SUSE History

On September 2, 1992, four twenty-somethings from Nuremberg, Germany—Roland Dyroff, Thomas Fehr, Burchard Steinbild, and Hubert Mantel—formed the Gesellschaft für Software und System Entwicklung GmbH. Literally translated as "Company for Software and Systems Development," the company has always been known as SUSE.

They may not have realized it at the time, but these young men changed the face of Linux forever. When their first planned distribution lacked a good installation and configuration tool, YaST (Yet another Setup Tool) was developed. Popular for its easy use, attractive graphical interface and the capability to customize your systems quickly during and after the installation, YaST took the Linux enterprise community by storm. And this was just the beginning.

SUSE's technical expertise and customer focus always stood out from other Linux distributions. IBM took notice and increasingly cooperated with SUSE in development work for their high-end platforms. Built on top of the open source Linux kernel and distributed with system and application software from other open source projects, SUSE was one of the first to deliver the value of open source to the enterprise.

In 2004 Novell bought SUSE and expanded community contributions further by sponsoring the openSUSE project and openSUSE Build Service. They made major contributions to the Linux kernel as well as Xen, KVM, OpenOffice.org, GNOME and KDE. Currently operating as an independent business unit of The Attachmate Group, SUSE continues to innovate and serve the business needs of its partners and customers worldwide with the best Linux distribution on the market.

See marketing artifacts from SUSE throughout the years.

In 2012, SUSE announced its 20 year anniversary. Check out SUSE's major historical milestones.