The two companies have agreed a five-year deal to work together on systems management and server interoperability, office document compatibility, sales and marketing, and intellectual property assurance.

The deal should raise the profile of New York-based Xandros considerably, but could also see it being prevented from distributing Linux and open source code based on the forthcoming GPLv3, according to the wording of the latest draft.

Through this agreement, Microsoft will make available patent covenants for Xandros customers. These covenants will provide customers with confidence that the Xandros technologies they use and deploy in their environments are compliant with Microsoft’s intellectual property, the companies announced.

Microsoft has claimed that Linux and open source software infringes 235 of its patents, with Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer, having used the Novell deal as evidence of the company’s view that Linux contains Microsoft’s IP.

The creator and maintainer of the GPL, the Free Software Foundation, last week published the last call draft of GPLv3, including terms designed to prevent a repeat of Microsoft patent covenant with Novell, which exploited a loophole in the GPLv2 to enable it to offer patent protection only to Novell customers.

The latest draft ensures that any patent protection for GPLv3 users applies to all GPLv3 users by outlawing discriminatory licenses agreed after 28 March, 2007. Xandros’ agreement with Microsoft would therefore appear to block it from making use of GPLv3 code.

The industry will have to wait for the publication of GPLv3 code and the response of the Free Software Foundation for confirmation of that, but in the meantime, Xandros and Microsoft will work together on interoperability.

Specifically, the companies have agreed to work on heterogeneous systems management capabilities, with Xandros implementing the WS-Management protocols in its BridgeWays Linux management software.

Xandros has also agreed to license a broad set of Microsoft server communications protocols in order to ensure that its Xandros Server offering interoperates with Windows Server.

On the office compatibility side, Xandros will join the ongoing project to create translators between Microsoft’s Open XML and the Open Document Format, and will ship the translators worth its Xandros Desktop offering.

If all that sounds like one-way traffic, Microsoft has agreed to endorse the Xandros Server and Desktop products as a preferred Linux distribution alongside Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise.

Microsoft had always insisted that it wanted to repeat its deal with Novell with other Linux distributors. Only its agreement to ship coupons for SUSE Linux subscriptions in order to support virtualized mixed environments was exclusive.

Our View

The publication of the last call draft of the GPLv3 last week had some in the open source community celebrating victory over Microsoft. According to the FSF, it allowed the Microsoft-Novell deal to remain in place because Microsoft’s distribution of SUSE Linux subscription coupons would transfer patent protection to all GPLv3 users, but prevented a repeat of what it called discriminatory patent deals for GPL-based code.

The deal with Xandros can therefore be considered a statement of intent by Microsoft that it is not just going to sit in the corner and be quiet. As the Linux distributor the victim in this situation is not likely to be Microsoft but Xandros, although the full implications may not be known until GPLv3 goes live at the end of June.

Aside from the patent issue, Xandros is actually a more likely candidate for interoperability with Microsoft than Novell. Windows-like administration has always been one of its selling points and in April it announced plans to port its xMC Xandros Management Console to Windows, enabling Windows-based Linux server management.