Good discussion, so I just thought I would add my 2 cents...
Ubuntu, SuSe, and Red Hat have different models. SLES and SLED are
targeted toward the enterprise and include support options. They are
also more stable releases. The paid-for OpenSuSE includes only
installation assistance.
Canonical is a commercial company that supports the Open Source Ubuntu
family and provides support for a fee. I would suspect that if there
were a reasonable demand, Novell could provide fee-based support
services since the mechanism is there with SLED and SLES. Canonical
provides 9-5 support desktop for 1 year at $ 293.76 and server support
for $ 881.25. The difference is that SuSE and Red Hat both provide
enterprise versions where Ubuntu provides a desktop and server version
free of charge where you buy the support as an extra. The advantage of
the SuSE model is that releases of OpenSuSE can be more cutting edge
where releases of SLES and SLED are stable built on the experience
learned from OpenSuSE. Just a different way of doing the same thing.
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Jerry Feldman