We can read the Linspire-Microsoft patent agreement now, and I thought it would be worthwhile to give it a close, line-by-line reading. I'll explain it as best I can, but ask your lawyer if it matters to you in a real-world sense. For our purposes here, let's just have fun with the worst deal I've seen yet in this category.

"When Microsoft announced the first of its patent interoperability agreements with Novell in November 2006, one of the major claims made in favor of the patent covenant agreement was that it would give customers peace of mind and ensure that they didn’t have to worry about issues such as intellectual property infringement."

It's a bit later than Linspire had planned, but the company's CEO Kevin Carmony told DesktopLinux that the new commercial version of its Linux distribution, Linspire 6.0, along with the free version, Freespire 2.0, and its revised CNR (click-and-run) software update system, should be out before August.

Linspire CEO Kevin Carmony observed that "some distributions have come out, claiming to be taking the 'moral high ground' by refusing to give in to 'Microsoft threats,' while openly promoting the means of circumventing proprietary software on their web sites, amounting to nothing more than high-brow software piracy

LINUX DISTRIBUTOR Linspire has shown what it is costing it to sign a deal with Microsoft over patents.

This morning a press release winged its way from Linspire which said the outfit was "joining the current efforts to improve the ability of OpenOffice.org users to work with the Office Open XML format by increasing the interoperability between ODF and Open XML".

When Linspire 6.0 is released next month, it will include the fruits of the recently announced marriage between Linspire and Microsoft. Linspire CEO Kevin Carmony says he has been in talks with Microsoft for about a year and a half before reaching an agreement.

As you probably have heard or read about by now Microsoft has made another deal with another open source company. This time Linspire has signed a deal with Microsoft to license VOIP and Windows proprietary media formats and true type fonts. My question is why? There is no need as those technologies are already in the open source world.