1. No particular company, project, or individual is “relevant” in the free/opensource software “scene”. None. If a project does stupid things that the user-base doesn’t trust (like xfree86 did, for example), the project will simply be forked from the lastest feasable release, and a new project will take it’s place. (That’s how x.org happened.)
Likewise, if a distro chooses to do stupid shit, the user-base will desert it like a sinking ship.

Additionally, there’s a very real substrata of “licenses are bullshit, fuck ‘em” willingness to do civil-disobedience. Eric Raymond’s website contains DCSS info in his words “as an act of electronic civil disobedience”.

What any particular distro, project, organization, or government elects to do, or not, is of no importance whatsoever ultimately — provided a large enough number of people refuse to play along.

Microsoft is scared shitless by the fact that Linux is impossible to stop, monopolize, or control. Linux (or an equivalent) will eventually win out completely, if for no other reason than that it’s proliferation cannot be stopped.
Novell never quite understood that buying a linux distro (SUSE) wouldn’t make it a big player in the Linux scene. NOBODY can be a bigger player than anybody else, BOTH because of the GPL and philosophy behind it, AND MORE IMPORTANTLY because of the underlying culture of the scene itself.
What MIcrosoft and Novell are doing is similar to what SCO did: faltering corporate entities’ death-throes, nothing more.

I wish P2p.net would concentrate more on reporting articles that MATTER, and less on regurgitating mass-media bullshit.