Azure Session at Cloud Expo

Microsoft and Amazon have signed a broad patent cross-license that Microsoft said covers Amazon's e-book reader "Kindle, which employs both open source and Amazon's proprietary software components, and Amazon's use of Linux-based servers."

Facts being thin on the ground one is left to speculate that that means all of Amazon's Linux-based servers everywhere including all those Linux images on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

The terms of the deal are secret of course, but Microsoft made sure to say that Amazon's paying it "an undisclosed amount of money."

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The fact that Amazon appears to concede the legitimacy of Microsoft's claims that Linux and other open source widgetry violate its patents is going to drive the Linux crowd up a wall. Microsoft has never identified which patents it's talking about, which infuriates them more.

Linux Foundation chief Jim Zemlin went into a state of denial blogging that "a cross-licensing agreement is a non-news event. The fact that two entities with expensive stockpiles of outdated weapons felt the need to negotiate détente is not surprising. Let's avoid second-guessing and implication. There's nothing to see here. We have real code to write."

Microsoft's deputy general counsel for IP and licensing Horacio Gutierrez mumbled something about the Amazon deal demonstrating the companies' "ability to reach pragmatic solutions to IP issues regardless of whether proprietary or open source software is involved."

Microsoft says it's cut more than 600 IP licensing deals in the six years since it started cashing in on its IP a la IBM.

It has only ever taken one company to court over patents in its whole life and that was TomTom last year over its Linux-based GPS navigation devices which used the FAT file format that's in the Linux kernel. Ultimately the Dutch company caved and they settled out-of-court for money and the undertaking to tear out the offending code over time.

Amusingly - and without mentioning a word about Linux - Microsoft said Thursday that Panasonic had licensed its Extended File Allocation Table (exFAT) technology, the latest generation of the Microsoft file system, as well as its FAT32 long file name technology for media devices. exFAT is supposed to up the size of files that can be stored on flash memory devices, the speed at which they can be accessed and facilitate the interchange between desktop PCs and consumer electronics. The deal includes a patent license.

Microsoft also has exFAT licensing agreements with Sanyo and Olympus.