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. While Microsoft wouldn't say which of its products and technologies Amazon is interested in, Microsoft did mention that Amazon's Kindle, which employs open source and proprietary software components, as well as Amazon's use of Linux-based servers are covered.
Neither company would officially disclose why the deal was struck today. "We are pleased to have entered into this patent license agreement with Amazon.com," Horacio Gutierrez, Microsoft's corporate vice president and deputy general counsel for Intellectual Property and Licensing, said in a statement. "Microsoft's patent portfolio is the largest and strongest in the software industry, and this agreement demonstrates our mutual respect for intellectual property as well as our ability to reach pragmatic solutions to IP issues regardless of whether proprietary or open source software is involved."
It's possible that Amazon agreed to signing the deal to avoid patent-infringement lawsuits from Microsoft. The mention of Kindle and Linux is not likely to be coincidental: the software giant has put extensive work into tablets and e-readers of various form factors and has previously claimed that Linux infringes on its patented technologies, although it has never specified which patents it believes the Linux stack and kernel violate (the software giant did sue GPS maker TomTom over the FAT file format). The companies may have decided to shake hands in these areas but their biggest competitive space will likely remain the cloud: Windows Azure versus Amazon EC2.
Microsoft says it has reached more than 600 licensing agreements since launching its intellectual-property licensing program in December 2003.
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