Internet account requiring SSN? If it's international like Paypal, they can't insist on such ID because it's an international service (you can add credit/bank account numbers from most countries). If you're a paying customer, you should not have to give away your SSN. If they insist you must provide your SSN for say a mobile phone plan, TV subscription, etc., take your business elsewhere and don't give them any of your money. If the competitors do the same, tell them that you're Canadian and don't have an SSN, and that you're calling from your [insert season here] house.

Has M$ already made a similar plugin for Blackboard or other competing software? I bet most college students who use Moodle don't even know that it's open source (and even then, most students use open source software on windeuce or OS X), so this is a great strategy for M$ to gain webmail/search engine market share while being partly user-transparent. The only real surprise (sort of) would be that M$ would encourage the use of open source software, but even then they'll surely use this as an exploit in order to abuse consumers (just like the .NET Firefox extension).

The strategy is obvious...this driver is a selling point! M$ can claim that their windeuce servers can virtualize Red Hat very effectively, so that if a buyer were considering a Linux server, M$ can claim it works well on their systems. Also, this allows Red Hat to identify itself to the Interweb as running within windeuce, meaning M$ will have more relevant market share data, and they'll have it faster than anyone else.