And Red Hat isn't? What am I missing?
Furthermore, i think they have clearly demonstrated how they see things.
This is especially true on the edge and unless you are a megacorp, i don't see anyone forking over money for the license. The open source offering is not to be used for production and simply as a testing ground for features that make it upstream... OKD, could have been a closer match to k3s in terms of cost but not necessarily simplicity and we are not even talking about how ready rke2 is.
SUSE's offerings, provide a balance of simplicity and enterprise features, making them compelling for SMEs. Here in Europe there is not even a question about it. Kubernetes is free and in the end of the day simply a wrapper of apis, which should not require licensing.
From the viewpoint of the average IT worker, Suse is also the much better choice!
By now i am suggesting Suse products to all my clients with the guarantee that even if i get hit with a bus and will not return, there will always(!) be someone to support their software. They are for instance the only ones actually doing this.
Cloud times are shifting again, especially with machine learning and i could not be happier about it.
The fact alone that with windows 11 a lot of orgs have a LOT of compute simply being thrown out makes for excellent dev environments and local clusters