It's the summation of all of the above.

Does SUSE require a payment up front, as well as a subscription in order to continue receiving updates, as well as even more payments to ensure hoovered data resides in your country?

There isn't one. It's just increasingly unnecessary.

I, personally, have an issue with people taking millions of LOC of software written by other people and given away for free, slapping a logo on it, and selling it to people who don't know better, but thre licenses generally don't prevent carpet-bagging.

IMHO, selling an OS your organization built most of is fine. Selling support, or hosting, is also ethical. Selling Libre software is not.