This morning, I emailed Realtek's NIC support line to ask about the Linux driver they offer for download for the 8168 NIC in my laptop. It's a source-code download (nice one) but it has never compiled on SUSE (not so nice one).

Having sent the email, I went out, had some lunch and did some shopping. I returned to a reply from one of Realtek's Tech Support guys. It wasn't the standard "thank you for your email, we're looking into it" email either, it had a tarball of the latest beta version of the driver attached. This update had clearly (based on the changelog) been produced as a result of my email. Best of all, it worked. I built the module and installed it. Then I fired up YaST and was able to configure it.

Now, to try and determine the license, line 98 of r1000_n.c reads

MODULE_LICENSE("GPL");