Hi!!
It seems we need to remember the context here. Long post alert! 
On the one hand, openSUSE was born as a project during the Novell era. At that time it was common for many projects to try to develop a community that would support a good part of that project or serve as a testing or experimentation stage. Whatever the reason, the word open was often added to the name to distinguish the business project from the community one. But since the time of Novell SUSE is a 100% open company, so “openSUSE” is really confusing.
For years, many of us have suggested that adding “open” to a word to highlight its free nature is bad practice from a marketing point of view.
On the other hand, openSUSE at the beginning was several things: a community documentation project (the wiki, the forum), a development system (OBS) and a version of the SLE distribution. But be careful, only one version. For example, for years openSUSE opted for KDE (now Plasma) while SLE came with Gnome. Installing KDE/Plasma was optional and not supported. Since then, openSUSE has developed a bunch of versions. We have a rolling release (Tumbleweed), a stable one (Leap) but also hybrid projects and experiments: Leap Micro, MicroOS (and Aeon and Kalpa)… and not all of them are of interest to SUSE. It is foreseeable that Leap Micro will correlate with SLE Micro, but it does not seem that they are going to use anything that is done with Kalpa, for example.
Sometimes we also have problems with confusing brand with product, partly because of how the project originated in the Novell era. Let me use commercial names here. Everyone knows what an Audi is and at the same time intuits the differences between A3 and A4. If you go to their marketing space (their website) you will see that when they talk about the models, they limit themselves to listing their names: A3, A4, … the ones they have. Somehow they assume that if you are looking at their products you already know that they are their products and that what you want is information about them, not about the brand. But on TV they will announce how shiny and cool “your new Audi A4” or whatever is.
Returning to openSUSE, if you go to https://get.opensuse.org you will see that, in the same way, products are listed without openSUSE, and the same thing happens at https://www.opensuse.org. Even in Mastodon you will see that many times, when we want to focus on the product, we do not mention openSUSE, but Leap, Tumbleweed, etc. Nowadays openSUSE is the project (the brand), whatever it is, and everything else is the products of that project.
To change or not to change? I don’t really like “openSUSE” as brand too much, if it were in my power I would probably try to change it. Another thing is the opportunity or need to do it.
- The opportunity: i.e. KDE changed the name of its desktop to Plasma with relative success. Even today it is common to find references to “KDE” or to “the KDE desktop”. It is not evident that a change in our brand would be more successful. Although there are those who say that if the brand does not remind us of the company, perhaps they could see us more as Debian and thus improve our “reception”.
- The need: It is also key to know what SUSE really thinks about all this. The last step that openSUSE decided on was greater integration with SUSE in Leap. This would be a step in the opposite direction. SUSE has invested a lot in marketing to be able to say: you can use the community version just like SLE and when you are interested in support, you can move to SLE.
