Early On 2 September 1992 in
Nuremberg,
Germany, Roland Dyroff, Burchard Steinbild, Hubert Mantel and Thomas Fehr founded the Software and Systems Development Corporation (). Three of the founders were still mathematics students at a university; Fehr had already graduated and was working as a software engineer. The name S.u.S.E. was an acronym for
Software- und System-Entwicklung (Software and Systems Development). In the following years, SUSE opened a total of six national and four international (USA, Czech Republic, Great Britain and Italy) branches. On 25 November 2002, Richard Seibt became CEO. In Hong Kong, SUSE's products are distributed by TriTech Distribution Limited. • In 1993,
Patrick Volkerding cleaned up the SLS Linux distribution, releasing a newer version as Slackware. • In 1994, with help from Patrick Volkerding, Slackware scripts were translated into German, which was marked as the first release of S.u.S.E. Linux 1.0 distribution. It was available first on floppies, and then on CDs. This was created by Florian La Roche, who joined the S.u.S.E. team. He began to develop YaST, the installer and configuration tool that would become the central point of the distribution. In 1996, the first distribution under the name S.u.S.E. Linux was published as S.u.S.E. Linux 4.2, a reference to the answer to
"The Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything" from the ''
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy''.
YaST's first version number, 0.42, was a similar reference.
Expansion running on SUSE 5.1 Over time, SuSE Linux incorporated many aspects of
Red Hat Linux, such as its
RPM Package Manager and its
file structure. S.u.S.E. became the largest Linux distributor in Germany. In 1997, SuSE, LLC was established under the direction of president and
managing partner James Gray in
Oakland, California, which enabled the company to develop Linux markets in the Americas and Asia. While Red Hat was ubiquitous in the United States, SuSE Linux continued to grow in Germany as well as in Nordic countries such as Finland and Sweden. In October 1998, the name was changed officially to SuSE (without dots).
Linus Torvalds, the creator of the
Linux kernel, used it fairly often. SuSE entered the UK in 1999. In 2000 SuSE released "
SuSE Linux Enterprise Server for S/390" becoming the first Enterprise Oriented Linux distribution. In 2001 SuSE released "
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 7" be available for AMD's and Intel's 32-bit architecture (x86), Intel's 64-bit architecture (Itanium processor family), and IBM's mainframe platform S/390 as well as iSeries, pSeries, and zSeries.
Novell On 4 November 2003,
Novell announced it would acquire SuSE Linux AG for $210 million. At Novell's annual
BrainShare conference in 2004, for the first time, all of their computers were run with SUSE Linux and it was announced that the proprietary SUSE administration program
YaST2 would be released under the
GPL license.
The openSUSE Project On 4 August 2005, Novell announced that the SUSE Professional series would become more open, with the launch of the
openSUSE Project community. The software always had been open source, but openSUSE opened the development process, allowing developers and users to test and develop it. Previously, all development work had been accomplished in-house by SUSE. Version 10.0 was the first version that offered public beta testing. SUSE Linux 10.0 included both open source and proprietary applications and retail boxed-set editions. As part of the change, YaST Online Update server access became free for all SUSE Linux users, and also for the first time, the
GNOME desktop was upgraded to equal status with the traditional
KDE. In November 2005, SUSE founder Hubert Mantel announced his resignation from the company. He stated that
Novell's acquisition had changed SUSE beyond his expectations and that he did not believe it was the same company that he had founded 13 years earlier. The resignation apparently stemmed from a dispute over the implementation of
Ximian products in the
GNOME-based default
desktop environment for the
Linux distribution. He re-joined only a year later.
Microsoft agreement On 3 November 2006 (renewed 25 July 2011),
Novell signed an agreement with
Microsoft covering improvement of SUSE's ability to interoperate with Microsoft Windows, cross-promotion/marketing of both products and patent cross-licensing. The agreement is considered controversial by some in the
Free Software community.
The Attachmate Group takeover On 22 November 2010, Novell announced that it had agreed to acquisition by
The Attachmate Group for $2.2 billion. The Attachmate Group planned to operate Novell as two units with SUSE becoming a stand-alone business, and it anticipated no change to the relationship between the SUSE business and the openSUSE project as a result of this transaction. The U.S. Department of Justice announced that in order to proceed with the first phase of their acquisition of certain patents and patent applications from Novell Inc.,
CPTN Holdings LLC and its owners would have to alter their original agreements to address the department's antitrust concerns. The department said that, as originally proposed, the deal would jeopardize the ability of open source software, such as Linux, to continue to innovate and compete in the development and distribution of server, desktop, and mobile operating systems as well as middleware and virtualization products. Stipulations regarding the licensing the patents were: • All of the Novell patents will be acquired subject to the GNU General Public License, Version 2, a widely adopted open-source license, and the Open Invention Network (OIN) License, a significant license for the Linux System; • CPTN does not have the right to limit which of the patents, if any, are available under the OIN license; and • Neither CPTN nor its owners will make any statement or take any action with the purpose of influencing or encouraging either Novell or Attachmate to modify which of the patents are available under the OIN license. The acquisition was completed on 27 April 2011. Former president Nils Brauckmann was promoted to
CEO and member of the Micro Focus Group board. On 22 July 2019,
Melissa Di Donato, former
SAP COO, was appointed CEO of SUSE.
Acquisition of Rancher Labs On 8 July 2020, SUSE announced its definitive agreement to acquire
Rancher Labs, which provides a Kubernetes management platform. Nürnberg remained the largest software development office though.
Acquisition of NeuVector On 28 October 2021, SUSE announced that it had acquired NeuVector, Inc., a provider of full lifecycle container security, for $130 million in cash and stock. After facing a downward trends in sales and a sharp decline in its share price, on 13 November 2023 an extraordinary general meeting approved the
delisting from
Frankfurt Stock Exchange.
Acquisition of Losant On 19 February 2026, SUSE announced that it had acquired Losant, an Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) platform. ==Products==