Linspire Signs Up for Microsoft Collaboration and Patent Deal
15228
Microsoft has signed yet another Linux collaboration and patent agreement, this time with its old copyright adversary Linspire, through which the companies will work on interoperability between Windows and Linux.
502851
SEOUL/NEW YORK  - Microsoft Corp.  and South Korea's LG Electronics  said on Thursday they have entered into a patent cross-license agreement, sending LG shares to their highest in more than a year.
104536
Let Lindows be Lindows When not threatening to sue Linux makers, Microsoft can't help itself from partnering with them. Redmond today announced a buddy-buddy deal with desktop Linux maker Linspire.â¦
46599
Microsoft announced on Thursday its first software licensing deal under a program mandated by a 2004 European Commission anti-trust ruling.
361384
Blog: Microsoft patent law expert says patent licensing, the new tool of choice for safe collaboration, will spur rapid innovation and new financial models.
450283
Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft have sealed a three-year, $300 million deal to jointly market their products to enterprise customers.
590196
SEOUL, South Korea -- South Korea's LG Electronics Inc. has signed a patent cross-licensing agreement with Microsoft Corp. covering a variety of hardware and software products, the companies said Thursday.
42907
Microsoft Corp. on Wednesday said that it is looking for ways to work more closely with developers of the Open Office open source project, while at the same time, apparently reserving the right to sue them, according to a legal agreement between Microsoft and Open Office's major sponsor, Sun Microsystems Inc., made public this week.
707323
(InfoWorld) - Cisco's highly publicized cooperation with Microsoft on unified communications will focus on sharing presence information as well as on voice mail, Web conferencing, and other areas, a Cisco executive said Tuesday. Cisco Chairman and CEO John Chambers and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer pledged last month to make their companies' technologies work together even as they compete in areas like voice call control. Details of the effort have been scarce, and some critics have called the Webcast promise a mere show of peace between two companies struggling over the lucrative communications and collaboration business. Unified communications is a buzzword for combining all forms of IP communications, making them accessible on a single client or from within applications. Because voice calls, text messaging, videoconferences, and online collaboration can all be controlled by software now, Microsoft is pitted against Cisco and longtime telecommunications vendors in the battle for this market. Rick McConnell, Cisco's executive sponsor of the partnership in the unified communications area, outlined one key objective of the effort in a meeting with reporters on Tuesday. Currently, Cisco federates all the presence and availability information from its unified communications systems and publishes that data to Microsoft's Office Communications Server (OCS), which can then push it to Microsoft clients. Microsoft doesn't reciprocate. The companies are working on making the same kinds of information go from Microsoft's software into Cisco's, said McConnell, who is vice president and general manager of Cisco's Unified Communications Business Unit. The way it is now, if an enterprise uses Cisco's Unified Communications Manager call control software and an employee picks up the phone, a colleague's Microsoft Office Communicator messaging client will show that employee as being on the phone. But if an employee indicated in Office Communicator that she was away from her desk, that information wouldn't show up on a colleague's Cisco IP phone. Making federated presence work both ways will make that possible, McConnell said. Cries for cooperation are rampant among Cisco's customers, according to McConnell. "I'm on the phone with at least one customer per day ... that's asking us about our Microsoft integration roadmap," McConnell said. Cisco's network domination and Microsoft's software role make that inevitable. "We're going to interoperate, frankly, in almost every account that we participate in," he said. "We have a deep interoperability roadmap, we'll deliver against that roadmap, and then the customer gets to pick," McConnell said. Most customers so far have chosen Microsoft for client software and Cisco for call control processing and multimedia conferencing, and he expects that to continue. Senior Cisco and Microsoft leaders in unified communications meet at least quarterly and typically more often, he said. But McConnell didn't mince words when discussing Microsoft as a competitor. The software giant has taken limited steps to share users' presence and availability information because doing so would let users adopt any kind of unified communications client, and Microsoft wants to own all the clients, he said. And Microsoft's forays into call management are weak compared with Cisco's more seasoned offerings, he said. "I think it's going to be some time before Microsoft really gets call control right," McConnell said.
685043
(InfoWorld) - Linspire has signed up a company headed by a former Microsoft executive to distribute its desktop Linux operating system in the Middle East and Africa. Business International will offer the English version of the Linspire Five-0 operating system to customers in at least 17 countries, Linspire said in a statement. The company is headed by Mohamad Jarrar, who worked at Microsoft from 1997 until last year as a business development manager expanding the company's business and its partner network in the Middle East. As part of the deal, Business International will also build a channel program that will enable OEM computer makers to offer PCs with Linspire preinstalled. The deal will see Business International handle distribution in Algeria, Bahrain, Cyprus, Egypt, India, Jordan, Kenya, Lebanon, Morocco, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Turkey, United Arab Emirates and Yemen, Linspire said. Next year, the two companies will start development work on an Arabic version of the operating system. The announcement was timed to coincide with the Gitex Dubai 2006 IT show that ends Wednesday at the Dubai International Convention and Exhibition Centre.
417678
Microsoft Corp.  and South Korea's LG Electronics  said on Wednesday they have entered into a patent cross-license agreement.
704667
The Linux specialist formerly known as Lindows announces that it has completed its name change to Linspire.
568428
A fifth cross-licensing agreement between Microsoft and a Linux-using company was announced late Wednesday. LG Electronics is the latest company to make a deal related to Microsoft's unproven claims to Linux-related patents.
587785
MacCentral - Michael Robertson, the founder of MP3.com and head of desktop Linux company Linspire Inc., on Thursday next week plans to launch a new music download company and service called MP3tunes.
761244
Microsoft teams Linux distributor to craft a single sign-on system for mixed Windows/Linux networks.
81816
Microsoft and Cisco Systems will collaborate to make their emerging products for network security compatible. The vendors had been working independently in the area of PC access to networks but say customers
682777
Developers of open-source Samba software will find their work a little easier thanks to an agreement with Microsoft, signed Thursday, that will give them access to previously secret data on how the Windows operating system works.Microsoft was compelled to make this information available following a March 24, 2004, European Commission antitrust ruling against the company. In July 2006, the EU fined Microsoft &#8364;280.5 million ($338.6 million at that time) for failing to provide documentation on Windows protocols to its rivals.&#160;Microsoft lost an appeal of that decision&#160;in September, setting the stage for the deal.The deal was signed with a nonprofit group called the Protocol Freedom Information Foundation, (PFIF) which negotiated on behalf of the Samba team because Samba is not represented by a corporate entity. PFIF will pay a one-time fee of &#8364;10,000 and, in return, will be able to allow open-source developers, including the Samba team, to access the documents.Developers will have to sign nondisclosure agreements and will not be allowed to redistribute Microsoft&#39;s documentation, but they will be able to write open-source software that implements the Windows protocols. The deal will also clarify which patents Microsoft believes are related to this technology, making it easier for open-source developers to avoid patent violations.Antitrust rulings forced Microsoft to set up protocol-licensing programs in the past, including the MCPP (Microsoft Communications Protocol Program) and the WSPP (Work Group Server Protocol Program), but these efforts were not compatible with open-source software licenses.That is apparently not a problem with the PFIF agreement.&quot;They&#39;re giving us all the documentation to make everything work,&quot; said Jeremy Allison, co-author of Samba. &quot;We will have no more excuses to suck &#8230; if we don&#39;t have something, we won&#39;t be able to say it&#39;s not our fault, we don&#39;t know how to do it.&quot;Samba is an open-source version of the file-and-print software used by Windows. It is a standard component of the Linux and Unix operating systems, allowing these systems to share data and work alongside Windows clients.But development of Samba has traditionally been back-breaking work. Developers would analyze network traffic to try and glean how Windows was working and then build their software based on that knowledge -- a process called reverse-engineering.With the new agreement, developers will have access to Microsoft&#39;s own protocol specifications and will be able to build their software based on those documents, Allison said. That, in turn, will accelerate the team&#39;s development of its next generation of software, which will implement the new Sever Message Block 2.0 protocol used by Windows Vista.Though the deal was reached on Thursday, developers were still waiting for the final technical aspects of the document hand-over to be settled, Allison said. He expects to get his hands on the technical specifications fairly soon. &quot;I&#39;m guessing that for my Christmas vacation I&#39;ll have some enjoyable things to read,&quot; he said.