It's right in the beginning of the press release and i find this marketing BS so unbearable that i didn't read any further. It's the typical BS i come to expect from venture capital owned companies (i've heard that all the time when i was working for one).

And how is Suse "independent" when it's owned by some swedish private equity group? See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EQT_Partners And, interestingly, see the german wikipedia entry for much more companies owned by EQT. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/EQT_(Unternehmen)

How is Suse independent, again?

WHat was communicated at the time was that EQT was going to be "hands off", and allow the current management to continue operating SUSE as is.

Even under Microfocus they enjoyed a level of freedom usually associated with independent companies.

If the board was left as is, and EQT is just a shareholder, that could be considered independent - more so than RH + IBM where there was some integration, and RH was becoming a wing of IBM.

But this is all speculation on my part, so YMMV

My interpretation is that they and Red Hat are just as "independent" as each other. That is they can do whatever they want as long as they keep making money...but if they don't then they can and will be course corrected by their respective owners.

So, how is that independent? And i guess, that if both are equally "independent" then RedHat would be larger one, wouldn't it?

And what does "largest open source" mean, anyway? More employees? More customers? More revenue? More contributions to open source?

Biggest in terms of market cap afaik.

Te operative word being independent. RH may be bigger, but it's not independent any more.

Redhat has been bought by IBM?