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.
If they’re public, they have huge pressure. If not, they can play their own game with a specific strategy that a shareholder might not like. So this could well be a good thing. Public trading usually leads to enshitification.
But you are still obligated to always act in the best interest of the shareholders. Private means you don’t answer to anyone outside the company and are not forced to do everything to pump the stock price every quarter.
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.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The SUSE organization has changed hands many times over the years… From being its own independent company to the notable acquisition by Novell two decades ago.
Over the past decade SUSE has changed hands between Attachmate, Micro Focus, EQT Partners, and then went public back in 2021 on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange.
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.
In taking SUSE private, the EQT Private Equity / Marcel is offering a ~16 EUR per share price, around a 67% premium over today’s share price.
"SUSE’s Management Board and Supervisory Board support the strategic opportunity from delisting of the company as it will allow SUSE to focus fully on its operational priorities and execution of its long-term strategy.
The interim dividend will be paid to all shareholders prior to the settlement of the Offer and will allow Marcel to finance its purchase of SUSE shares under the Offer and certain transaction costs incurred by it."
I’m a bot and I’m open source!
It doesn’t make automatically a good news, for example there’s a billionaire who took private ownership of an once famous social network and ran it to the ground completely annihilating its purpose
