I was just reading about openSUSE since I’m a relatively new openSUSE user. From what I’m reading here, suse itself was completely closed source without any free version available UNTIL Novell’s involvement in the project, where it thereby launched openSUSE. Is that accurate?? I thought openSUSE existed previously and Novell just embraced it and ran with it.
No, not completely closed source, that would have been against the various FOSS licenses. Back in the day of S.U.S.E YaST and various configuration software were only licensed for use with the media (no online distribution) so you had to buy a box set, although you could install it on as many machines as you liked. Then Novell bought S.u.S.E and split it into an enterprise distro and a community distro. And lots more you can read up.
You could do worse than look up SUSE in Wikipedia.