SUSE in the shop window: will the Linux player remain European?
SUSE in the shop window: will the Linux player remain European?
Publish Date: 2026-03-12 04:13:00
Source Domain: www.techzine.eu
Originally German, SUSE is now owned by Swedish investment company EQT and officially based in Luxembourg. A complex, yet European affair. But now EQT is considering selling SUSE. Is a takeover by a non-European company on the cards, and what would the consequences be?
Sovereignty is a hot topic, and fears about American interference in Europe’s IT infrastructure are omnipresent. Technology, complex as ever, is an international affair. Somewhere in the software supply chain, there are always non-European companies, even if, for convenience’s sake, you count open-source solutions as ‘sovereign’.
Linux is everywhere, but which one?
One of the most important components in the software stack is the operating system. A Linux distribution is almost always active for the IT networks behind the scenes. Despite this uniform adoption, the nationality of such a Linux distribution has so far remained off the radar in sovereignty discussions. Unjustly so, in our opinion, because you can only speak of sovereignty or digital autonomy if you can continue all aspects of your software supply chain on your own.
This is where SUSE can play an important role. As Red Hat’s main challenger, it offers support for many Linux distributions as an OS for critical IT systems. And, crucially for sovereign ambitions, it is entirely European. In an interview with Techzine in the middle of last year, CEO Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen, a Dutchman, stated that SUSE has an advantage as a European player.
At the same time, he stated that open source knows “no boundaries.” Whereas Red Hat has been shielding its own RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) and restricting open source for several years, SUSE has opted for an approach whereby customers can, in principle, always withdraw from a partnership.
EQT opts for maximum profit
SUSE was a publicly traded company between 2021 and 2023, but that came to an end with the acquisition by EQT. As befits an…
