>Also, doesn't this offering prove there isn't vendor lock-in?

It's non-trivial to build a RHEL clone in a way that doesn't infringe on RHEL trademarks and still has timely delivery of security patches, etc. Centos did that, and was broadly used. RedHat acquired Centos in 2014. Then more recently, they completely changed what CentOS was (clone of current/stable RHEL) into a development branch that was ahead of RHEL. That's a different thing, that would serve a different purpose...they effectively killed the product.

I think it is new, and is a lever against RHEL lock-in. Though yes, the linked story is the marketing view of that.

I don't disagree with anything you said, but my take on their lock-in argument is they're saying that once you install RHEL, and pay for the support from Red Hat, you are stuck with it. It is very easy to stop paying for support and attach your existing RHEL servers to other repos. That's what the use case of Liberty Linux seems to be: stop paying RH, keep your existing RHEL servers, pay us instead. It really can be that easy hence my argument that there isn't lock-in. But frankly the only reason we're having this discussion is because SUSE's marketing and description for this product is way too vague and possibly misleading.

> That's what the use case of Liberty Linux seems to be: stop paying RH, keep your existing RHEL servers, pay us instead.

No, I don't think so. If a company is a happy RHEL customer, why would they switch?

I think the targets are:

* CentOS Linux users who are upset that CentOS Linux was prematurely EOLed and don't want to pay RH as a result. Or pay Oracle, come to that.

* Companies with a mix of CentOS Linux, maybe some RHEL, and some SUSE, for whom this gives them a choice of moving to all-SUSE distros rather than all-RHEL distros.

* SLE customers who need some RHEL-compatible boxes for some stuff that only supports RHEL and RHEL clones, who can now keep it inside the SUSE family.