This is good news, I suppose. But why should users trust SUSE to maintain a free RHEL clone for the long term when Red Hat came to the conclusion it was bad business. Once bitten, twice shy.
Because SuSE has already been doing this for longer than CentOS has been around. It's just SuSE isn't a big name in America, it's used more in Europe (and often typically mainland Europe too).
We also use LEAP on most of our servers. It's rock solid. I prefer it to Ubuntu after they snap-ed everything. Newer packages, seamless upgrades. Not so many packages though. We're still using Ubuntu 18 on development workstations, but that could probably change the second SuSE decides to offer >2yr free tier support.
AFAIK is mostly used in Germany, where SuSe has a strong take due to the average german person strongly preferring german-native stuff.
It looks like a cultural to me, in many times when I have interacted with people from Germany in a business context it just seemed that they are perfectly capable of speaking english but they just don't want to.
> it just seemed that they are perfectly capable of speaking english but they just don't want to
Due to the similarity of German and English, German speakers can superficially appear far more competent in English than they actually are. (This goes both ways.) Speakers of both languages come to the other with about half of the grammar (including hard bits that usually betray non-natives like irregular verbs by vowel umlaut) and a large collection of basic Germanic roots.
I'm always amused when watching a German film how entire sentences sometimes are decoded by my brain as English, when they're German.
But this completely breaks down once you go beyond "Ich habe all das Bier getrunken". German never got all the French-Latin vocabulary. Most technical and literary terms are completely different. They may feel quite ill-at-ease in English even though they sound reasonably fluent with the basics.
To my understanding suse has offered CentOS maintenance for along time already, in a package to migrate you over to SUSE Linux Enterprise. and the service level agreements only apply for customers, as in paying customers.
Red Hat came to the conclusion it was bad business.-
Is this really why they chose to do it? Streams make more sense with the modern environment. Fedora is upstream, then centos then RHEL. RH is doing a stepped approach which makes sense because no one can remember all domains and forsee all problems.
-Bad business is what Microsoft is doing by dumping broken patches on end users to test in production after MS liquidated their QA testers.
