SUSE's soon to end years as an enterprise Linux distributor under foreign occupation offer some perspective for what may be ahead for Red Hat. And since this is shaping up to be at an Ars Technica length, I'll mention the 2010 Oracle/Sun horror story, in case you think Red Hat sold out to the devil.
SUSE was founded in like '92 in Germany, and grew out of a fork from SLS/Slackware, which were the first Linux distros to offer a nice installer for Linux. (a testimony to this heritage...
