The New Zealand Herald has a story today about the open source community meeting at Google to discuss the threats that Microsoft has made against the open source community. Meanwhile Microsoft has signed three patent deals in the last few weeks.

Linspire was the latest to sign up, while Xandros and LG Electronics signed up last week. This appears to be a classic divide and conquer strategy, where Microsoft are separating businesses that distribute Linux from the community which writes Linux. While this strategy appears to be working in the short term it will be interesting how long it is before complete analysis of Microsoft's patents is undertaken to evaluate the validity of any claims on open source.