Well put. I think the relationship works for both of them.

I should also note that although I've seen ActiveState maligned for their relationship to Microsoft, and some have cast them as being somehow tainted by accepting money from a company decidedly hostile to open source, my experience with them in the past is that they put out an excellent product (I've been extremely impressed with PerlApp) and have been an excellent member of the community. They have, in my opinion, been very conscious of the principles that are important to the success of open source and have played a very important role in the Perl community.

This is coming from someone who doesn't use Windows (I switched fully to Linux a couple years ago and haven't looked back).