Big FOSS vendors don't eat their own dogfood– they pay for proprietary groupware

2/12/2026 at 5:54:22 PM

Is there any evidence of SUSE using Teams internally besides that one “We'll give you three minutes back, as they say on Teams meetings!” remark? I don't interpret that remark to necessary mean SUSE themselves use Teams for internal chats; for all we know SUSE could be using some FOSS system internally while using the Teams instances of external orgs they work with, and that latter case being the basis for the remark.

If someone from SUSE is killing some time on Hacker News right now, I'd love to hear more about their internal workflow — especially since (in my experience) Teams on Linux is a less-than-pleasant experience, so if that's what they're really using then I'd love to hear more about how they're going about reducing that pain.

by yellowapple

2/12/2026 at 8:54:14 PM

SUSE used Teams for years (particularly under Melissa Di Donato, who made everyone use it). I used to participate in some of the community project meetings that wound up being on Teams because it was the approved solution they could use. It was the reason why the openSUSE Project deployed a Jitsi instance.

They do not use Microsoft 365 or Microsoft Teams anymore. They use Google Workspace just like everyone else now (the mail headers tell you that). I don't know anything about their workflows, though.

by Conan_Kudo

2/13/2026 at 10:18:04 AM

Stallman wouldn't agree, but in a FOSS spectrum, I think MSFT sits in the middle between FOSS and SaaS, at least they release binaries. With Google it's all SaaS.

I hold no horse in the race, but it seems that Google Workspace is a step in the opposite direction, you don't even have access to binary executables, and you can't self host much stuff, but hey at least you can export your data and make backups! (You can right?)

by TZubiri

2/13/2026 at 10:50:00 AM

Microsoft has effectively ended support for the self-hosted versions of the groupware stack. So between Microsoft and Google (since both are SaaS), I would pick Google. Especially as I've had to administer both solutions before, and I would never voluntarily choose Microsoft 365 ever again.

And yes, you can regularly export your data out of Google Workspace and there are tools that can process that data and use it easily enough.

by Conan_Kudo

2/12/2026 at 8:35:41 PM

How many OSS projects do devrel on Discord? (and please, let this moment be when it ends!) Feels like instead of indicting these projects and companies we need to actually invest resources in the design research and UX necessary to get FOSS tools to be truly competitive. Hint to developers: it's not feature parity, it's making the important features really good.

by laurex

2/12/2026 at 5:06:27 PM

Thanks for submitting my article. :-)

by lproven

2/13/2026 at 9:25:27 AM

You're welcome :). I though it might interest some people here

by baud147258

2/12/2026 at 5:13:42 PM

This is just petty tribalism. How is this different than Red Hat devs using macbooks or whatever.

Reasonable people can recognize the right tool for the job. If the productivity didn't grow it would be a bad idea to organize society around capitalism. If your goal is getting shit done at scale, you can't rely on "There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law."

You want them to use, what? jitsi? neomutt? iRedMail? DEEPSEEK?!? LOCALLY?!? GET REAL! These are serious developers for Petes' sake!

by casey2

2/12/2026 at 6:04:53 PM

> How is this different than Red Hat devs using macbooks or whatever.

I'd argue Red Hat using Macbooks to be somewhat worse (unless those Macbooks are running Fedora somehow, of course); that'd be equivalent to the Mattermost devs using Teams, or the GIMP devs using Photoshop ;)

During the brief time I was at (a subsidiary of) IBM, one of the standard laptop options (and the one I ultimately picked) was a ThinkPad running RHEL; pretty sure it even shipped with Boxes and a script to spin up Windows VMs to cover the “I need to run this proprietary program that won't run in Wine” angle. If Red Hat's own OS in their parent company's standard config ain't good enough for them, then that seems like a problem they should be hard at work fixing.

by yellowapple

2/12/2026 at 10:29:44 PM

Red Hat employees can use Fedora on their MacBook. Fedora Asahi Remix [0].

Unfortunately in the business world you often have to use tools that others outside of your company uses. I would never choose to use Oracle Database but since the client uses it then I must setup a development / QA environment for it.

I don't know of any Microsoft Access Database solution that runs on non-Windows OSes. Any time I interact with one I need a Windows VM. Would love a command line client like sqlite3 so I don't have to use such a bad GUI.

[0] https://asahilinux.org/fedora/

by yndoendo

2/13/2026 at 8:43:39 AM

most redhatters used Fedora/RHEL on ThinkPads, Macbooks were in super minority

we used FOSS before Google, but had to switch (there was some pushback internally)

not sure what happened after IMB took over.

by strzibny

2/13/2026 at 5:18:19 PM

I'm not sure if it was so rare, perhaps it depended on your role or location. I suppose developers in engineering used MacBooks less than those of us who worked in consulting, where they were quite common for customer work. We had a choice, though, and there was no judgment about which work tool we preferred.

I'm not sure on what's going on today, I left the company around the IBM acquisition.

by bosse