Investment reinforces SUSE’s commitment to innovate and support SUSE Linux Enterprise distributions and related open source projects
SUSE plans to contribute its code to an open source foundation
Point is, if you work for some big corp, when you buy something, you want proper warranties meaning people to blame if it breaks down. I have seen corps want to pay for stuff available free just so they can point at someone if there’s a problem. Ubuntu is mostly fine, Canonical does offer support, but “nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM”.
The enterprise support also means security updates, which is a huge requirement for government contract work (not just US, anything military really). I’ve also seen requirements for use of DISA approved products. I think at the time RHEL and maybe SUSE were the only ones on the list - I’m a few years removed from having to care about this.
RHEL gets enterprise support from RedHat / IBM.
Point is, if you work for some big corp, when you buy something, you want proper warranties meaning people to blame if it breaks down. I have seen corps want to pay for stuff available free just so they can point at someone if there’s a problem. Ubuntu is mostly fine, Canonical does offer support, but “nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM”.
The enterprise support also means security updates, which is a huge requirement for government contract work (not just US, anything military really). I’ve also seen requirements for use of DISA approved products. I think at the time RHEL and maybe SUSE were the only ones on the list - I’m a few years removed from having to care about this.