Microsoft News Tracker

A US Federal Court judge today reversed the whopping $1.5 billion judgement against Microsoft that a jury handed down in a Alcatel-Lucent patent lawsuit case last February:

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Last Friday the Free Software Foundation released the GNU General Public License, version 3 and there have been a variety of reactions, not all enthusiastic. Since one of the avowed targets of GPL v3 was Microsoft’s recent patent deals with Linux distributors (e.g. with Novell and with Xandros), there was great anticipation for what Microsoft’s reaction would be to the final version. That reaction was announced yesterday and is basically the claim that GPL v3 does not apply and a disclaimer to make sure it never applies:

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In recent months Microsoft has signed cross-license agreements with a number of large hardware electronics firms like Samsung and Seiko-Epson and today announced another with LG Electronics, the Korean electronics giant. This is standard practice for larger corporations, but there is a novel aspect in today’s agreement in view of Microsoft’s recent grumblings about Linux patent infringement: 

LGE will be making ongoing payments to Microsoft for the value of Microsoft patents as they relate to Linux-based embedded devices that LGE produces.

That’s not exactly new since the Samsung announcement said:

Samsung will also obtain coverage from Microsoft for its customers’ use of certain Linux-based products.

It’s hard to tell what is really going on here from press releases and the companies won’t reveal the actual financial and technical details, but the whole point of cross-licensing agreements is mutual insurance. It wouldn’t surprise me if any of these firms using Linux took out a little Microsoft Linux insurance as part of the deal.

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.

Some Microsoft news leftovers from Friday and the weekend:

Microsoft lifts shroud off Halo 3 to mixed reviews which doesn’t bode well for Microsoft’s hopes to haul down some big bucks from the latest sequel of their superstar Xbox game.

The folks at LiveSide caught Windows Live Drive making a brief pre-beta appearance under its new name Windows Live Folders. Online storage services are not exactly novel and Live Folders doesn’t seem to be going to advance the state of the art:

LiveSide describes it as a “very basic service” and I agree. It currently has less functionality that some of the startups we’re tracking, such as Box.net.

Microsoft threatened with legal action for sin of omission. Media Rights Technologies claims Microsoft and other tech companies are violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) by not using their patented DRM technology.