Microsoft, Linspire to Promote Customer Choice
By CXOtoday Staff
Mumbai, Jun 14, 2007

Microsoft and Linspire - a Linux desktop provider - announced interoperability, technical collaboration that includes intellectual property assurances. The agreement promotes customer choice and strengthens the bridge between the Microsoft, Windows, and Linux operating systems.

For Microsoft, this is the latest in a series of collaborations with Linux platform and OSS providers. These include JBoss, LG Electronics, Novell, Samsung Electronics, Xandros, XenSource, and Zend Technologies.

Teaming up with Novell, Microsoft, and other companies, Linspire will develop and distribute open source-licensed translators, allowing OpenOffice and Microsoft Office users to share documents. This will enable translation between Ecma Open XML and OpenDocument Format documents.

Linspire will license Microsoft's RT Audio Codec to voice-enabled interoperability between Linspire's Pidgin instant messaging client and Microsoft's Microsoft Office Communicator and Windows Live Messenger.

It will further license Microsoft TrueType fonts - including Arial, Georgia, Times New Roman, and Verdana - so Linspire users have better experiences in creating, editing, and viewing files and documents.

Future releases of Linspire will support the latest Windows Media 10 audio and video codecs, allowing Linspire and Microsoft Windows users to share digital media files.

Linspire will select the Live Search service of Windows Live as the Linspire 5.0 default web search engine.

Through the agreement, Microsoft and Linspire have developed a framework to provide patent covenants for Linspire customers. The patent covenants provide customers with the assurance that the Linspire technologies they use, come with rights to relevant Microsoft patents.

Customers will only receive these 3 technologies (instant messaging, digital media and TrueType fonts) if they purchase a patent SKU. The technologies are not shipped with all Linspire 5.0 distributions.