Bringing Leap and SUSE Linux Enterprise closer together - a proposal

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Hi everyone,

today I have some exciting news and a proposal to relay: SUSE wants to
go another step in openness towards the openSUSE community and suggests
to bring the relationship of openSUSE Leap and SUSE Linux Enterprise to
a new level.

Internally this idea is called "Closing the Leap Gap" and proposes to
strengthen and bring more closely together:

* developer communities, by focusing on openSUSE Leap as a
development platform for communities and industry partners;
* user communities, by leveraging the benefits of both a stable
Enterprise code base and the speed of community contributions;
* the code bases of openSUSE Leap and SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE),
by not only sharing sources, but also offering the SUSE Linux
Enterprise binaries for inclusion in openSUSE Leap.

The proposal includes a three step approach:

1. Merge the code bases for the intersection of openSUSE Leap 15.2
and SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 SP2 as much as possible without loss
of functionality or stability. (SUSE has started a cleanup process
on the SUSE Linux Enterprise side already.)
2. In parallel to classic openSUSE Leap 15.2 create a flavor leveraging
SLE binaries, leading to an intermediate release in the October 2020
time frame.
3. Build openSUSE Leap 15.3 with SLE binaries included by default
(assuming community agreement).

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