I believe, from the bits i've gathered from this, that there is a "partnership" on some level, but that partnership is more of the kind that ESC once enjoyed with LL, based on access to technology and expertise etc, rather than in a business sense.

This may simply be a case of the difference between the software engineers concept of partnership and the business worlds concept - which have very different implications. The material may have been removed to avoid that confusion - but that's just speculation on my part.