Stories about: Linspire

The no-lawsuit agreement reached in June between Linspire and Microsoft earlier this year is almost useless to Linspire customers because of tight restrictions on what the deal covers, according to a high-profile open source legal commentator.

As the CEO of Sweden-based open source database vendor MySQL, Marten Mickos knows about the role open source software can play in business and personal computing.

Microsoft has revealed that its patent deal with Linspire doesn't cover the new version of the GNU General Public License (GPL), the company's latest effort to distance itself from the GPLv3.

With about a week remaining to collect comments on a plan to adopt Ecma's Open XML standard, Massachusetts is mum on how the issue is fairing, but some who disagree with the action are already voicing their opinion publicly.

Samba developers have definitively switched future versions of the software to the GPL v3 licence, which could have a serious impact on companies maintaining software patent covenants.

Novell will continue to ship the complete version of its Linux enterprise server even though Microsoft is attempting to distance itself legally from the new General Public License (GPL) v3 open source license.

French Linux vendor Mandriva is the third Linux operating system company in a week to say it's not interested in any licensing deal with Microsoft to avoid possible patent infringement claims.

The Linux faithful might be staring down the barrel of another round of Microsoft's legal taunts, but at last week's Linux Foundation Summit, the reaction was more ho-hum than oh-no.

Canonical chief executive Mark Shuttleworth has made it clear that Ubuntu isn't interested in forming a deal with Microsoft along the lines of those recently reached by Linspire, Xandros and Novell.

Leaders of Microsoft's strategy to make its products more interoperable with competitive technologies said the company still hopes to strike a Linux pact with Red Hat similar to the partnerships it's forged with Linux vendors Novell, Xandros and Linspire.

Linspire has signed an intellectual-property agreement with Microsoft that shields the Linux company's customers from patent claims.