The more apt Red Hat equivalent seems to be Fedora here, which is 100% free as in speech & beer as well. Or CentOS, if we're talking about developing Enterprise software. It's a binary-compatible RHEL rebuild after all.
But the rest of the packages are either:
1. Directly from SLE, meaning that they have the exact same version, patches and build setup (they're rebuilt on the External OBS though). These are kept up-to-date with maintenance releases for SLE (which is what I meant by "up to date").
2. Community-managed, meaning that they were not available in SLE and the community added them.
Admittedly, the kernel is the one case I know of where this is not the case. CentOS might be comparable, but I don't know whether or not RedHat actually contributes to CentOS (we contribute to OpenSUSE).
Not sure if that counts, but they hired a few of CentOS's core developers a while back (one or two years ago, I think), explicitly to make communication between RHEL developers and the CentOS people easier/faster. CentOS remains what it was before, but Red Hat now pays a few people to work on it full time.
[1] https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/red-hat-and-c...
> I don't know whether or not RedHat actually contributes to CentOS
CentOS is part of Red Hat (for like 1 - 2 years? Not sure).
I'm kinda irked by your original post because it seems to imply you cannot get Red Hat technology without the EULA or only by paying. That's just wrong as both CentOS and Fedora prove.