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Full disclosure / background - I've been using MS products since MS-DOS 1.25. At first yeah, they were the thing, then they weren't. Over the years I have developed a serious dislike for everything MS. I trust them about as far as I could've thrown the big, clunky old PC I had that (briefly) ran Win-ME. In fact, I think I did eventually pick it up and chuck it into a dumpster.

Now my primary OS at work is RHEL. We use a few Win10 boxes for the things we absolutely have to use Win10 for by agency mandate. But primary development is on RHEL. At home I run one of several flavors of Linux and I have an Android phone. My wife, for better or worse (seems I've heard that phrase before in that context) is solidly in the Apple camp. The upshot is, we have one Win10 laptop, that actually dual-boots into Linux too. I boot Win10 about once a month or so to pick up updates. When this laptop dies, (it's a 4 year old hand-me-down as it is) I probably will not replace it with any other machine running Win10 as we no-longer seem to need it for anything.

All that said... I don't see this as a particularly nefarious move by MS. Oh, I am sure, 100% sure they are not doing this for the good of the Linux community. I do believe MS intends to gain a few things from this.

One, apparently the code for exFat is fairly ugly/crufty. They probably figure the open source community will clean that up for them and they'll incorporate it back into their own OSes.

Two, it "throws a bone" to the Linux community - for pure PR purposes. It makes them (at least on the surface) appear to be working with Linux, not against it.

Three, as I understand it they've garnered quite a bit of cash from their patents. Perhaps they're offering this up as a sacrificial lamb because they think they've just about run this cash cow into the ground?

Four, while exFat is terribly handy, it is really only useful (at least from a Linux standpoint) on thumb drives you intend to exchange with other users who are on some non-Linux box. I don't see exFat ever becoming all that important inside Linux. If MS starts making noises about patents and code now in the kernel - it'll be summarily pulled.

Five, exFat's usefulness is probably on the wane. Everyone seems to believe the Internet Of Things (IOT) is coming - with rampant IPv6 connectivity between everything with a little bit of power and room for a grain of rice sized chip. The thumb drive will go the way of the CD-ROM, floppy disk, cassette tape, etc. Who needs to transfer files via "sneaker net" when everything is connected and inter-operable? Pervasive networking will provide the transport. There is literally nothing in my house now that stores or uses data (particularly media such as photos/video/music) that isn't connected via wifi and/or bluetooth. Then only "island" is my car - a few years old now and just a commuter econo-box. It does require a thumb drive to play my music.

The upshot is, while I have no doubt MS's motives are far less than pure and are focused on what is in MS's best interests... I don't see that they can do anything to harm Linux directly with this move. They're only option would be to let exFat into Linux, then try to re-assert their patents. I believe that would be a tough sell legally, and as I mentioned, would see exFat pulled right back out to today's status-quo with hardly anyone in the Linux community noticing.