OpenSUSE 12.2 is officially dead now [1] and blogs begin to advertise a new release of the Microsoft-friendly (and funded) distribution, perhaps unknowingly helping Microsoft. One such site says that the new release is now offered in Microsoft-owned servers, demonstrating patent and control issues, not to mention privacy issues. Other reports mention SLE* (SUSE) [2] on Amazon, the CIA's privacy-infringing special partner. This is the very opposite of what the GNU/Linux world should strive for. At the same time, Microsoft is "openwashing" its datacentre [3] and so does the Microsoft-owned (partially) Facebook [4,5], which is a censorship/surveillance company (users are the products, not the customers, and the business model is brainwashing them, also with pseudo "search" like Microsoft's). Amazon has already shown us how "open" it is when it started paying Microsoft for GNU/Linux, deleted files (remotely) from people's devices, and kicked out Wikileaks from its hosting plan at its most critical time (censorship). ⬆
The openSUSE Project has just announced that openSUSE 12.2 has reached end of life (EOL) and it will no longer be supported.
“These servers are optimized for Windows Server software and built to handle the enormous availability, scalability and efficiency requirements of Windows Azure, our global cloud platform. They offer dramatic improvements over traditional enterprise server designs: up to 40 percent server cost savings, 15 percent power efficiency gains and 50 percent reduction in deployment and service times,” Laing said.
The Open Compute Project officially got started in 2011 as a way to open up Facebook's server designs and help the broader IT community — it's an effort that is paying off for Facebook and many others too.
Facebook is reaping the benefits of designing its own energy efficient servers. Today at the Open Compute Summit, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that “In the last three years alone, Facebook has saved more than a billion dollars in building out our infrastructure using Open Compute designs.”