Microsoft and Amazon.com have signed a wide-ranging patent cross-licensing agreement that provides each company with access to the other's patent portfolio. Specific terms of the agreement were not disclosed, but it was made clear that Amazon will be paying Microsoft an undisclosed amount of money as part of the arrangement.

What was Jeff Bezos, Amazon's CEO, thinking? Amazon just signed a patent cross-licensing deal that pays Microsoft intellectual property fees for, among other things, patents that cover Amazon's Linux-based Kindle e-reader and its Linux servers.

Bradley Kuhn, the technology director of the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) expressed dismay this week after learning that Black Duck Software was granted a patent that covers software methods for detecting and resolving open source software licensing conflicts.

Microsoft and Amazon announced on Monday that the two have entered into a patent cross-licensing deal. As part of the pact, Amazon will pay Microsoft an undisclosed amount of money, though the two sides did not disclose more details

Amazon S3 provides unlimited storage at low prices, which makes it an ideal solution for storing backups. But to make use of it, you need a piece of software that can actually interact with Amazon S3

A few hours ago, I posted "Is Microsoft the New SCO?" but now I realize, after a little research, that Amazon and Microsoft are in this patent agreement for one reason: so that Amazon can abandon Linux on its Kindle in favor of Windows 7. Crazy? Nope.

Red Hat Wednesday made its Enterprise Linux OS available on demand by releasing it for the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service that hosts business applications. The move is part of Red Hat's so-called "automation" strategy, which aims to deliver a Linux and open-source infrastructure for simplifying how applications run and are managed.

What Amazon does not want to tell us about software patents in its recent deal with Microsoft; more reasons to suspect that Dell pays Microsoft for Ubuntu GNU/Linux

If you're into DRM-free music, you have a reason to get pretty excited today. As speculated, Amazon has launched the public beta of its new digital music portal called Amazon MP3, which will feature two million songs from 180,000 artists and 20,000 labels,