Hallo,
openSUSE is not listed in the List of Free GNU/Linux distributions and it explains it with the following text:
openSUSE offers a repository of nonfree software. This is an instance of how “open” is weaker than “free”.
This is the link of the explanation: https://www.gnu.org/distros/common-distros.html
Is it not considered as Free GNU/Linux only due to the nonfree software repository you can download once you have openSUSE Tumbleweed installed? Or is it because it also contains binary blobs in its kernel?
Thank you.
As far as I know, there isn’t anything problematic in the kernel.
As for why some folk consider it non-free – you will have to ask the people who consider it non-free. Some years ago, Novel talked to Microsoft about something, and for some people that made openSUSE evil (for no reason that I can understand).
And then openSUSE supports secure-boot, with “shim.efi” signed by Microsoft. And some people don’t like that.
For the purists, though, it might be partly due to the repos. There is some proprietary code in “packman” repo. But “packman” is not officially part of openSUSE. So maybe the issue is the “repo-non-oss” repo, which has some proprietary packages (such as “opera”) that can be installed. And that repo is officially part of openSUSE releases.