[toyg]

The SuSe agreement was really about networking and filesystems. At the time, SuSe had been bought by Novell - a networking company. They saw Linux as the future of their business, but the risks around Windows interop as a real threat to that business. They did not have an adversarial relationship with MS (actually the opposite), so they moved to mitigate those risks with a friendly agreement. Other companies did not share those interests. This post is bad revisionism.

(As an aside, what MS did or did not do in the '90s really has no bearing on what they did in the '00s or later. 90s MS was a hustling startup, '00s MS was a corporate behemoth. Like Apple pre- and post-iPhone, they changed behavior and (declared) values once they became the top dog.)