Published at LXer:

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CALIF. -- Believe it or not, on my way to the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit at the Googolplex this week, I realized that I knew at least one more Linux distributor would form a partnership with Microsoft, and that the most likely one was Linspire....... ................ So, who's next? Well, that same morning, I was thinking about Ubuntu as another possible candidate. Mark Shuttleworth, CEO of Canonical Ltd., the company behind Ubuntu, had never been as hostile towards Microsoft as some Linux leaders. I mean, this is the Linux leader who's recently said "I'd love to work with Microsoft..."

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This is getting stranger all the time - after rereading Machiavelli I figure Microsoft might be hoping that the GPL3 pracktically shuts down the distros (not Suse) that signed agreements and generates a bad rep for OSS in general.
These are distros people paid for and can`t then get their goods anymore because of the bad boys from the FSS.

I can already see the ads:

When will the FSF shut down your IT departement??
Not with MS!

Other idea would be to help the poor customers out because - after all they bought software from MS partners and thus are practically family.

In any case the GPL would be tested in court or if they just let it go be reduced to a laughing stock.

Those MS guys ain`t stupid

Aren't you the one who said this was no big deal?

Yeah - and I still think so and I am not the only one:

"I consider dual-licensing unlikely (and technically quite hard), but at least _possible_ in theory. I have yet to see any actual *reasons* for licensing under the GPLv3, though. All I've heard are shrill voices about 'tivoization' (which I expressly think is ok) and panicked worries about Novell-MS (which seems way overblown, and quite frankly, the argument seems to not so much be about the Novell deal, as about an excuse to push the GPLv3)."

The question is what is going to happen - I don't know the players involved as do pretty few people here.That way it is pretty hard to judge what they are up to.
As Linux makes inroads into computing there will be much more stuff like this - it's inevitable.There are very few companies that don't have those kind of deals.
I do keep an open mind to all possibilities as you can see because thats generally a good idea.

It all depends on what MS is up to.Being the cynic I am I figure if Xandros and Linspire crash and burn in the process thats their problem since they saw the writing of the GPL3 on the wall which was not the case with Novell.

Also I still don't see what LG has supposedly got to do with that - if they make hardware they obviously want it to work with as many things (as in codecs) as possible (otherwise they would be wide open to lawsuits from their costumers) and I don't see them useing the win32 codecs package from mplayer for obvious reasons.