The openSUSE Leap
distribution is a community effort built on top of a set of stable packages
from the SUSE Linux Enterprise offering. SUSE is now floating a proposal
to unify the work of building those two distributions; click below for the
details or see the
“closing the Leap gap” FAQ, which summarizes things this way:
“Today, SUSE is also offering the pre-built binaries from SLE in
addition to the sources, to increase compatibility and to leverage
synergies.” The intended advantages (or “leveraged synergies”) seem
to be reducing the effort
required to create Leap and making it easier to migrate a system between
the two distributions.

Source: LWN.net – Bringing Leap and SUSE Linux Enterprise closer together – a proposal