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But Canonical (and I assume SuSE as well) has quite a few proprietary bits (definitely more than RedHat), with some of their offerings being more or less "Open Core" (for examples, see comparison of MAAS free vs commercial, or how to distribute software to Ubuntu Core systems). That kinda matches what the article is saying.


I can comment on the SUSE bit. In the past we had some proprietary products (SUSE Studio comes to mind), but they've all been sunset a long time ago.

Now-a-days everything we work on is FOSS, and for almost all of our history the major products we've had also were FOSS. You could even call up SUSE in the old days and ask for a CD with all of the source code for SLES without being a customer. These days you can download all the SLES sources from OBS (it's what openSUSE Leap is based on), and SLES has a Factory-first policy that requires all new changes to first be sent into openSUSE. All of our products (to my knowledge) are FOSS licensed and we provide the source code for all of them as source RPMs -- even if they aren't copyleft -- and on GitHub in most cases.

I would very much argue that Red Hat and SUSE can easily trade blows on which is the "more open" company in this regard. For instance, SLES sources are far easier to get access to and work with than RHEL sources in my experience (and our kernel sources are actually separate patches rather than a single patch blob). But that really doesn't matter at the end of the day -- we both work diligently on free software and contribute upstream consistently. Canonical I'm not as sure about, but from my experience collaborating with them they also do an absolutely immense amount of upstream work. In the past, they were quite sheltered and didn't contribute back, but this changed significantly many years ago.

[I work at SUSE, and all of my work is upstream and free software work. I've never touched nor seen a single piece of proprietary code in my 3 years of working here.]


This is true now, but wasn't always the case. YaST was proprietary closed source for the better part of the first decade. It wasn't until SuSE was bought by Novell that they started open sourcing their proprietary bits.


Sure, and there are other historical warts like that. I never said SUSE was always like this (quite a large number of people know SUSE from SUSE Studio -- a proprietary product) but these days we are definitely at least as "open" in this sense as Red Hat.




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