I think they are positioning their own professionally supported enterprise distro as “the best” while positioning this Red Hat clone as the free-est ( both in t

I think they are positioning their own professionally supported enterprise distro as “the best” while positioning this Red Hat clone as the free-est ( both in the free beer and freedom sense ). It is a good move. They siphon off customers from the competition to a free option and dramatically raise awareness of their paid service. If it turns out that they still cannot make headway in North America with SLES, they can create paid support options for Liberty. Just like Red Hat, they will have the credibility of being the distro maintainer. Given the staffing and infrastructure they already have to maintain for SLES, maintaining a RHEL-a-like may not even be that much work. Really smart.