Perhaps because they’re owned by an investment company who now want their money back.
The timing seems right, Redhat is now owned by IBM, so setting SuSE free to compete with Ubuntu and Redhat might be a smart move. Ubuntu is doing their own thing in many respects, and IBM pretty much removed RedHat from the stockmarket, and pissed of some people with CentOS. Those CentOS users need to look for a new distro.
If someone is moving off on CentOS Linux and doesn't want to start paying for RHEL, why would they want to pay either SUSE or Canonical instead? Certainly they could move to openSUSE but that makes them SUSE users, not customers. And users who have demonstrated they're willing to go through a migration to avoid paying.
I believe their Linux desktops are Debian-based but my understanding is their servers run a highly customized version of Linux that really isn't based on and doesn't look like a conventional distro.
The timing seems right, Redhat is now owned by IBM, so setting SuSE free to compete with Ubuntu and Redhat might be a smart move. Ubuntu is doing their own thing in many respects, and IBM pretty much removed RedHat from the stockmarket, and pissed of some people with CentOS. Those CentOS users need to look for a new distro.