I think that is this a bit unfair for SUSE. We (I am employee here) have a long tradition of innovation and failing in communication.
We had OBS, that is some kind of build system as a service that guarantee reproducible builds and traceability of packages before that was a thing. We develop an automatically and deeply tested (openQA) rolling distribution (Tumbleweed) at the same time that other was telling in the forums that this was simply impossible to do. We have crazy ideas like MicroOS with transactional updates, together with good old classics like YaST, Zypper or linuxrc.
We are just a few, but we have tons of contributions in the kernel, gcc, btrfs, qemu, runc, openstack, saltstack, kubernetes and whatnot.
This is fair, and I'll admit it's a knee-jerk reaction to a product I like disappearing into a larger organization and possibly being neglected or shut down, as I've seen happen many times before. I hope it means bigger and better support for Rancher.
One thing I would say about SUSE - they are never mediocre. (nor what I would usually consider a behemoth)
The engineering team inside SUSE are exceptional - they do amazing things, and build really interesting features. The product planning / joined up thinking / visionary direction is where they fall down. As a sibling pointed out they have worked on some really interesting stuff, but (when I was there in any case) failed to pull it together into something that could have been outstanding.
Ex-SUSE engineer here. Without a doubt SUSE is the best place that I have worked for in my career of 15+ years, across multiple companies.
They are neither mediocre nor a behemoth. They have some excellent engineers. SUSE has worked on Ceph even before RedHat acquired Ceph. OBS and SUSE Studio had envisioned containers even before the market was ready. SUSE has some prime contributors for Linux kernel, GCC, Linux HA etc. Greg KH was a SUSE employee once, before moving to linux foundation. Technologically, they are far from mediocre.
In my personal experience, SUSE always felt that they had good engineers but somehow lacked the sense of making enterprise sales or generating postive news. The company being head-quartered in EU and not in California may also be a reason for the lack of the news. During my times, they were going through multiple rounds of acquisitions and nothing was stable in the vision of the company. The SUSE management did not feel like a Behemoth because they were trying to satisfy their investors in Novell, Microfocus, etc.
We had OBS, that is some kind of build system as a service that guarantee reproducible builds and traceability of packages before that was a thing. We develop an automatically and deeply tested (openQA) rolling distribution (Tumbleweed) at the same time that other was telling in the forums that this was simply impossible to do. We have crazy ideas like MicroOS with transactional updates, together with good old classics like YaST, Zypper or linuxrc.
We are just a few, but we have tons of contributions in the kernel, gcc, btrfs, qemu, runc, openstack, saltstack, kubernetes and whatnot.