Reliable second source?

The rest of the IT industry needs a reliable second source for Linux. Red Hat might not be able to use legal means to become the dominant vendor, but network effects are almost as powerful--especially for being able to support legacy and/or proprietary applications.

The most cost-effective way for SuSE to stay viable as a second source is to work upstream. Keep the kernel crew together, do hardware support, bug fixes, and performance improvements, and don't try to maintain anything too far out of line with kernel.org or RHEL. IMHO, you can tell when a company actually has large-scale customers by reading "git log," because for those customers, "support" includes kernel hacking. Having two companies that can do this for large business workloads will keep the rest of the industry happy.