Also, if CIQ follows them and SUSE bases this on CentOS Stream (at least for RHEL9; CentOS Stream 8 is admittedly a bit messy), this is exactly what Red Hat was hoping to achieve.
I prefer something that is kept reasonably up to date so that I don't have to fight ancient long-fixed issues or missing features. But I really don't care, if it pays the bills I'll use it.
RHEL is increasingly seen as threatening its own place in the market, and enterprises want to be sure their multi million dollar investments will be stable over the long term. Paying SuSE for support makes sense if you believe they will support you better over the long term than RHEL will. Time will tell who provides more value, but SuSE does appear to be out-IBMing IBM.
For the average enterprise switching from SLES to SUSE RHEL means that update will happen in 5-7 years
I've been migrating to Ubuntu or retiring systems for the last two years and still not done. Hoping to be rid of RHEL 7 before updates stop.
I dislike windows and the M$ ecosystem but as far as server management for undocumented servers it's much easier to deal with them than for Linux stuff. For an undocumented Windows server, you send out an email, wait 2 weeks, shut it down and listen for the screams.
For an undocumented Linux server, you send out an email, wait 2 weeks, prep the fire extinguishers, batten the hatches, and wait for the mob of angry villagers to storm the DC with pitchforks because thanks to you their print server for their paper checks is now printing in Klingon and it can't be fixed without resurrecting the guy that wrote the software 6 days before he died of terminal terminal disease.
With Linux systems, sure, you can check chron and top and find what is running and where it is but it's a bit more unwieldy than the windows GUI, plus you don't always have a full list of the file and folder permissions and getting a full list of those requirements for whichever softwares are accessing them.
RHEL, either officially paid for, or via CentOS / Oracle Linux, is everywhere though, gub'mnt, private, academia.
It is a good move. They siphon off customers from the competition to a free option and dramatically raise awareness of their paid service.
If it turns out that they still cannot make headway in North America with SLES, they can create paid support options for Liberty. Just like Red Hat, they will have the credibility of being the distro maintainer.
Given the staffing and infrastructure they already have to maintain for SLES, maintaining a RHEL-a-like may not even be that much work.
Really smart.