Both Red Hat and Canonical have free enterprise distributions: CentOS and Ubuntu respectively. Until last week, SUSE didn’t have any such offering — at least not officially.
Everything changed with the arrival of Leap.
I was at SUSECon 2015 when SUSE made the announcement, and I talked to over half a dozen SUSE executives and openSUSE developers, including Richard Brown, the chairperson of the openSUSE board. The information I gathered from these interactions gave clear indications that Leap is now a great alternative to Ubuntu, CentOS and Debian for production servers. However, very little is known about Leap.
Following is my interpretation of what Leap is and some points of interest:
Leap gets the DNA of SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE)
OpenSUSE Leap is compiled from the source code of SLE. The first version, 42.1, is based on the first service pack of SLE 12, which will be released soon. How this will work going forward is interesting: SLE is based on openSUSE, making it an upstream for SLE. At the same time, SLE adds packages and modules as needed by its enterprise customers, which Leap will benefit from as these will be shared. Thus, SUSE is an upstream for Leap.
It is my understanding that openSUSE teams will have complete freedom over what they want, but in a majority of cases, they like to have a system as mature and stable as is SLE. So it can be safely assumed that that Leap and SLE will remain very similar.