Open Source Policy Summit 2026 SUSE recommends that companies should run on FOSS – but an accidental revelation from a company exec, live on stage, reveals it doesn't practice what it preaches. It's not alone.
For this vulture, the single most amusing revelation from any of the industry speakers at this year's Open Source Policy Summit was from SUSE's Dominic Laurie, who moderated the final panel discussion of the day, "Sovereignty and Procurement."
The panel ended a few minutes before the scheduled time, and he closed it with a surprising comment:
The other panelists looked surprised, and one, Polish MEP Michał Kobosko, immediately picked up on it:
It most certainly was. SUSE is one of the Policy Summit's Gold-level sponsors, alongside Red Hat. The tagline for the event is "Digital Sovereignty Runs on Open Source" – but apparently SUSE does not run entirely on open source. This leading European vendor of enterprise FOSS runs on Microsoft, or at least it uses Redmond's collaboration services.
Amusingly, the day before, The Reg sat in the audience at the CentOS Connect event and watched with interest as a Red Hat staffer in the row in front of us opened their laptop, signed into their Red Hat corporate Gmail account, and started going through their work email – occasionally pausing to get the Gemini LLM to emit some custom slop for them to paste into an email.
We've long suspected this based on comments from friends at the company, but sadly nothing that we could quote or attribute. This time, though, we saw it for ourselves. We've also had reports that Canonical uses Gmail and Google Apps inside the company – indeed, former staffer Till Kamppeter mentioned this in a Mastodon reply to us earlier this year. In the same thread, we also asked Red Hat's Jan Wildeboer, but he declined to answer.
That thread was prompted by another ancient Microsoft document, "Converting a UNIX .COM Site to Windows," resurfacing on tech social media, as such things occasionally do. The document described the pains that Microsoft experienced as it migrated HoTMaiL from Unix to Windows. (The original capitalization is a sort of pun: Hotmail let you access your email via HTML.)
Microsoft acquired Hotmail in late 1997, and as The Register reported just two years later, Hotmail ran on FreeBSD and Apache, with some Solaris for the back end. It took multiple efforts to transfer this to Windows, but it did it, with great effort and thus at considerable expense – and the result guided the future development of Windows Server.
Microsoft calls this "eating its own dogfood," and it still does it. Two years ago, we reported that the company had moved LinkedIn from the end-of-life CentOS Linux to Azure Linux. As with Hotmail 25 years earlier, its first migration effort failed – so it tried harder, and got there.
Hotmail and LinkedIn are largely free-to-use services. These are not profit centers for Microsoft, and the migration exercises must have involved a lot of people and effort. This was difficult and expensive, with no direct impact on the bottom line. It doesn't sell Azure Linux, and when it migrated it, it didn't sell Hotmail either. This was a cost with no associated profit or direct gain to be made.
The thing is that Microsoft's management is smart enough to take a long-term view, and realize that the company will benefit. Such migrations reduce the vendor's dependence on third-party products, tools, and services, even if those tools are free. The knowledge gained improves the skills of the company's staff – especially relevant for consultancy and services – and indirectly, they force the company's own products to improve to cope with new unfamiliar roles and workloads – which makes them more competitive.
Email and groupware represent a significant cost for all companies. The arguments for digital sovereignty are strong: if you must spend the money, spend it locally. Regional governments can thus support businesses in their own jurisdictions; national organizations can keep it in their country or nearby allies, not distant and possibly hostile nations.
This applies to Linux vendors too, even if they do not sell FOSS groupware. Large groupware deployments don't come for free, even if they are FOSS. Red Hat has 19,000 employees, SUSE's CEO told Fortune it has 2,500, and Canonical's most recent government company filing reported just under 1,200.
This vulture is a former employee of SUSE, and was still employed there when it split from Micro Focus in 2018. Micro Focus got started selling COBOL tools to help companies move apps off expensive mainframes and onto DOS and later Windows PCs. Its later acquisition of Attachmate added tools for linking big iron to PCs and PC networks. Micro Focus is very much a part of the Microsoft ecosystem, and for it, this choice made good sense. The newly independent SUSE stuck with it – also for solid reasons.
That was eight years ago now, though. There's been enough time. It's not as if Office 361.5 is such a compelling option. As we reported last September, one millennial techie's verdict was "don't even consider starting with Microsoft."
There are plenty of such offerings out there. Another of the sponsors of the Open Source Policy Summit was Open-Xchange, another German company based in Cologne. Although owner Kiteworks is based in the US, ownCloud was even closer – its pre-acquisition HQ was in Nuremberg, just like SUSE. Nextcloud is based in Stuttgart, so it's a bit further. Grommunio is elsewhere in the DACH, being based in Vienna.
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- CentOS is coming to RISC-V soon if you have the kit
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The other two have perhaps less reason to consider options from the Teutonic world. For Canonical, Zentyal has the virtue of being based on Ubuntu, as we reported back in 2010. However, there is a profusion of Linux-based FOSS groupware tools available now. We mentioned SoGo when looking at Debian's Freedombox blend last month. Kolab has been around since 2003, Zimbra since 2005, but both are newcomers compared to Citadel, which has roots in the early 1980s.
The Reg FOSS desk is no great admirer of Microsoft or its products, but sometimes, we have to concede that it does things right. It has made a long habit of "dogfooding" its own products, and this has served it well.
To spell this out: any FOSS vendor should constantly strive to run their entire business on FOSS. Even if they don't sell a particular function, it's still part of the whole.
FOSS isn't some strange little niche tool, suitable only for server stuff, as if it were some odd little outgrowth of commercial proprietary software. It's not as if it's only suitable for certain functions, like running web servers.
In reality, it is the other way round. Commercial software is an accidental side effect of cooperatively developed software. For as long as software has existed, it's been normal to distribute the source code along with the binary.
There's no mystical inherent difference between source code and compiled binaries. That is a trivial implementation detail which only applies to certain programming languages. Most code is interpreted. That means the user runs the source code directly, forcing companies trying to sell the stuff to find ways to make it unreadable. It's called obfuscation, and even if people occasionally win prizes for it, it's a bad thing.
It's all just software. Anything at all you can do with proprietary code, you can do with FOSS, from invisible system firmware up to fancy games and sophisticated tooling for creating everything from movies to music to multinational corporations.
FOSS OSes, including all Linux distributions and their relatives from FreeDOS to Haiku, are the visible peaks of icebergs. They are built from submerged mountains of FOSS code, invisible only because most people don't care about such stuff and don't look for it.
Vendors selling packaged bundles of it are merely imposing arbitrary boundaries: "We support these specific versions of these named components, and we won't help you with the rest." There's no real difference, though. The upstream so-called "community" versions of those paid-for distros are slightly newer versions of the same programs and packages. The demarcations are nothing more than lines in the sand, and we all know what happens to those as tides flow and ebb.
The upstream projects of RHEL, SUSE SLE, and Ubuntu LTS contain all the component parts to build something like Gmail or Hotmail. As the Microsoft documents about moving Hotmail to Windows reveal, Hotmail was built on FreeBSD and Solaris, while it's public knowledge that Google, Meta, Amazon, and so on run on Linux.
The fact that the enterprise Linux vendors don't sell groupware is just another line in the sand. Those enterprise Linux distro repositories contain the same components of the same apps that those FOSS groupware vendors use.
Microsoft has been successfully building and selling proprietary applications and tooling in an increasingly FOSS-dominated world because it constantly actively studies its many rivals. It imitates what they do, improves on it, and incorporates it – to the remarkable degree that an entire Linux OS is now an optional feature of the Windows desktop. Eating its own dogfood, running the company on the company's own products, is a key part of making this work. Even when those products – such as Linux distributions – are rivals to its own products.
Apple's macOS and iOS (and all its other OSes) are built from FOSS components and tools – most of them from the BSD world. The company focuses its efforts on the visible parts, the graphical layers on top. (It's only the profound technological conservatism of the BSD projects that prevents them from adopting Apple's tools – it has been tried in the past.) This is a key aspect of how Apple, and NeXT before it, became and stayed relevant and competitive: intelligently adopting and adapting FOSS rather than reinventing wheels.
Linux vendors need to do the same. Identify where and why they're using proprietary tools in their organizations. Work out which parts can be done in FOSS, and spend money on doing whatever can be done in FOSS, to make the FOSS world stronger. FOSS groupware is the lowest-hanging fruit of all here.
FOSS is an ecosystem, built by thousands of people and groups and organizations, sometimes cooperating and sometimes competing, but all working together so that the whole thing develops and adapts and improves. Using proprietary communications tools to run companies whose core marketing message is that FOSS is a better solution is a contradiction in terms of epic scale.
To summarize the summary, FOSS vendors should run on FOSS. Using FOSS helps make FOSS better, and helps make better products – and that includes components they may currently happen not to sell.
Digital sovereignty applies to businesses as well. Any management team that thinks it makes better sense to help rival vendors by paying for rival products and services, rather than keeping that money in their own market and thus improve its own competitive position, should return their MBAs.
The Register asked SUSE, Red Hat and Canonical to comment. ®