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Linspire Signs Patent Pact With MS
RLiegh sends us to an AP article reporting that Linspire has signed a patent deal with Microsoft. The company, which started out life as "Lindows," joins a growing list of patent agreements reached between Microsoft and vendors. Linspire will be granted a license to use True Type Fonts and "various code" that would allow for Linspire users to use voice on Windows Live Messenger as well as the usual patent protection for Linspire's customers. In return, among other things, Linspire will make Microsoft's search engine the default search on PCs shipped with their OS. Kevin Carmony, the CEO for Linspire, approached Microsoft a year and a half ago, according to the article.
Not to mention that Canonical is based in Europe where Microsoft's patents are currently worthless.
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Did anyone here actually read the AP summary? Linspire went out and licensed actual code from MS for Windows Live Voice stuff, Windows Media files, and Truetype Fonts (it doesn't say anything at all about patents for fonts, they probably just mean providing the fonts). They're also working on translating between OpenXML and ODF. These are all pretty important to people who want commercial Linuxes to "just work" in a Windows-centric world, and can't settle for partially working reverse-engineered implementations. And oh yeah, they also agreed to protect Linspire users against legal action by Microsoft in regards to any patents. It sounds more like Linspire went out to license these technologies from MS, then MS wanted to add in the patent protection stuff to make it sound like another Linux vendor is paying protection money to them (even though MS seems to be paying most of the money so far). Yes, I hate MS, and yes I think the patent deals spread a lot of FUD, but I think Linspire has managed to get some good things out of this deal, depending on how much they paid. Or maybe MS paid them again?