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From the openSUSE news website:
The wait is over and a new era begins for openSUSE releases. Contributors, friends and fans can now download the first Linux hybrid distro openSUSE Leap 42.1. Since the last release, exactly one year ago, openSUSE transformed its development process to create an entirely new type of hybrid Linux distribution called openSUSE Leap.
Version 42.1 is the first version of openSUSE Leap that uses source from SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) providing a level of stability that will prove to be unmatched by other Linux distributions. Bonding community development and enterprise reliability provides more cohesion for the project and its contributor's maintenance updates. openSUSE Leap will benefit from the enterprise maintenance effort and will have some of the same packages and updates as SLE, which is different from previous openSUSE versions that created separate maintenance streams.
Community developers provide an equal level of contribution to Leap and upstream projects to the release, which bridges a gap between matured packages and newer packages found in openSUSE's other distribution Tumbleweed.
Since the move was such a shift from previous versions, a new version number and version naming strategy was adapted to reflect the change. The SLE sources come from SUSE's soon to be released SLE 12 Service Pack 1 (SP1). The naming strategy is SLE 12 SP1 or 12.1 + 30 = openSUSE Leap 42.1. Many have asked why 42, but SUSE and openSUSE have a tradition of starting big ideas with a four and two, a reference to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
(Score: 3, Informative) by frojack on Friday November 06 2015, @01:51AM
Opensuse was historically viewed by Suse as a testbed platform for Suse Linux Enterprise: Server and Desktop (SLES / SLED)
As such it was fairly bleeding edge, and things would get foisted on Opensuse well before they were ready. The worst such disaster was KDE 4.0, a full 2.5 years before it was ready for prime time. Then there was systemd, which Opensuse did a pretty good job of making painless. The most recent was BTRFS as the default (but certainly not the only) file system choice for your root partition - another minor disaster.
All of these happened with no-notice.
Opensuse sold itself as being a community distro, but in actuality the community had absolutely zero say about what went into the product. You could bitch all you wanted, but nothing changed. Their mailing list manager simply started killing threads that had anything to do with systemd and banning subscribers. It got ugly.
At least now the pretense of being a community distro os over. Its still a testbed for SLES/SLED, but at least you get to run the same things that SLE has. (Including one of the slickest integrations of LDAP I've ever seen.) Previously SLED packages wouldn't install on OpenSuse. SLED/SLES are extremely stable and well tested.
It will be interesting to see how they handle the testbed purpose of OpenSuse while maintaining compatibility with SLE.
Full disclosure I like the distro. I'll probably like LEAP when I get around to installing it. I see the warts because I use it every day, but by and large it is problem free if you know what to avoid.
Just don't install BTRFS, because you WILL lose data (I promise), and you will have no clue where all your disk space went. BTRFS is still not ready for prime time. Give it another year.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.