Microsoft and Amazon Ink Deal Over Linux IP -- Visual Studio Magazine

Microsoft and Amazon Ink 'Confidential' IP Deal

By Kurt Mackie
02/23/2010

Microsoft issued an announcement on Monday stating that it had signed a "patent cross-license" deal with Amazon.com regarding Amazon's Kindle e-reader device and the "use of Linux-based servers."

Amazon will pay Microsoft an unspecified amount of money to settle intellectual property (IP) matters. The exact terms of the deal are considered to be confidential, but the announcement still put open source Linux in the cross hairs.

"Microsoft chose to focus on Linux and open source -- distinctly calling it out from 'proprietary software' and wasn't specific about any patents," noted Jim Zemlin, executive director of the nonprofit Linux Foundation, in his blog.

Zemlin discounted the deal as a "non-news event," saying that companies make such deals all of the time and don't issue press releases about them.

Microsoft's announcement stated that the Kindle electronic book-reading device relies on "both open source and Amazon's proprietary software components," plus it uses Amazon's Linux-based servers.

Microsoft elicited controversy among open source Linux advocates when it announced a deal with Novell in November of 2006 over IP used in Novell's SuSE Linux Enterprise Server operating system. In May of 2007, Microsoft was accused of spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt over Linux licensing after a Microsoft executive claimed that Linux violated 235 of Microsoft's patents.

Until this latest announcement with Amazon, Microsoft had been relatively quiet about alleged IP violations concerning Linux. Its last effort centered on TomTom's use of Microsoft's File Allocation Table technology in TomTom's Linux-based GPS devices. The case was settled in late March of 2009.

Not all of Microsoft's Linux deals have been about remedying IP violations. The company has tended to stress Linux interoperability with Windows as a means of meeting customer needs. To that end, Microsoft signed a deal in October of 2009 with Red Hat concerning Windows Server and Red Hat Enterprise Linux running on each other's virtualization platforms. No licensing or compensation agreements were announced with that deal.

About the Author

Kurt Mackie is senior news producer for 1105 Media's Converge360 group.

Printable Format

comments powered by Disqus

Featured

Copilot Engineering in the Cloud with Azure and GitHub

Who better to lead a full-day deep dive into this tech than two experts from GitHub, which introduced the original "AI pair programmer" and spawned the ubiquitous Copilot moniker?
Uno Platform Wants Microsoft to Improve .NET WebAssembly in Two Ways

Uno Platform, a third-party dev tooling specialist that caters to .NET developers, published a report on the state of WebAssembly, addressing some shortcomings in the .NET implementation it would like to see Microsoft address.
Random Neighborhoods Regression Using C#

Dr. James McCaffrey from Microsoft Research presents a complete end-to-end demonstration of the random neighborhoods regression technique, where the goal is to predict a single numeric value. Compared to other ML regression techniques, advantages are that it can handle both large and small datasets, and the results are highly interpretable.
As Some Orgs Restrict DeepSeek AI Usage, Microsoft Offers Models and Dev Guidance

While some organizations are restricting employee usage of the new open source DeepSeek AI from a Chinese company due to data collection concerns, Microsoft has taken a different approach.
Useful New-ish Features in .NET/C#

We often hear about the big new features in .NET or C#, but what about all of those lesser known, but useful new features? How exactly do you use constructs like collection indices and ranges, date features, and pattern matching?