Our Last Stand, SUSE Merged with HPE, Whazzup Zorin
Seems like the top story today was the merger of Hewlett Packard Enterprise and SUSE parent company Micro Focus. Links to the press release arrived yesterday emphasizing that SUSE is now HPE's preferred Linux partner. In other news, the Everyday Linux User pondered the "strange" developments over at the Zorin OS camp and OMG!Ubuntu! discussed Ubuntu's new default wallpaper. Michael Larabel took TrueOS Beta for a spin and Doc Searls said today, "Linux has been used at least as much to build corporate (and government) cathedrals as to liberate the geeks who write it."
SUSE circulated a press release yesterday announcing the merger of Hewlett Packard Enterprise's Software Business Segment, that was spun out of HPE, with SUSE parent Micro Focus. That PR stated, "Also as part of the transaction, Micro Focus and HPE announced their intent to enter into a commercial partnership naming SUSE as HPE's preferred Linux partner as well as exploring additional collaboration leveraging SUSE's OpenStack expertise for joint innovation around HPE's Helion OpenStack and Stackato Platform-as-a-Service solutions." This deal will give HPE its own Linux distro to meld with its cloud stack. SUSE is sure this will pave a path for longer-term growth, although the company grew 18% last year. The employee base grew 23% last year with "hundreds of SUSE positions" still available. More to be announced at November's SUSECON.
Doc Searls today said, "Every human being on the commercial net remains trapped in corporate cathedrals, many of which are ravenous for the blood of personal data, most of which is acquired by surveillance. In fact, nearly our entire existence in the commercial world is inside cathedrals where we have near-zero autonomy and great exposure to whatever those running the cathedrals wish to know about us." And then he noted that Linux has been leveraged by greedy corporations and power-hungry governments to watch every move we make online. It's used for marketing, political coercion, and police profiles among other things. Doc called it a "surveillance economy" that needs to be stopped. He said an open marketplace and "coterie of alpha geeks" to develop it are needed. He's spitting at tornadoes, but he said this is "our last stand." He's throwing an "unconference" in October to discuss it.
Gary Newell today asked, "What Has Happened To Zorin Linux?" He said "something strange" is going on over there in Zorinland and he wonders if they are giving up. Newell noted that the last stable release was version 9 based on Ubuntu 14.04 in July 2014. Version 10 appeared for a while based on Ubuntu 15.10, but is now gone. Version 11 was released in February, but it too was still based on Ubuntu 15.10, a distro out of support by then. Newell called that "bizarre." Ubuntu 16.04 was released in April and Ubuntu 16.10 is due next month, but nothing was/is forthcoming from the Zorin camp on a new release. Newell wondered, "What therefore is the future of Zorin?" He concluded it's probably fading away and suggested Mint might be a better choice anyway.
In other news:
* Trying Out The FreeBSD-Powered TrueOS With Its Custom Qt Desktop
* Meet The New Default Wallpaper of Ubuntu 16.10
* Remembering Loki's Linux games from the '90s
I ordered a lot of games from Loki, several I didn't even want when they hit financial trouble. But games like Decent 3, Quake 3, Unreal Tournament, Sin, and Rune filled my early Linux nights. I was very sad to witness their demise.