TLDR: SUSE plans on investing $10+ million over the next several years on developing a free binary compatible RHEL fork.
They expect and encourage community input during the development.
SUSE will also continue maintaining SUSE Linux Enterprise, naturally.
Yeah, and I love it. However, after knowing the deb and the rpm worlds for the 20 years I’ve been using Linux, I believe it is too late for these two sides to unite and work together.
Even without talking about different dot extension, there are multiple incompatible repo with the same ones. Take RHEL vs SuSE vs Fedora, or Ubuntu vs Debian