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.
Sounds like they’re spinning this off to a separate legal entity which won’t be profit driven. I’m not saying don’t be cautious, but it looks like they’re taking appropriate steps to work with the community.
I think I’m going to try Aeon as my daily driver, even though zypper is laborious as hell. Let’s see how long I last.