Choice matters, choice happens

It would be easy to think that corporate endeavor and innovation will always benefit  the customer. It’s often true, but not always – as the world of enterprise open source software right now is demonstrating.

Open source isn’t just about the inputs – about the principle that a wide diverse community with shared equity in the outcome will always be the fastest way to innovate. It’s also about the outputs. About the freedom to select the best option that works for you – whether you are an individual amateur coder or looking for a solution for your Fortune 500 company.

However, for some, it seems that there is a strong temptation to cash in on what they see as casino winnings. To draw a line around gains, and walk off the floor. But the world isn’t a “winner takes all” place. The history of human evolution has these moments but is largely based on cooperation, on open collaboration. Without it, we’d never have crossed oceans, let alone reached for the stars. 

Yet where we are now  is in the middle of a battle between cashing out on open and continuing to mutually benefit. It’s vertical control on the one hand and the freedom to select vendors based on trust and value on the other.

This is a tug of war. At one end of the rope are vendors reducing choice for their customers – often with little notice. We see de facto platforms eating at innovation, we see consumption without transparency, and commercial pressures forcing decisions .

Customers are right to feel that in 2024 the walls are closing in around them. It doesn’t have to be this way. At the other end of the rope, customers can find partners who, yes, have the scale and resources to innovate at pace, but also maintain the conviction that the ecosystem and the open source model are the biggest drivers of that innovation.

This is why – right now more than ever – it’s important to stand up for the right to choose. We’re reminded that choice matters. 

At SUSE, we’re lucky to not only have built much of the code the world relies on, we continue to engineer modern solutions for new workloads in the open. And the choice SUSE has made is to remain open.

Consolidation is antithetical to open source, to customer choice and upsets the equilibrium from the mutual benefit of customer and vendor.

Importantly, one fundamental truth to the open source development model has been that companies that compete can also collaborate. When market power actively works against customers’ ability to choose from multiple vendors, that is a backwards step. Instead, we continue to believe in the open ethos. Where the smallest can work alongside the biggest – with customers free to select and move between partners. Open code compels all to compete on value not IP – which is customer-first. 

Choice matters, therefore choice happens. That’s the ethos we support, and one we are proud to live day in and day out.  For over 30 years SUSE has proven this commitment is a resilient one, one we make today and every day.

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