Internal affairs at Linspire seem to be worse than we used to believe. According to Linux Watch, it might not be just the company's CEO who takes his business elsewhere. SJVN talks about a possible "executives exodus". He tries to remain balanced, but the headline gives it all away.

In the last 12 months, Linspire has made moves that brought it both praise (such as its decision to base future versions of its Linuxes on Ubuntu and opening up of CNR to other distributions) and condemnation (its patent partnership with Microsoft) from the Linux user community.

As some people on the Web are already saying, one wonders if those executives received money from Microsoft. This seems like a classic case of striking deals and paying a rival to exit the market. It is illegal.

Microsoft was accused of buying out its competition. The accusation was back in 2006 when Microsoft attended the trial in Iowa. This Linspire story rings a certain bell. Microsoft settled to escape prosecution in Iowa, but it can be perceived as admission of guilt.

What's worrying here is that Linspire's deal is not all that different from Novell's. Whether they share the same destiny or not, who knows? We might find out in the future. Here is a new essay which uses a parable to describe Novell's relationship with Microsoft and the Free Software Foundation.

I've been trying to catch on and to understand what this thread's all about (It started with R. Hovespian from Novell explaining why they needed a deal with MS). I thought, maybe I could try to summarize it all to understand - and maybe explain to others - what's happening here, so I made up a tale of the whole situation