Breaking: The openSUSE Board discusses SUSE's request to stop using its brand, highlighting the need for cooperation and goodwill.

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.

  • moontorchy@lemmy.world
    511·
    5 months ago

    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…

  • narc0tic_bird@lemm.ee
    28·
    5 months ago

    Doesn’t SUSE actively benefit from openSUSE development? I thought Tumbleweed and SLES had a similar relationship as Fedora and RHEL.

    • mogoh@lemmy.ml
      24·
      5 months ago

      Notice that “Fedora” does not have “Redhat” its name. Maybe the request is reasonable. I don’t know how many people think that thy don’t need SLES, because there is openSUSE.

      • narc0tic_bird@lemm.ee
        8·
        5 months ago

        My comment was more about how SUSE benefits from openSUSE development (and vice-versa) and that Tumbleweed has a similar relationship to SLES as Fedora has to RHEL, as they are both upstream of their respective enterprise distributions.

        Besides, people don’t need SLES. Enterprises do because of the support they get. And I’d assume employees responsible for that kind of thing at such enterprises would know the difference.

        And the Red Hat logo is literally a fedora hat.

        If it’s just a name change done well, I couldn’t care less (although openSUSE is a very recognizable name and brand recognition would have to be reestablished). I just hope that this isn’t the beginning of something worse.

  • Mango@lemmy.world
    251·
    5 months ago

    TIL SUSE exists and wouldn’t have found out if not for OpenSUSE and this news. It’s kinda weird to open their website and see this:

  • sorrybookbroke@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    24·
    5 months ago

    This is a massive miss-play on Suse’s part. Essentially all the good will, and recognition I have for Suse is based on OpenSuse. It’s the reason many of the places I’ve worked at now run a Suse product instead of redhat. Seriously, when I think of OpenSuse and Suse as a whole I barely differentiate the toonunlike redhat and fedora. That’s likely the reason for the switch but I cannot see how-this does anything but benefit them.

    From the article too there are some concerns. Suse is, admittedly, trying to cause opensuse to change direction ans managment to further suit it’s buisness at threat of removing support. This is sad to see.

    • woelkchen@lemmy.world
      29·
      5 months ago

      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.

    • Stupidmanager@lemmy.worldEnglish
      51·
      5 months ago

      That is the phonetic spelling of how you’re supposed to say SUSE. It’s. SUSAhhh, like appaloosa. I know this because I watch that goofy video on youtube.

  • Corgana@startrek.website
    121·
    5 months ago

    Honestly, for a good distro, the brand is not great. Perhaps this can be viewed good opportunity to go with something more unique!