The great leap backward

SUSE chose to skip 13 and 14 because of marketing/sales concerns with 13 being considered unlucky and any number including 4 being related to 'death' in eastern cultures.

Obviously, those concerns are something which the openSUSE Project does not share - we already had openSUSE 13.x, and the plan was to have 4x.y as our versioning for the next few decades with Leap.

But that's one of the joys of openSUSE being a very independent community from it's partner and sponsor in SUSE. SUSE made their decision about SUSE Linux Enterprise and figured the community was free to do whatever the heck we wanted.

We could have ignored SUSE's decision entirely, there was no suggestion from SUSE management or anything like that about changing anything.

But given the whole unique point of openSUSE Leap is that it is, by design, a community built derivative of SUSE Linux Enterprise, yeah, the Board and openSUSE's release team are somewhat fond of reflecting that closeness in version numbers. The community at large had expressed similar thoughts in the very, very, very long mailinglist thread we had a few years ago when we chose 42.x in the first place.

Heck, there was even suggestions back then that we should try to encorage SUSE to skip a SLE version or two so they could sync up, but we dismissed that idea as madness because we assumed SLE would NEVER skip a version ;)

And so SUSE's jump (leap?) from 12 to 15 gave us an opportunity to sync up the version numbers. We took it. It isn't going to be pain free, but it's going to be a lot less painful now than doing it in the future. If long mailinglist decisions are the worst fallout of this decision, I can live with that.

Going forward we have a much more sustainable, rational, and easy to maintain structure for Leap versions, which is a good thing, and SUSE and openSUSE can collectively screw up our version numbers of our regular release distributions together in the future, which isn't the worst risk in the world to have.