Pascal,

It was not intended as a flame, but in most of the points you bring up you talk about OpenSUSE. This post was specifically about SLES (even though I mentioned OpenSUSE as it is often brought up during the same discussions).

Let me answer a few of the things you bring up:

• I mentioned the deal with Microsoft not to BS, but it does give another cling to SLES (compared to RHEL) and although it may be good for business I doubt it helps to attract an Open Source community.
• OpenSUSE is a different product I was specifically talking Enterprise Linux here.
• It may be true that there are no public statements, but walking around on a trade floor with a CentOS shirt does help to hear opinions (from SLES users, Novell sales people and others). CentOS is a selling point for choosing RHEL (as well as CentOS of course), but hard to quantify.
• I plan to do another blog article about what Enterprise Linux is and why it is important and the long term support is the most convincing argument. Whether you think that fits into the definition is an opinion like this article is my opinion :-)
• My opinion (on anything) may be wrong but I can change my view based on new arguments, experience or evidence.
• Red Hat of course had market share before CentOS existed, but CentOS is adding value on top of Red Hat's offering that no doubt is helping Red Hat keep its dominance.
• There are benefits of having a free Open Source SLES that OpenSUSE does not have. LTS is one of them. I know SLES is based on OpenSUSE, but if it is not identical one cannot be sure if binary compatibility or expect the same solutions to work for both. I did not mention Fedora because the same issues are involved. I don't think it is a substitute.

  Now, this blog article was not a flame. I simply tried to find out why I think this is the case. None of the reasons are set in stone, things can still turn around. I absolutely mean the last paragraph and maybe I just hope that it could (re)start a discussion within the community and within Novell.