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SuSE confirms US staff cuts

It's bad... only 12 left

Updated It's symptomatic of the chaos around SuSE this week, that as the company's US spokesperson was telling The Register that only ten of SuSE's 60 stateside staff would lose their jobs, its US President Volker Wiegand was telling Client/Server News that only twelve would remain.

Wiegand's explanation will make the gloomiest reading for Linux enthusiasts in a long time. He's back to figuring out "where the business model is", in Linux, describing the OS as a "fallen angel" that had "fallen more than it had climbed"... and even talks of making SuSE a buy-out target. But at this rate, there won't be too much to buy, according to Linuxgram.

Although SuSE's strength is in its enterprise relationships with big customers (it's performed much of the work on ports to IBM's S/390 and AS/400 lines), although it now finds Big Blue's Global Services operation eating its lunch.

SuSE is privately held, unlike distro rivals Red Hat and Caldera who've been able to call on cash reserves made at the height of the Linux stock boom, and bubble economy indulgence from their financiers. But their revenues remain negligible: Red Hat netted $42m for the year-ending last month, while the pre SCO Caldera earned just $4m in its year ending October last.

Xenia Von Wedel of the Terpin Group earlier told us that ten redundancies were being made in the marketing and support areas and that developers would not be affected.

Wiegand blamed bad communications, although in fairness flaks can only tell us what they're told by the client. And Wiegand clearly hadn't shared this information with his PR agency. ®

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