They can't adopt Oracle's tactics because there is nobody else doing what Red Hat does.
SUSE does what Red Hat does (work on the software it ships). In addition to that it also provides Enterprise Support for RHEL :). Which might make it both good and evil you could say or maybe just chameleonic.
> Not to anywhere even close to approaching Red Hat's extend
This needs a citation.
I for one do not agree with you. Looking at the statistics of top kernel contributors for kernel 2.6.35 by lines changed¹, Red Hat can claim 7.8% of lines changed while Novell (SuSE) is at 4.7%. The difference is considerable but I do not think it's fair to say that that it's "Not to anywhere even close to approaching Red Hat's extend[sic]".
These statistics obviously cover just the kernel. The Linux environment is much larger than that, and it should be pointed out that SuSE is _the_ major contributor to KDE with openSUSE being generally regarded as the top-of-the-line KDE distribution. Novell also contributes significantly to GNOME.
I do not want to turn this comment into a laundry list of SuSE contributions to Linux, so I'll just say that IMO SuSE are certainly holding their own as the 2nd largest enterprise Linux vendor in terms of contribution to the general Linux ecosystem. If you do not agree, I would appreciate it if you could back your opinion with substantial evidence as opposed to just making unsubstantiated claims.
I was under the impression that Novell no longer works on Gnome much, and that the torch (and many of the engineers) have moved on to Red Hat and some smaller companies (Igalia, etc).
It is true, however this is a bullshit example of loopholes of open source software. However to RH's defense I do see why they would do this. However part 2: RH is still mooching off the open source work of worldwide contributors. They need to respect that.
SUSE does what Red Hat does (work on the software it ships). In addition to that it also provides Enterprise Support for RHEL :). Which might make it both good and evil you could say or maybe just chameleonic.