The title is indeed misleading. With Open Source SLES I actually meant an Open Source SLES community that supports the distribution.

It is true that you can download the SLES binaries from Novell, likewise you can get RHEL binaries from Red Hat as well. But what you don't get from Novell and Red Hat are the security updates, support and community.

That is what CentOS adds and an 'Open Source' SLES is lacking:

- Guaranteed security updates for a period of 7 years
- Additional packages (albeit the OpenSUSE buildsystem may fix this !)
- A flourishing community and userbase

The offer from Novell and Red Hat may vanish and is therefor no substitute for what CentOS brings into the picture.

So strictly speaking you are right, but then you are not seeing the whole equation.