Linux Customers Opt for Microsoft IP Peace of Mind

Back in 2006, when it inked a strategic interoperability and intellectual property assurance agreement with Novell, Microsoft also tapped the other top Linux vendor worldwide, Ted Hat, for a similar alliance. Red Hat might have said “no” to the IP assurance marriage proposal from the Redmond company, but Microsoft and Novell are in fact offering intellectual property peace of mind to customers running the Red Hat distribution of the open source operating system, along to other companies leveraging different distros of the Linux OS.

The landmark Microsoft and Novell agreement has not entered its third year and the two companies continue to draw in customers around the globe. In 2008, Novell launched a new subscription service, designed to provide companies running non-SUSE Linux platforms not only with expanded support, while transitioning to the Linux distro from Novell, but also with intellectual property peace of mind from Microsoft. The service is addressed at organizations running Red Hat Linux and additional third-party distributions of the OS that want to migrate to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. Through IP assurance, the Redmond company is guaranteeing that no legal actions will be filed against companies running open source software that might infringe on Microsoft’s patents.

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