tl:dr
SUSE != openSUSE
SUSE the corporation does not dictate nor direct the roadmap, goals, nor governance of the openSUSE Project.
They provide Infrastructure, some financial support, and Legal Coverage for the community project, and use the community contributions to create their SUSE Linux Products.
That’s it. The project does have some restrictions placed upon it by this relationship (not being able to ship patent encumbered codecs, or things like the NVIDIA graphics drivers, for instance), but SUSE does not make the decisions for the openSUSE project in it’s development direction, it’s governance, or how it’s community is managed.
This is a business decision by SUSE, the corporation, not a development decision to “rebase” the SUSE or openSUSE product on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
If you’ve not clicked on the link in the title, here it is again, from Board Member Doug DeMaio, who has put together a nice FAQ explaining this in more detail.
No. While SUSE the corporation supports, and does have some limited input into the community project, openSUSE Tumbleweed is fully community developed and controlled (I don’t believe there is anybody on the SUSE payroll who’s job description is working on openSUSE, the SUSE Employees contributions to openSUSE are at their own discretion and interest). openSUSE Leap is also a fully community supported and developed point release distribution, that is based on the SUSE Linux Enterprise sources.
openSUSE Tumbleweed -> SUSE Linux -> openSUSE Leap