you may have lots of questions ;-), not all of which we may be ] [ able to answer (yet). -- Gerald ] Dear openSUSE community, Today, SUSE embarks on a new chapter to accelerate its growth aspirations as the world’s largest independent open source company. SUSE has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Rancher Labs, a market-leading Enterprise Kubernetes Management vendor based in Cupertino, California. I’m sure this community is no stranger to Rancher, given its widespread adoption, the many open source projects it’s contributing to and involved with, and importantly the fact that it is 100% open source. Combining Rancher’s strength in multi-cluster multi-tenant container management and Kubernetes distributions, and SUSE’s strengths in Enterprise Linux, Edge Computing and AI will continue and expand market adoption of open source technologies. It will drive, contribute and support innovation within, with and from the various open source communities, and specifically with the openSUSE community and project(s) that are very close to our heart. We will deliver open source based computing everywhere with the latest AI and other technologies, and seamless deployment of containerized workloads from core to the edge to the cloud. The agreement is signed but the acquisition has not yet closed. After closing, the open source communities and openSUSE will benefit from great and continued involvement from SUSE and Rancher but as one combined company. SUSE remains committed to delivering 100% true open source technologies with no vendor lock-in. Sharing this ethos, Rancher Labs will continue its strategy to be open and support multiple Kubernetes distributions and operating systems. Rancher's infrastructure- agnostic architecture can support any Cloud Native Computing Foundation- certified Kubernetes distribution including Google GKE, Amazon EKS, and Microsoft AKS, as well as RKE, k3s, and other projects like Gardener and last, but not least, Kubic! Best, Thomas