Comment # 15 on bug 1165047 from Michal Suchanek

The autoclose patch that flips the default is not on the master branch.

Since cdrom is modular the sysctl setting is not always effective, even if
shipped.

It is not applied in early userspace in the initramfs, either.

To be able to disable autoclose reliably adding the SLE patch to the master is
the only way.

On the other hand the observed behavior is due to some broken application
polling the drive. Linux has an interface for polling optical drives without
triggering the autoclose: opening the drive with O_NONBLOCK.