So they're not trying to create something like RHEL but in a way that is committed to being more 'open' somehow. They're still shooting for the bug-for-bug stuff, and still an effort that's parasitic on RHEL in terms of its substantive development.
This whole situation sucks.
Idk. How is that standing on its own? SUSE already has a perfectly good enterprise Linux distro in SLE. If the point is to have an alternative standard that anyone can build from, why not just use that as the base?
Seems to me that all the RHEL derivatives were perfectly content to let RH set the standards for enterprise linux. RH doesn't like that arrangement. SUSE probably wouldn't mind it.
All the derivatives have their EL8 and EL9 based distributions they've committed themselves to support for some time, so I'm sure they'll maintain bug for bug compatibility as best they can given the circumstances. No reason for them to keep following RH after that.