On the SUSE side, you can get OpenSUSE Leap which is a clone of all of our SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) packages that are kept up to date with SLE. It also has a bunch of community-maintained free software packages not available in SLE. And yes, it's all free as in speech and beer. And no EULA.
How does "uses SLE packages" and "kept up to date" work together? I'm seriously confused because that seems to be exclusive to me. For example, an more up-to-date kernel package isn't really derived from SLE anymore then, right? And how can a developer be sure his software working on openSUSE Leap is running on SLE when there are different packages? That's what this post is about, kinda.
The more apt Red Hat equivalent seems to be Fedora here, which is 100% free as in speech & beer as well. Or CentOS, if we're talking about developing Enterprise software. It's a binary-compatible RHEL rebuild after all.
Well, the reason that Leap 42.1 has a 4.x kernel is because the next service pack of SLE is planned to have a 4.x kernel as well (at which point, from my understanding, they'll sync up). The reason they didn't just use the SLE kernel is because of hardware support.
But the rest of the packages are either:
1. Directly from SLE, meaning that they have the exact same version, patches and build setup (they're rebuilt on the External OBS though). These are kept up-to-date with maintenance releases for SLE (which is what I meant by "up to date").
2. Community-managed, meaning that they were not available in SLE and the community added them.
Admittedly, the kernel is the one case I know of where this is not the case. CentOS might be comparable, but I don't know whether or not RedHat actually contributes to CentOS (we contribute to OpenSUSE).
The difference between openSUSE and Fedora seems to be that openSUSE is based on SLES and Fedora is the base for RHEL. That may be different approaches, but I feel like it has very comparable results. Fedora is a community project heavily sponsored by Red Hat and open to everyone, it seems to be very similiar to openSUSE's governance model. Most things Red Hat is creating for RHEL is available in Fedora before (in fact, I cannot name any RH product that's not available in Fedora thinking about it).
> I don't know whether or not RedHat actually contributes to CentOS
CentOS is part of Red Hat (for like 1 - 2 years? Not sure).
I'm kinda irked by your original post because it seems to imply you cannot get Red Hat technology without the EULA or only by paying. That's just wrong as both CentOS and Fedora prove.
> I don't know whether or not RedHat actually contributes to CentOS
Not sure if that counts, but they hired a few of CentOS's core developers a while back (one or two years ago, I think), explicitly to make communication between RHEL developers and the CentOS people easier/faster. CentOS remains what it was before, but Red Hat now pays a few people to work on it full time.
