You are making connections that are not there. For example, Novell, which owned SUSE, made that deal with Microsoft. But SUSE, the corporate distro, at that point was not using KDE as a default desktop, but GNOME. This stemmed from the fact that Novell had also incorporated Ximian previously and was deeply involved with GNOME (and Mono and .NET). Corporate SUSE used GNOME, and they still do. KDE and SUSE have no relationship of that type, not even today. How could KDE be protected by a deal that did not involve them at all?