Definition of SuSE / openSUSE

Along with Slackware, Red Hat or Debian, SuSE is one of the oldest GNU / Linux-related initiatives; If the Linux kernel saw the light of day at the end of 1991, SuSE was born as a company the following year, in 1992.

However, SuSE did not have its own distribution until much later, in 1996, since, initially, the The company was dedicated to developing software solutions based on Slackware, a storied distribution.

SuSE differentiated itself from the rest of the large technology companies in the field of software because he was born in Germany, with the name Software- und System-Entwicklung (which gives rise to the acronym SuSE), and what it means Software and Systems Development

For the development of their own distribution, the SuSE team changed the foundation on which their distro was built until then (from Slackware to Jurix), and developed a tool from installation and package management that was very successful: YaST.

The name of this tool is also the product of an acronym, this time of a curious play on words:

Yet another Setup Tool (yet another configuration tool). Despite this humorous name, YaST hides a very powerful tool that, in addition to having a visual environment graphic like any other software modern, it can also be run in mode text, presenting a very user-friendly menu environment Username. At the package level, SuSE adopted the Format RPM popularized by Red Hat.

At the beginning of the 2000s, SUSE was going through a serious crisis that led it first to reduce its infrastructure, and then to be acquired by the North American Novell in 2003

Under Novell, SUSE experienced a period of renewed splendor. The North American multinational acquired the German one in order to have a technology that would replace the already outdated NetWare.

The problem was that Novell could not overcome the situation of decline in the market, and in 2011 Attachmate bought it.

During all these acquisitions and changes, SUSE has always maintained a personality own, being a subsidiary of the company that acquired it, with a certain degree of freedom.

In the midst of this process, in 2005, the openSUSE initiative was launched. This was aimed at building a community distribution, open and free, from which to build professional solutions.

OpenSUSE has evolved in such a way that for some time now, it has been easy to tailor our own distribution based, of course, on the latest openSUSE version.

The most controversial event in the history of SUSE took place in 2006, when it was under Novell: the agreement with Microsoft.

The Redmond company had been claiming, for a long time, royalties to the community of software free for the use of code source subject to intellectual property, something the community had refused to do.

This source code was heir to SCO, with rights that it had shared with Microsoft.

Novell paid to have guaranteed the right to use technologies that facilitated interoperability between the GNU / Linux platform and Microsoft Windows.

Currently, openSUSE is among the most popular GNU / Linux distributions, and the server versions and SUSE Professional are used in IBM computers or SAP systems, among other leading companies in the world. sector.

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