Microsoft News Tracker

Back in April I noted how Microsoft lobbyists were working a full court press to stop passage of US state laws fostering the OpenDocument Format. It turns out they have been very effective:

In a resounding victory for Microsoft Corp., bills seeking to mandate the use of open document formats by government agencies have been defeated in five states, and only a much-watered-down version of such legislation was signed into law in a sixth state.

The proposed bills would have required state agencies to use freely available and interoperable file formats, such as the Open Document Format (ODF) for Office Applications, instead of Microsoft Corp.’s proprietary Office formats.

Of course, Microsoft would call their Open XML “freely available and interoperable” too.

Today, Microsoft and Linux distributor Xandros signed an agreement reminiscent of the controversial Microsoft-Novell deal. Microsoft and Xandros will work together on interoperability, Microsoft sales and marketing will tout Xandros as a “preferred Linux distribution,” and everybody’s favorite part:

Through the agreement, Microsoft will make available patent covenants for Xandros customers. These covenants will provide customers with confidence that the Xandros technologies they use and deploy in their environments are compliant with Microsoft’s intellectual property.

We’ll see how this plays with the Open Source crowd, particularly since the final draft of the GPL version 3 license, while grandfathering the Novell deal, would not apply here. See also Richard Stallman’s take on how GPL 3 will provide to all Linux users the same Microsoft patent protection extended to Novell.

Michael Arrington at Techcrunch enlivens the Monday return to work with a rumor about a team of rock star developers at the Microsoft skunk works in Silicon Valley building a next generation search engine. Microsoft reportedly moved Sanaz Ahari (who’s a rock star all by herself) from Seattle to Mountain View to lead the team. Hopefully, there’s more to it than just an improved search engine, since while there is undoubtedly still some gold there, the Web search mother lode is long since played out.

Update 6/5: Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of the search and advertising platform group denies the rumor.